I will show how at the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the McCombs School of Business we built a system that uses the chatter on Twitter to predict how a movie will do, in terms of sales, on opening weekend. We are also able to determine for how long the movie will continue to bring in ticket sales. I will discuss the techniques we used to collect, store and analyze tweets to determine whether people are speaking positively, negatively, or if they are just sharing information about the film. Although I will be illustrating the example with movie ticket sales, our research techniques can benefit the industry in areas such as market research, advertising, consumer relations management, and supply chain management. Session co-organized by the McCombs School of Business and the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC).
Elizabeth Winkler is a research associate at the Center For Research in Electronic Commerce at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Her expertise are in the field of social media as a prediction research tool. Her article “Follow the Tweets” was published in the Wall Street Journal/ MIT Sloan Management Review in November, 2009. When not traveling, she can be found eating gelato and practicing yoga around Austin.
