The Magic Bean Laboratory

How many people saw Land Rover Adventuregram on Instagram?

Mat Morrison — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 18:59:34 +0000

The Brooklyn Brothers recently released a frightfully clever campaign on Instagram as part of the launch of the new Land Rover Discovery. It takes the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure in which the player clicks tags on the photos to explore a rural and urban landscape. Each tag represents, of course, an Instagram […]

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Median Impressions Per Tweet (and how to calculate them)

Mat Morrison — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 12:49:06 +0000

I’ve been hearing knowledgeable social media friends say that their relationship with Twitter is beginning to tail off; while they used to love the platform, they no longer feel they (or their clients) receive the value they used to. Part of this unease can no doubt simply be attributed to early adopter platform burn-out, another […]

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The Thing About the Influencers

Mat Morrison — Thu, 14 May 2015 12:29:10 +0000

These are the slides and (highly idealised) script that went with them at my talk today at Digital Shoreditch. I've been doing an awful lot of thinking about "influencers" recently as part of a big project. It's been more than half a decade since I last looked at the problem in any depth; back then I was fascinated by the Social Network Analysis opportunities: these days, as you'll see, much less so.

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Testing the “One Image To Rule Them All” Guidelines

Mat Morrison — Sun, 08 Mar 2015 21:26:37 +0000

James Whatley recently shared a post by Garrett Heath, “One Image to Rule Them All.” The timing was particularly handy, as I’d begun to freak out about image dimensions on Twitter. Twitter helpfully gives us the ideal image aspect ratio for Twitter Cards. Tip: If you want your entire image to be visible in the […]

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Why Are Scammers Always From Nigeria?

Mat Morrison — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 15:54:17 +0000

I am particularly fond of instances of “common knowledge” that turn out to be wrong. I actively enjoy having my remaining beliefs in urban legends burst. It feels like I’m attaining knowledge; or becoming less ignorant at the very least. This is one of my favourite examples: “Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are From […]

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Using BBEdit and Markdown together

Mat Morrison — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 21:52:59 +0000

I’m a heavy BBEdit user. For those of you who don’t know, BBEdit is a text editor (not a word processor) and it’s been around for almost a quarter century. I use it for writing code (a bit), and for cleaning or manipulating text data (a lot.) But mostly, I use it as a research […]

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Median Retweets (and trends)

Mat Morrison — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 10:03:53 +0000

This animated histogram charts the retweets received by an influential (anonymous) Twitter user with around 90K followers. I'm becoming very interested in the ability of Twitter users to activate their audiences.

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Using Excel to summarise your Twitter Analytics data better.

Mat Morrison — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 19:21:52 +0000

This is the first of what I'm planning will be a series of screencasts looking at Social Media data and analytics.

I hope it's going to be a useful experience for me; but more to the point, useful for you. So I hope you'll bear with me and give me feedback -- either in the comments below, or on Twitter -- where I'm @mediaczar.

For this first video, I thought I'd take a look at Twitter's analytics product. Twitter opened this up to the general public last month -- but some of us have had much longer to play around with it and get used to it. I thought it might be good to share some of what I've learned.

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Building an RSS feed with ScraperWiki and Yahoo! Pipes

Mat Morrison — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:27:26 +0000

Building an RSS feed for Facebook's Research blog is relatively straightforward thanks to ScraperWiki and Yahoo! Pipes.

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Bitlyquery

Mat Morrison — Sun, 04 May 2014 20:41:05 +0000

I’ve decided to share some of the tools I use to do my work. Partly in the hope that someone may find them useful; partly in the hope that having other people use the tools will help improve them. The first one I’ve posted is one of a set of link shortener tools, called bitlyquery […]

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