So it was perfect timing to read the latest Case Study from Twitter featuring our efforts of “Curating the Olympics” — bringing back sweet memories of our adventures in real-time editorial selection for NBC. As a little teaser, check out the excerpt below from the Twitter Olympic Curation Case Study:

————–

NBC partnered with a company called Swarm Collective to put human eyes on the tweets around the clock. Anywhere on Stamen’s tree-map, you could click a sport and see a list of filtered tweets—the best of the best—about that sport.

It looked like THIS.

Swarm ultimately filtered the 2 million down to around 170,000 for display.

Okay, so that’s

50 million tweets
↓
2 million
↓
170,000

…which gives you a sense of the scale of the challenge—and of the opportunity—when it comes to curating Twitter. Whatever kind of curation system you license or build, keep your eyes on the prize: trimming the torrent of tweets down into a focused flow that your audience will find interesting and valuable—not overwhelming.

During the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver earlier this year, US broadcaster NBC tapped digital media agency Swarm Collective to manage its inaugural Olympic Twitter Tracker (left) – a tool that collated the colossal amount of commentary being generated by people tweeting about the games onli ne.

“NBC realised that there was this amazing potential to have and harness the real-time information coming through Twitter and they really wanted to capture the fans’ opinions about the Olympics,” explains Swarm co-founder Lauren Cook. “Not only the fans, but high profile tweeters – celebrities, past Olympians, politicians and the Olympians themselves.

“Because there was such a large amount of Twitter traffic going on about the Olympics, if you didn’t have a tool like the Twitter Tracker, you couldn’t really understand the main trends coming out of it – when (American snowboarder) Shaun White won the gold medal, within 10 minutes there were 12,000 tweets being filtered into this tracker.”

Cook set up Swarm with her business partner Lindsay Yaw in 2008, prior to which she worked for a Washington DC-based agency called New Media Strategies. Swarm’s staff levels fluctuate depending on the project (35 people were onboard for the Vancouver Olympics) and the firm has outposts in Boulder and Denver, Colorado. The company’s mantra is to “design online social experiences to amplify the voices of the people through digital technologies.”

“It’s basically about using this amazing amount of content that is out there on Facebook, Twitter and social networking profiles, and really curating it and editorialising it to have a brand or a company show their viewers what the main trends are happening online,” Cook says. “For our clients, it’s critical that Twitter is no longer just an added bonus – it’s critical to have it as part of a campaign, whether you’re on the entertainment side or the corporate side.”

Prior to working with NBC and San Francisco-based studio Stamen Design on the Vancouver project, Swarm worked with CNN on the launch of the newscaster’s CNNGo endeavour, a website focusing on providing travel, lifestyle and entertainment content for numerous Asian cities. Swarm’s role was to ensure uniform editorial, tone and factual accuracy for each of the hundreds of stories on the site across multiple city editions.

“We’ve found ourselves working with broadcasters a lot lately because they’re finally understanding the importance of using technologies like this to engage their fans,” says Cook.

Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s director of media partnerships, recently told C21 that the social networking site was “the scaleable television platform that we’ve been waiting 25 years for.”

“I completely agree with Chloe’s statement,” says Cook. “What the TV industry needs to do is continue to be open-minded about using these progressive technologies. It’s not just about aggregating Twitter content anymore and just having it scrolling on your website; it’s about curating the best content.

“In addition, there are examples of Twitter actually saving a TV show, like Chuck. Because of the reactions of the fans on Twitter, they were able to save this TV show and have it come back for another season.”

Looking at the TV realm, Cook highlights Bravo as being one of her favourite broadcasters for social integration. “They have this amazing virtual viewing party that they use called the Talk Bubble,” she explains, “and during every single TV show – for example, The Real Housewives of New York – they invite their viewers to live Tweet within this virtual viewing party.”

Looking to the future, Cook says Swarm will be working with broadcasters on a number of major events, and hints that a Twitter Tracker for the 2010 Fifa World Cup may be the company’s next major undertaking.

“There are a bunch of large-scale events coming up in the near future that are very interested in using something similar to the Olympic Twitter Tracker, because this is really a very event-based tool,” she says. “It’s all about having a large-scale event, whether national or international.”

And while the company works on initiatives using a variety of different social media sites and portals, Cook says that Twitter is the most important when it comes to real-time communication. “It has been very smart in its growth and partnerships,” she says of the company. “It’s constantly adapting to the environment and listens to consumer opinion about its product.

“I’ve been to the Twitter office in San Francisco and it has this amazing grid of TV screens that has a rolling Tweet aggregator of anybody out there that’s Tweeting about Twitter. So basically it has a constant real-time update of what people think about the company. It’s a reminder to the employees that they can always do better, that they always need to be listening.”

Adam Benzine

26 Apr 2010

© C21 Media 2010

SXSW is where the biggest trends in digital media are born. It’s where Twitter debuted for the first time. It’s where FourSquare gained notoriety as the next-coolest geo-targeted app. And, it’s where we at Swarm Collective share our geeky side with 15,000 of our closest digitized comrades.

This year, at SXSW 2010, we had just come off of an incredibly complex and exciting—Swarm’s fave project combo—Twitter-based project with NBC for the Olympics.  It allowed us to see the emerging technologies at SXSW from a different vantage point than ever before—through the lens of utilizing the most progressive technologies possible to help our clients interact with their audience and consumers in highly effective and innovative ways.

We met with two of our favorite companies at SXSW—a brand new company that launched days before SXSW called TweetShare. And, Twitter, our partner from the NBC Olympics project.

TweetShare is like a Facebook Fanpage, only utilizing far richer content, and utilizing Twitter’s conversation platform. It acts as a virtual room where you can upload dynamic, interactive content such as video, images, pdf’s, PPT’s, etc and use the Twitter environment to create discussions around these pieces of media. It allows people to interact with a huge variety of branded media in a very real-time environment. Plus, companies get all the data surrounding their users experience. Very cool. Very new. Very unique, and we’re in love with the idea so much that we (Swarm) are in the midst of creating a partnership with TweetShare, so check back periodically to learn more about their capabilities as we’re sure they’ll develop greatly over the next few months.

Our meeting with the folks at Twitter was exciting, as always, and we’re discussing very exciting projects moving forward, so we’ll keep you all posted on that.

We also saw, and learned about a huge variety of data visualizations—from Flickr to FourSquare to Twitter—such as Pepsi’s Zeitgeist that will undoubtedly inspire the next phase of projects we are working on coming up.

Until then, keep in touch and keep the Swarm alive.

By, Lindsay

“Swarm Collective produced our social feeds so that viewers got the most immediate and immersive NBC Olympic experience.” — Perkins Miller, Senior Vice President, Digital Media, NBC Sports & Olympics

For NBC and the Olympics, the Twitter Tracker means that users, viewers, fans, and athletes can experience the events by participating in them through online dialogue and, in that, knowing their participation is reflected in the event, thus building engagement.

The NBC Olympics Twitter Tracker captures and showcases the passion behind the reactions of these fans, athletes and viewers to reflect an authentic user experience in the event. The more authentic the experience, the more engaged they become. The more engaged they become, the more we can understand where they are spending their time, how they are communicating and sharing with other people, and what topics they care about.

The NBC Olympic Twitter Tracker on NBCOlympics.com has attracted numerous positive reviews and press mentions on influential online publications such as The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post and Mashable – resulting in large-scale exposure for NBC.

For users who want an aggregated, visual understanding of ALL dialogue occurring about the Olympics, the Tracker on www.nbcolympics.com has becomes the only destination for staying up-to-date in real-time, (ie: “This is definitely one of the best ways to follow the games if you can’t get to a television.”: http://crenk.com/nbc-help-us-track-the-winter-olympics/ ).

Moving forward, we at Swarm are thrilled at the prospects for this application across numerous large-scale international events. So, we’ll keep you posted on what’s next!