Finding Top Keywords with the Social Analytics API

 There are over 50 Entities and Service Operations available in the Social Analytics Lab API. Over the next few posts we will provide details on how the Entities can be used to accomplish some basic scenarios in the Social Analytics lab.

The first scenario we’ll look at identifies top keywords for one of the lab datasets. To accomplish this, you only need two Entities in our API (pictured below):

Keywords

The Keywords entity includes every keyword that has been defined or observed by our curation processes. After two weeks of activity on the Bill Gates Lab, we already have an inventory of over 10,000 keywords. New keywords observed in the Social Stream are marked as New. These new keywords are useful to consider when defining filters (coming in a future version) to curate relevant conversations.

With the following LINQ Statement in LINQPad, we can get a sample of the active keywords in the Bill Gates Lab:

  (
 from k in Keywords
 where k.ItemStatusId == 10 //Active
 select new
 {
 k.Name,
 }
 ).Take(10)

KeywordReferenceEntities

KeywordReferenceEntities are the record of what Keywords are referenced in Content Items and Message Threads. In our taxonomy, a Content Item is a post of any kind, ranging from gestures such as Facebook likes to a Tweet to a Blog Post. A Message Thread is a summary of an original post in a feed and all responses to that post in the same feed.

With the following LINQ Statement in LINQPad, we can get a sample of Keyword References:

  (
 from k in KeywordReferenceEntities
 select new
 {
 KeywordName = k.Keyword.Name,
 k.MessageThread.LastReplyContentItem.Title,
 k.MessageThread.LastReplyContentItem.HtmlUrl,
 }
 ).Take(10)
 

Top Keywords for the Last Week

Using these two Entities together, we can calculate the top 5 Keywords referenced in the last week for Bill Gates. Here’s the code:

  (
 from k in Keywords.Expand("KeywordReferences").AsEnumerable()
 where k.ItemStatusId == 10
 && k.KeywordReferences.Max(kr => kr.LastUpdatedOn) > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-7)
 orderby k.KeywordReferences.Count descending
 select new
 {
 k.Id,
 k.Name,
 References = k.KeywordReferences.Count
 }
 ).Take(5)

and the results:

Check out our blog later this week to find out more about what you can do with the entities in the Social Analytics Lab.

Also, please let us know what questions you have or other interesting discoveries you find in the labs.