Spiky Charts
Today I am going to blog about spiky charts. You know the ones! You see them in buzz or trend tracking presentations, or sentiment analysis decks. On the X axis is time, and on the Y axis is “buzz” or whatever, and the actual graph is like some kind of bizarro EEG reading, all mad spiky.
And you see them on neuromarketing charts too except there the spiky graph actually IS a repurposed EEG (or some other bit of medical kit).
What do these spiky graphs - let’s call them spikograms - tell us? Well, the main thing about spikograms is that they’re hard to read. Intentionally so - the graph is making a virtue of its complexity. To put it in a nutshell, the spikogram tells you you’re getting away from marketing and into proper science now. And something more - there’s an authenticity play going on too. After all, simple data - the sort you might get out of a (spit) SURVEY - leads to simple curves and easily comprehensible charts. TOO EASY, with a spikogram you know you are getting the real world in all its messy complexity.
Another interesting thing about spikograms is their interpretation. As mentioned, they’re hard to read, and yet read they must be. So every spikogram comes with a key, pointing out the stimulus for a given spike. For a neuromarketing experiment this is fair enough - you control the stimulus, after all, so it’s fair enough to suggest that the spike a 1’10” when you showed a picture of a kitten might be because you showed the picture of a kitten.
For buzz analysis things are a little cloudier. You don’t control the stimulus - if you’re tracking a specific piece of information or work you might, but for more generalised pictures of brands and individuals you certainly won’t. So the direction of the analysis reverses. Instead of it being stimulus response, it’s detecting the response then hunting out the stimulus. Your role is to interpret each spike and match it to something going on in the world, which you do by drilling down into the data and seeing what people are actually saying. Obviously if you’re only looking at when the needle is moving you’re not going to get much concept of what the background noise and sentiment about a topic is, so I assume agencies doing this stuff track news as well as sentiment, in order to form hypotheses about what effects they might see.
But my favourite thing about spikograms is how their popularity in buzz and sentiment tracking is revealing about how those disciplines think of the data they handle. An EEG scan is a scan of a single brain reacting to stimuli, and similarly buzz tracking spikograms show a conception of the internet as a kind of gestalt uni-mind, twitching and peaking in response to brand activity. The negative-sentiment individuals causing one particular downspike might well be completely different people from the positive-sentiment ones causing the following upspike, but in the world of the spikogram they’re all neurons in the same gigantic brain.
