by Danny Shea
The moment from 2010 State of the Union coverage everyone will remember may be Chris Matthew's admission that he "forgot Obama was black for an hour" on MSNBC. But the moment that ends up being most pivotal in changing the way the media covers big, live events may well have happened on CNN, where John King used the "Magic Wall" to analyze almost 150,000 Twitter responses to President Obama's speech.
Using technology from software startup Crimson Hexagon, CNN presented a comprehensive breakdown of Twitter responses to the State of the Union, ranging from "Support Obama" to "Obama too liberal." King, operating the Magic Wall, was able to drill down to show state-by-state reactions and highlight sample tweets from each state, as well as show a macro-view of Twitter users' responses to the speech.
Missouri Tweeters, for instance, were about 47% supportive of Obama's speech; Massachusetts Tweeters about 49% supportive; California Tweeters about 50%.
WATCH:
At a time when media organizations big and small are debating how best to integrate sites like Twitter and Facebook into their coverage, CNN appears to have found a successful application.
"We turned the corner tonight," Alex Wellen, CNN's Senior Executive Producer, Integrated Programming said in the control room shortly after King demonstrated the technology for the first time.
Wellen said that CNN had access to the entire "firehose" of Twitter data, as opposed to the limited amounts Twitter makes publicly available for search, and said that there were three elements that made the analysis successful: 1. massive amounts of data, 2. timing of that data, and 3. state-by-state geotagging of that data.
"All together, it gave us a 50,000 foot view of what the Twitter reaction was," he said.
