The Walmart Chocolate Covered Egg Salmonella Recall

1. Topic-based Social Media
Monitoring
The Walmart Chocolate Covered Egg
Salmonella Recall
March 1, 2013
Solving complex problems…in a manner judged to be truly superior

2. • Our Contour System is currently collecting tweets
about Walmart.
• Contour provides an analytics capability that can
organize unstructured data into topics.
• On Feb 28, 2013 we analyzed 30K tweets about
Walmart and identified a topic that indicated a recall
on Chocolate Covered Eggs due to Salmonella
concerns.
– Just 96 tweets out of 30K provided enough signal to
identify this topic
• We detected this approximately 8 hours before any
news organizations published any content on this
subject.

6. http://blog.usfoodsafety.com/2013/02/27/chocolate-covered-marshmallow-
eggs-recalled-for-salmonella-sold-at-walmart/

7. Mar 1, 3pm
Mar 1, 12pm
Mar 1, 1pm
Feb 28, 5pm

8. • Topic modeling provides an excellent way to
identify the signal in the sea of noise of social
media
• We demonstrated how, through topic-based
social media monitoring, we can identify topics of
interest ahead of the news cycle.
• The applications for this technology are broad:
– Brand Monitoring
– Investment Decisions
– Intelligence & Security