Are Toilets The New Twitter? Using Smart City Data To Measure Interest
Forbes - One of the most common uses of Twitter by marketers and researchers is to gauge public interest and reaction to major events at scale.
Social media makes such analyses relatively trivial through simple keyword searches and volume trendlines. However, last month during the World Cup, Tokyo’s waterworks bureau reminded us that as cities become increasingly instrumented, the myriad other signals in our daily digital exhaust offer powerful alternative signals that stretch beyond the digital divide.
In the aftermath of Japan’s World Cup win against Colombia, the Tokyo waterworks bureau offered a postmortem noting that water use jumped 24% for several minutes during the break, as millions of fans that had been glued to their television sets all ran to the bathroom at the exact same moment nationwide. Similarly, at the end of the game the bureau experienced a 50% increase in water use as fans all rushed to relieve themselves in unison at the conclusion of a gripping match.
The city’s waterworks had been prepared for the sharp sudden demand surges, having observed them during previous football matches.
That a football match could so strongly impact water consumption that it required adjustments to the city’s water supply and pressure is a reminder of the myriad ways in which our daily lives are recorded in the digital exhaust of our increasingly instrumented cities. It also poses fascinating questions about how all of this instrumented data could be used by cities to better understand how their societies are reacting to realtime events.