Your Next Flight… Equipped With Netflix?
Bingewatchers everywhere, rejoice! You can now stream your favorite (and “favourite”) programs and movies while you are cruising through the air on Virgin America.
According to a press release from earlier this week, “the offer will last until March, 2 2016 and will only be available on planes equipped with the airline’s new ViaSat WiFi, which Virgin America claims delivers Internet speeds up to ten times faster than other Wi-Fi systems provided by competing airlines.”
As we took a closer look at mentions around the airliner across the media spectrum, we found that Netflix is (unsurprisingly…and LITERALLY) at the center of this week’s conversation:
Our platform also found that sentiment around Virgin America is overwhelmingly positive, sentiment with which so many of our San Francisco-based team would agree.
Looking closer, the moment that news of the partnership broke, positive sentiment peaked with 160 mentions of Virgin in the media:
What does all this mean? Virgin America’s #NetflixOnboard was an immediately well-received promotion. And, just two days of data illustrate that the partnership may result in more customers of Virgin America starting to become Netflix customers, and vice versa. “Cross promotion” success, right?
Edward Snowden Joins Twitter
Can you hear me now?
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 29, 2015
We heard you, Edward.
Fugitive US intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, is opening up his thoughts to the public through Twitter. Identifying himself as @Snowden, his bio reads “used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.”
Within hours, Snowden’s followers grew by the thousands, and as of now, he has well over 1,200,000. We decided to dive deeper into the buzz around Snowden’s newly-established social presence. One of the biggest takeaways? People respond to humor. Twitter was super amused by the one (and only) account that Snowden is following on the platform: 
Our other takeaway? It’s great to be quick on the draw like The New York Times. This major media outlet was the first to point this out, and in turn, they have the most popular tweet about Snowden’s Twitter presence:
Edward Snowden follows just one account on Twitter: The NSA http://t.co/ohvQ6S15Xs — The New York Times (@nytimes) September 29, 2015
Water on Mars
Earlier this week, NASA held a press conference to discuss the discovery of water on Mars. According to the team of scientists behind the project, it is believed that during summer months, water runs down canyons and crater walls all over the planet that’s fourth closest to the sun.
When news of the discovery broke, Zignal Labs saw a spike of 14,012 mentions across media outlets, averaging about 234 mentions per minute: 
Looking closer at the data, tweets made up the majority of Mars mentions: 
This reflects the realtime nature of the press conference. Because discussions around the discovery were happening by the second, many people immediately took to Twitter to talk about water on Mars, and then dismissed the conversation as soon as the conference ended.
Boehner Resignation Coverage Dominates Social
Over the weekend, House Speaker John Boehner made an announcement that shocked all of Washington (and the rest of the country)—he is retiring.
This news caused a firestorm across all media outlets, with the most chatter going down on social. We found that there were more than 42,000 Boehner mentions per hour after his announcement was made. And, as shared by our friends at the Washington Post, we tracked more than 151,000 geocoded tweets.
“Judging by this map, New York took the most interest in the news, accounting for 10 percent of all Boehner-related traffic. Texas, California, Illinois and Florida also saw not surprisingly intense interest, along with Boehner’s home state of Ohio. But look at Kansas on this state-by-state heat map, which chimed in with more than 11,000 tweets about the soon-to-be-former Speaker.”
We would never label Kansas “a big state,” right? Perhaps this is due to the fact that one of Boehner’s biggest critics is from the Sunflower State. Boehner’s resignation prompted Representative Tim Huelskamp to send out the following:
Today the establishment lost. #Boehner — Cong. Tim Huelskamp (@CongHuelskamp) September 25, 2015
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