“Economist turned advertising executive Jason Harper sees an additional function: as a real-time laboratory for measuring how multimillion-dollar ad campaigns are succeeding or failing to drive product sales.”

“To gauge the predictive power of tweets and Facebook sign-ups, Harper borrowed the concepts of velocity and acceleration from the world of physics.”

“”Under Harper’s model, which he calls Velocity and Acceleration, the idea is to constantly measure the number of related tweets, blog mentions, and Facebook fan sign-ups during the campaign. By using calculus to compute the velocity, or rate of change, of the tweets and sign-ups, Harper can easily calculate any acceleration–the rate of change of velocity over time. Using these two metrics, Harper says, he can predict whether a mass marketing campaign will reach its overall goals within the first few days it begins running. The resulting curve typically takes a steep upward slope before leveling off, a pattern known in the industry as “the kick-ass curve.” Says Harper: “The idea is to predict the height of the plateau.”

From TechnologyReview