Sentiment indexing is a new IBM analytics capability -- so new that there's still virtually no advertising budget behind it. Our job was to make this capability famous. But how? We're calling it PopData, and it's done by applying analytics to the things people really care about: social media and pop culture. Our first stop was fashion. Social media analysis showed Steampunk was poised to break into mainstream retail, and we turned the prediction into an animated Steampunk infographic. Word of the prediction spread from business/tech news to fashion/ culture publications, bringing IBM's new capability widespread fame and interest.

By applying analytics to the things people really care about, social media and pop culture, we took data to the mainstream to create what we call PopData. Our first stop was fashion. Analysis of social media showed Steampunk was poised to break into mainstream retail, and we turned the prediction into an animated Steampunk infographic. Word of the prediction spread from business/tech news to fashion and culture publications, bringing IBM's new sentiment indexing capabilities widespread fame and interest.

Our sentiment indexing story got picked up by the mainstream media in a major way: properties like Forbes, Wired, Cosmo, PSFK, and Time Magazine all featured the infographic. Ultimately, our effort yielded outsize results: 9 million earned media views!