Contributors A-Z | Top contributors | Edit profile

Kyle is a senior R&D executive at TNS Global Brand Equity Centre, where he feeds his passion for discovering what makes people tick. As part of TNS’ Thought Leadership team, he has made it his goal to share this understanding with a wider audience. His main areas of interest relate to non-linear, systems dynamics and he has a strong desire to bring the hard sciences to bear on the question of why people do what they do. This passion has encouraged him to delve into specific scientific areas such as neuroscience, chaos theory and network theory.Kyle has published articles in Admap Magazine and Research World Magazine, and has presented papers and hosted expert Q&As at the South African Market Research Association, ESOMAR and The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences. In addition he is the recipient of several awards, including a WPP Atticus Award and both the Gold and Silver awards for best paper at the 2010 SAMRA conference.

• What can we learn from South Africa’s most influential tweeters?

  So far in our series on the South African Twittersphere, we explored what lessons we can learn from conversations happening around two key political figures, opposition leader Helen Zille and president Jacob Zuma. We then mapped a large portion of the South African Twitter network in order to identify who had the most followers and the sub-communities that exist within the network.While it is useful to know who has the most followers, this is not necessarily the best way of ...

• What lessons can we learn from mapping the SA Twittersphere?

  In the last post of this series we looked at what the most popular hashtags in conversations around two of the most powerful tweeters in South Africa, Helen Zille and Jacob Zuma, revealed about the way politicians use Twitter.Our next piece of research went one step further by mapping and visualizing a large portion of the actual network of connections the underlies the South African Twittersphere. In our network, people were connected if one person followed another person.The way ...

• Understanding how politicians use Twitter: a case study

  Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have fundamentally changed the nature of political discussion. They allow the common person to add his or her voice to the issues that are important to them and to connect with important decision-makers that might otherwise be out of their reach.Twitter has had a particularly profound effect on political discourse, even in emerging market countries like South Africa. In that country, this has been especially true for opposition leader Helen Zille, who ...