The Next Angry Birds?

The mobile game sensation Angry Birds has spawned a whole industry of plushies, games, shirts, costumes, and even these flip flops! What is the next game to capture the public imagination? Our Walmart.com toy merchant, was pitched by a vendor on Fruit Ninjas. Like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninjas is a fun and whimsical game and it is ranked as the #4 game on the Apple AppStore right now. According to social media trends, it has a quite a bit further to go until it’s a real pop-culture phenomena like Angry Birds. For now Angry Birds still rule the roost.

SocialSense Smackdown: Battlefield 3 vs. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3

@WalmartLabs is working on ways to help Walmart interpret social media to predict trends and learn more about what our customers want. We are mining social media sources like Twitter and Facebook, blogs, search activity, as well as Walmart transaction data to find useful insights. We'll be posting some of our insights here on the @WalmartLabs blog. Please let us know your thoughts.

Today we saw this interesting article in WSJ about the holiday sales war between the blockbuster video game franchises: Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty and Electronic Art’s Battlefield. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 hit stores yesterday while Battlefield 3 went on sale October 27th.

We took a look at how these two games are doing head-to-head in social media buzz. Battlefield 3 saw a sharp temporary spike in the SocialSense Index the week of launch. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has surged this week and appears to be overtaking Battlefield 3. However, Call of Duty 3 doesn’t appear to have the buzz strength that Call of Duty 2 had the same time last year. Will this translate into softer sales than last year? We’ll revisit this post in the coming weeks to see how it plays out.