I was all prepared to sit down and write a blog post about how quickly talk of yesterday’s earthquake along the North American east coast spread, but sometimes something comes up that’s just way more important. That something happened mere hours ago when it was announced that Steve Jobs will be stepping down from his role as Apple’s CEO.
There’s never been any doubt about Jobs’ health before as he’s been known to take extended leaves of absence, but this time seems a little more serious as he’s actually given up his title as CEO. He may not be completely out of the picture however as he said he will be staying on as a chairman, but what that means is anyone’s guess. Taking his place as CEO will be Tim Cook, who was previously the COO for Apple.
Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I decided to take a snap shot of what was being said through the world of social media about the big news. In just a few hours since the announcement was made (I’m sure it’s even more as I write this and will more than double by the time you read this) I found 1,761 blog posts, 2,854 online news articles, 755 forum posts and 187,928 tweets talking about Steve Jobs.
The tweets I found were coming in from across the globe, as illustrated in the heat map below.
A buzzgraph, which shows us the words most used in conjunction with my search terms, seems to tell the entire story. In the center we find the word “resign” and “resignation” which is really the heart of the story. Then, all around we can see words that tell the story of Jobs’ time with Apple including “contributed”, “innovation”, and “success”. Then we can see words that talk about his illness including “pancreatic” reffering to his cancer and “unfortunate”. Finally we can also see words that talk of Apple’s future, which include Jobs’ “successor” Tim “Cook” and his new role as “chairman”.
People really loved Steve Jobs and a look at the sentiment around the story shows that people are upset at the news.
Finally, I decided to pull out a few conversations from different mediums so you can get a feel for what is being said.
Blogs
Online news articles
UPDATE: The numbers listed above were taken at about 9:15pm(EST) last night (August 24). As predicted, news about Steve Jobs has been heavily passed around and at 9:15am(EST) this morning I found 12,612 blogs posts, 16,025 online news articles, 7,837 forum posts and 486,486 tweets all mentioning Steve Jobs since the story broke.
Tags: analytics, apple, MAP, Social Media, steve jobs, sysomos
