Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Was Your Community Manager Appreciated?

This past Monday was the third annual Community Manager Appreciation day, a day to celebrate all the hard work community managers do that sometimes goes unnoticed. Started back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang as a way to pay tribute to the people that are behind the scenes of thriving online communities, the knowledge of the celebration has grown as the job has become a lot more common at many companies. Some people think that community managers are the people that play on the internet all day, but really they’re the heart of a community for a business. From my own experience I can tell you that community managers handle almost all functions of a company at some level. They can be PR, marketing, sales and customer service all at the same time. As you may guess, I do have a personal affinity for this day.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics tool, I decided to take a look at just how much online talk was going on about Community Manager Appreciation Day. Since many community managers these days work in the social space, I thought that would be the best place to get the information from. Looking for the term “Community Manager Appreciation” or the few forms of the “#cmad” hashtag, I was able to find 114 blog posts, 74 online news articles, 80 forum postings and 4,744 tweets.

I then took a look at where this semi-holiday was being celebrated. The USA provided the most talk of Community Manager Appreciation Day at 55.2%. This is likely because a lot of companies have their head offices in the US, so that is likely where the community managers are also located. The UK had the second most talk with 15.8% followed by France, where there’s interesting social media happenings, at 10.2%. Canada, where this community manager is located, only accounted for 4%.

Next I pulled up a buzzgraph which shows us words that we find most connected to our search terms. Right in the center we can see Owyang’s name. He was brought up a lot in conversation as the man that first came up with the idea for Community Manager Appreciation Day. We can also see strong connections to “happy,” which was people celebrating, and “thank,” which was people thanking the community managers for doing what they do. The thing that threw me off in this buzz graph was the “23-oct.” After a little digging into it, I found that a social publishing platform company called Vitrue is holding an award for best community managers and submissions are open until October 23rd of this year.

What’s interesting is that when I pulled up a word cloud around the talk, Owyang actually takes a back seat to the community managers. He appeared in the center of the buzzgraph because he was mentioned a lot in when people were talking about Community Manager Appreciation Day. However, the word cloud shows us the words that are being used most often, and as you can see, it’s the community managers that were being talked about the most on their day.

Lastly, and the thing that makes me the happiest, was the sentiment I found about Community Manager Appreciation Day. To be honest, I’ve actually never seen this before in any analysis I’ve done. Community Manager Appreciation day received ZERO negativity. However, positive sentiment was at an astounding 77%.

For some more information on community managers and a nice infograph, check out Social Fresh’s 2012 Community Manager Report.

Tebow Takes on Twitter

Tim Tebow may be the most popular man in sports right now. He was a first round draft pick the NFL’s 2010 draft. He became the Denver Broncos’ starting quarterback part way through the 2011 season and has lead them on a wild charge ever since. His celebration ritual has spawned an internet and photo meme known as “taking a Tebow.” And as of Sunday, he can say that he is also a Twitter record holder.

This past Sunday during a Broncos’ game against the Steelers, Tim Tebow threw an 80-yard touchdown pass in overtime to win the game for Denver. The crowd in Denver went wild, but even more so, Twitter exploded with tweets about Tebow. Right after the touchdown pass Twitter recorded 9,420 tweets per second, making it the second most tweets per second for a single event. It was however the record for a sporting event.

I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to look a little bit deeper into the event. I found that it wasn’t just Twitter that was talking about Tebow. On Sunday, January 8th, I found Tebow mentioned in 2,549 blog posts, 1,495 online news articles, 22,950 forum posts and 484,946 tweets.

While 484,946 tweets doesn’t sound like a giant amount, it’s much larger when most of the tweets happen at almost the same time. Also, I pulled up a popularity chart of mentions of Tebow on Twitter over the past six months and found that this one day was almost the amount of tweets on his last most popular day.

I also found something interesting when I looked at where all the tweets were coming from. Surprisingly, Colorado didn’t even come close to being the state that produced the most tweets about Tebow. Neither did Pennsylvania. The top three states that were talking about Tebow were California, New York and Florida. Colorado actually tied for the state with 9th most Tebow tweets with Virginia and New Jersey.

Lastly, I took a look at the talk surrounding Tebow in a buzzgraph. Not surprisingly the Broncos are right in the center of the conversation. We can also see strong ties to the Steelers and the score of the game, 29-23. We can also see that Tebow’s winning touchdown pass was also a main part of the conversation as we can see from strong connection to the term “80-yard.”

With every NFL fan now with their eyes on Tebow, I wonder if he could set another record next week? Or maybe at the Superbowl?

Happy (Social) New Year!

New Years is a friendly time of year. Everyone likes to wish others a happy New Years, regardless of if you know them or not. You say it to the clerk at the grocery store, your neighbor that you only see once in a blue moon, even the random group of strangers you pass on your way home from your new years party. If we do this in real life, it’s not hard to imagine that we also take to social media to spread New Years cheer to the entire world. And we do. In fact, in Japan when midnight struck, the Japanese sent 16,000 tweets a second and actually crashed Twitter. So just how much New Years well wishing was being passed through social media? I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software to find out.

Looking for mentions of “new year” and “new years” on December 31 and January 1 I put together some numbers of people mentioning it through social media channels. From those two days alone I found 299,583 blog posts, 44,376 online news articles, 342,361 forum posts and 9.2 million tweets mentioning New Years.

Looking at where all the talk was coming from I found that the US had created 53.9% of all the mentions. The UK had the second most mentions with 11.5% and then Canada with 5%.

However, because such a large amount of media comes from the US I thought that this even seemed a little weighted. Because of this I decided to look at the geographical distribution on Twitter. Here, the top three countries remained the same and in the same order, but the US had been taken down to 43%. As well, the other category above (across all social channels) accounted for 19.7%, while just on Twitter the category accounts for 27.8%. And although Japan was able to crash Twitter with so many New Years tweets at their midnight, they didn’t seem to produce as much as some other countries over the span of two days.

A heat map of Twitter New Years mentions shows us that tweets were in fact being produced by people around the globe.

Pulling up a buzzgraph of the overall conversation I found nothing but good wishes coming from the social media world. Words like “happy,” “happiness,” “wishes,” “celebrate” and family.

Another word that I found in the buzzgraph that was popping up a lot was “resolution.” The new year is a time when a lot of people make resolutions and I found that a lot of them made them publicly through social media this year. I added “resolution” and “resolutions” to my original query and found 41,972 blog posts, 4,518 online news articles 18,431 forum posts and 321,265 tweets about New Years resolutions. Think they’ll be kept?

Happy New Year to you and yours from all of us at Sysomos! Hope 2012 is great for you!

MOustache Season Comes To A Close

As the month of November comes to close we bid a fair adieu to all the wild moustaches that show themselves but once a year. That’s right, by the time this post is up MOvember will officially be over (but I’m sure you can still donate). For those not in the know, all the creepy moustaches you’ve seen over the past month have been part of a world-wide charity effort to raise money for prostate cancer research and have a little fun while doing it. Well, we started off the month with a MOvember blog post, so I thought it only fair to close it the same way.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, I decided to take a look at MOvember activity throughout social media for the month. Keep in mind though, at the time I grabbed these numbers MOvember was still not “officially” over. During the entire month I was able to MOvember mentioned in 15,284 blog posts, 6,056 online news articles, 18,753 forum posts and 55,199 tweets.

Trending those numbers out over the month we can see that there was an enormous amount of talk as MOvember kicked off. During the month it slowed down a bit, but was still garnering around 13,000-14,000 mentions a day. Then as the month closed we can see another rise in activity as people scrambled to get last minute donations.

Next I looked into which countries were creating the most buzz about the charity movement. The US had the most at 32.5% of the conversation for the month. They were followed by Canada with 23.5%, then the UK with 23.2% and Australia (where MOvember originated) with 8.2%.

Since I’m already on the topic of countries, I headed over to MOvember.com and pulled up the list of money raised by country. I’m happy to say that my home of Canada had raised the most money for prostate cancer research with over $34 million. The other countries that created the most buzz were also in the top four money raising countries as well. That said though, every country did a fantastic job as every dollar helps!

 

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to take a look at what all the conversations over the month were about. No surprise that the main topic of discussion was about moustaches (spelled in a few different ways). We also see a lot of talk about “fundraising” and “donate” as people were mainly talking about collecting donations on behalf of the charity. Not to be forgotten though is the cause, and we can see that “prostate” and “cancer” were strongly connected to the conversations.

Lastly, I pulled up the overall sentiment around the MOvember talk. I’m glad to say that all the talk throughout the month showed a 88% favourable rating. I can only assume that the 12% of negative talk was coming from women who couldn’t wait until their man shaved his moustache off.

Finally, I’m proud to say that the bigwigs here at Marketwire+Sysomos generously agreed to match donations raised by all of our teams up to $5,000. While I don’t have our final numbers, as the west coast is still collecting donations as I write this, I can tell you that we exceeded that number. That means that over $10,000 will be donated to help fund prostate cancer research from the Marketwire+Sysomos family!

I hope you all had a fantastic MOvember and raised some money for this great cause. Happy shaving!

What Happened at Blog World: Some Social Media Stats

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Blog World in Los Angeles. Blog World is one of the largest North American social media conferences and brings together people from all over the world to learn and discuss social media, meet new people in the social media world, see old friends and of course, have fun doing it all. I had a great time over the three day conference and even though I was at our Sysomos booth most of the time, I was still able to keep track of what was going on through social media.

Using our Sysomos social media monitoring and analytics tools, I decided to take a look back at some of the statistics that came out of Blog World. Over the three days of the actual conference I was able to find 933 blog posts, 336 online news articles, 18 forum posts and 24,402 tweets talking about Blog World.

Usually when I do analysis on events Twitter is the dominant channel. That’s no surprise given the nature of the medium. It’s an easy and quick way to share information, so when you’re sitting in a conference you’re able to quickly share tidbits of information that you think others who aren’t there would also like to know. In the case of Blog World, the tweets greatly over shadowed the mediums and it’s even more apparent when you see it as pie chart.

However, Twitter is a great way to get information to people who couldn’t actually be there. From those 24,000 tweets about Blog World there was a potential reach of 199 million impressions. 44.49% of the tweets were original tweets. However, 36.35% of the tweets were retweets. That means that a good portion of the tweets about Blog World, meaning information from sessions and other discussions, were people passing on the talk to even secondary sources and beyond.

The conference also had people all over the world talking about it. A look at where tweets about Blog World were coming from shows us that people around the world were either at the conference, retweeting tweets from the conference or discussing the information that was coming from it.

Next I pulled up a word cloud that shows us some key themes from all three days. As you can see by the range of words below the conference seemed to span a wide range of social and digital topics. We can see words like “marketing,” “mobile,” “bloggers” and networks like “Facebook,” “Twitter” and “blogs.”

Lastly, for my look at Blog World as a whole I pulled up the sentiment analysis around it. Looking at sentiment across all mediums it’s very apparent that most people enjoyed the conference and what they heard. Negative sentiment only accounts for 3% of the entire conversation while positive makes up 58%.

I then wanted to break down the days. First I compared talk on each of the days by share of voice. The first day, November 3rd, had the most talk and accounted for 41% of the conversation. Some of this may be due to people showing up and trying to find people to meet up with, but as you’ll see from the buzzgraph coming up, that doesn’t show as one of the main themes for the day. Friday accounted for 32.2% of the conversation and Saturday only 26.6%.

Next i pulled up buzzgraphs for each day. While a lot of different subjects are evidently talked about each day, there clearly is a difference in what stands out each day. For instance, the words with strong connections on Thursday all seem to be about speakers. We can see strong connections to names like [Chris] “Brogan,” “Jostein” “Svendsen” and “GuyKawasaki.”

Thursday

From Friday we can again see a range of topics and speakers as key parts of the conversation, but there’s one specific topic that stands out. On Friday there seemed to be a lot of talk about making money by blogging. This is evident by very strong connections to the words “blogger” and “blogosphere” and those are connected to “monetize” and “monetization.”

Friday

Lastly, Saturday seemed to focus around two main things. The first was one with “iJustine,” internet celebrity, and the second was about the “Tricaster,” a portable device for putting together quality video productions. What’s also interesting about this day’s buzzgraph is that there is less words in it than the other days. This is most likely because there was less activity on Saturday as we saw in the share of voice between days. Because of this, the conversation was more focused on a few larger topics rather than on a wide range as the other days where more activity was happening.

Saturday

Lastly, using Heartbeat, which was tracking the entire conference, I decided to pull up a list of the 10 most influential Twitter handles around those three days of the conference. These are the Twitter handles with high authority rankings that were tweeting, being retweeted and mentioned the most over the course of the conference. They were:

  1. @Ford
  2. @MariSmith
  3. @Problogger
  4. @mayhemstudios
  5. @prosperitygal
  6. @WeBlogtheWorld
  7. @TedRubin
  8. @chrisbrogan
  9. @markdavidson
  10. @blogworldexpo (the official Twitter account of the conference)

That’s it for my overview of Blog World. I had a great time, some great conversations with great people and can’t wait to do it again next year. Were you at Blog World? Were you following along online from home and work? Let us know if you had any part of Blog World and what your thoughts on the event were.

End Of An Era: Talk and Tribute to Steve Jobs Through Social Media

Last night I was sitting down to write a blog post about the sentiment around Apple’s iPhone event that happened on Tuesday (which wasn’t nearly as bad as you would have thought by looking at the tweets I saw in my stream). But just as I sat down to write I took a quick peek at my Twitter stream and couldn’t believe what I saw. Steve Jobs, founder and long time CEO of Apple and inspiration to geeks everywhere had passed away. I didn’t know if it was one of those Twitter rumors or not, but a quick visit to apple.com confirmed that for the second time in almost as many months I’d have to do a last minute change on what I would write about because of news about Steve Jobs.

I saw this news just after 8pm(EST) last night after not seeing anything on the internet for the past hour and a half. By then, Twitter was already exploding with people talking about the untimely passing of the tech mogul. It took a little while for the news to sink in and I spent a bit of time reading what people were saying throughout my various social networks before I decided that I need to start tracking this through our Sysomos software. At 8:30pm(EST) I used MAP and did a search for the following terms that I thought would show up or already saw people using: “steve jobs” OR stevejobs OR ripsteve OR ripjobs OR ripstevejobs OR #stevejobs OR #ripsteve OR #ripjobs OR #ripstevejobs OR #stevejobs. At this time, which was still shortly after the news broke I was already able to find 1,081 blog posts, 1,790 online news articles, 618 forum posts and 249,042 tweets containing my search terms yesterday.

It’s important that I point out at this time that while the tweets were starting to pour in about Jobs passing, a lot of those blog posts and news articles at that time were still from a bit earlier in the day and were likely talking about Jobs in relation to the Apple iPhone event from the day before. I actually pulled up a buzzgraph at this time as well to see what all the talk was currently about and found that I was right, it was too soon for it all to be about Steve’s death. The following buzzgraph shows that talk at this time was still focused around iPhones, but it changed as time went on.

I decided to keep following how the talk of this progressed as more and more people heard the news and took to social media to talk about it with their friends and peers. By 9:30pm(EST) I found that all the mediums had started to really pick up and tak about Steve Jobs. At this time there was 1,905 blog posts, 3,836 online news articles, 1,483 forum posts and 570,414 tweets.

I then continued to track the numbers of Steve Jobs talk through the night at different intervals. Half an hour after my last check, at 10pm(EST) numbers had risen to 2,298 blog posts, 4,752 online news articles, 2,156 forum posts and 636,924 tweets.

And through the night, numbers looked like the following:

Midnight(EST)

1am(EST)

4am(EST)

8:30am(EST)

I took my final screen grab at 9:30am(EST) this morning. By this time, everyone that was sleeping when the news first broke would have been awake and heard about Jobs. At this time there was 13,611 blog posts, 33,484 online news articles, 27,832 forum posts and 2.5 million tweets about Steve Jobs in about a 24 hour time span. This is very reminiscent to how talk of Bin Laden’s death spread through social media.

At this time as well, our buzzgraph which shows words being used in conjunction with our search terms had also significantly changed. While the buzzgraph I saw at 8:30pm was still focused on words that reflected Tuesday’s iPhone announcement, this morning it was now filled with words of people talking about their sadness of Jobs death an stories and accomplishments of his life.

I also took a snapshot of where all the tweets were coming from. By just taking a quick look at this map it’s easy to see that Steve Jobs had an effect on people around the globe and these people had taken to social media to talk about it.

Steve Jobs was a visionary that changed the world of technology forever. Without his iPod, I don’t think that the MP3 would have caught on as quickly as it did. Even people who could be considered to be Jobs’ main competitors knew how much he had changed the world and they weren’t hesitant to pay their respects to the man. Google put a very minimalistic tribute to him right on their main search page. Blackberry (RIM) sent out a tweet with their condolences and even Bill Gates, who some may have considered Jobs’ number one competitor in life, wrote a short piece on his personal blog to pay his respect.

 

 

It’s no question that today is a sad day in the world of tech. Steve jobs was a visionary and a leader in the industry. He will be very missed by many people, myself included, but if the numbers that showed talk about him in only about 12 hours are any indication, he will not be forgotten.

Social Media Week: Sysomos Looks Back Through Social Media

Sysomos was proud to once again partner with Social Media Week for social media monitoring and analytics. We spent all of last week carefully watching what was going on in regards to Social Media Week around the world and were quite impressed and astounded by what we saw. We contributed daily a short blog post about interesting activity that we noticed for each day of the week and you can find all of those posts on the Social Media Week blog. The following post is appearing on the Social Media Week blog today as our final wrap up post:

 

Hello for what will be my last time posting on this blog! This is Sheldon from Sysomos here with a follow up to all the action we saw last week during Social Media Week. From what I gathered through Sysomos it looked like a fantastic time was had around the globe by all those that spoke, participated and even those that just watched the action through their computer screens (I was one of the latter). Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytic tools, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve put together some stats and charts to highlight the social media activity during the week.

I will start this final post as I’ve started all of my other posts, with a look at the general talk around Social Media Week. Doing a search for all mentions of “Social Media Week” and the hashtags “#SMW” and “#SMW11″ over the course of five days last week I was able to find 261 YouTube videos, 614 forum postings, 299 online news articles, 1,074 blog posts and 17,871 tweets. Not too shabby for five days.

I then thought that I would dive into some demographic information about who was creating all this Social Media Week buzz from around the globe. Since this was a global event I thought it would be best to start with some geographical info. Below you can find a heat map that shows where talk about Social Media Week was coming from. The darker a country is in the map shows more conversation coming from that country. I also pulled up a little chart to show the top four countries that were generating the most Social Media Week talk. If you couldn’t see from the heat map, Indonesia and the United States were generating the most talk at 26% of all talk each. The next two countries talking the most about Social Media Week were the UK (13%) and Canada (6%).

I also pulled up a graph to see what languages the talk was happening in. I was ecstatic to see the range of langues being used to talk about Social Media Week. What’s even more interesting and cool at the same time, is that some of the languages being used to talk about Social Media Week are native to places that weren’t home to our host cities. That means that even people who were physically at Social Media Week were still talking about it. That’s fantastic.

Next I dove into the users that were doing all of the talking online during Social Media Week. What’s really great here is that I found that Social Media Week was being talked about across all ages and genders. First, I found that both men and women were almost equally contributing to the online conversation. I found that males accounted for 51% of the conversation while females made up the other 49%. That counts as pretty much even in my books. Then I looked into the ages of people talking about Social Media Week. Here I found that people 20 and under made up 14% of the conversation, those 21-35 accounted for 36%, those 36-50 made up 29% and the 51 and older crowd made up the remaining 21%. That’s a pretty good spread and showed that people of all ages were engaged in the talk. It’s no surprise that the 21-35 year olds were the largest crowd, as that tends to be the case a lot as they’re a generation very involved in social media. It was great to see that even those 20 and under were getting involved as well.

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to show what some of the Social Media Week talk was about and how it was interconnected. What’s really great is that we can see a whole bunch of different languages represented in the buzzgraph. One of the deeper connections we can see in the chart is to the term “livestream” which tells us that people were talking a lot about the livestreaming of the diffferent talks and events. That also probably explains how so many places and languages that weren’t physically part of Social Media Week got into the conversation. Right below the buzzgraph I’ve also included a word cloud to show us some of the most popular words being used in conjunction with Social Media Week.

One last thing I looked into about Social Media Week in general was how the conversation on Twitter was happening. Because Twitter seemed to be by far the most active Social Media Week channel I thought I’d give it a little bit of focus. Out of the 17,871 tweets I mentioned above I looked to see what kind of tweets they all were. My analysis showed that 49.03% of the tweets were regular tweets. That means that nearly half of all the tweets were people sharing what they were hearing to their followers. 39.93% of the tweets were retweets meaning that people were passing along the Social Media Week info they were seeing from other people. The final 11.04% were tweets were @ tweets, meaning people talking to each other about Social Media Week related things. As well, I found that of all the tweets that happened during the week there was a potential reach of 42.4 million impressions.

Half way through the week I posted on the Twitter users that were creating the most amount of mentions per city. Since the Social Media Week is now over I thought I would update that list. The following are the Twitter users with the most mentions of individual host city events (note that I removed the official city Social Media Week accounts):

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

Lastly, I thought we would dive into the activity of each of our 12 host cities. Before I list them out for you, I thought it would be interesting to look at them all combined. Below you can see a chart that I put together made up of all the host cities activity as tracked by keywords and hashtags provided to me by the Social Media Week global organizing team. The chart shows the level of activity for each day combined, but also shows how much was contributed by each city individually.

The following shows the activity broken out to the city level. Here you can see how activity levels were each day of the week, activity in each of the social channels and the sentiment rating for each city. Keep in mind that because Twitter was such a dominent channel during the week it tends to out shadow the activity of other channels in the line graphs, but the activity was there. I’ve also included below each city a buzzgraph of that city so that you can get a feel for some of the conversations that were happening.

Beirut

 

Berlin

 

Bogotá

 

Buenos Aries

 

Chicago

 

Glasgow

Los Angeles

 

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

 

São Paulo

 

Vancouver

Well, that’s it for me (at least until the next Social Media Week). I hope that you all enjoyed these posts and got a better idea of what was happening around the world during Social Media Week.

It was a real pleasure for both myself and Sysomos to be a part of Social Media Week. We think it’s a great event and hope to continue to be a part of it.

Quick note: This was my last blog post for Social Media Week, not Sysomos. Someone had thought I would not be blogging here anymore, so I thought I should just point this out.

The Build Up to Social Media Week

Sysomos is proud to once again partner with Social Media Week for social media monitoring and analytics. On top of providing the organizers with social media monitoring for the week, we have also been contributing to their global blog and will continue to daily for the rest of the week. The following post appeared on the Social Media Week blog on Monday to show the the online build up to the big week:

 

The big day is finally here and today we kick off Social Media Week in 12 cities around the world! Sheldon from Sysomos here and I’ll be your guide to social media monitoring and analytics for this exciting week. If you’ve been following the global blog for the past couple of months I’m sure you’ve seen some posts of mine looking at social media activity in each of our host cities leading up to today. Since Social Media Week is now underway, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how talk of Social Media Week in general has looked leading up to now.

Using two of Sysomos‘ industry leading social media monitoring and analytic softwares, MAP and Heartbeat, I will be digging in to what is happening around the world in terms of Social Media Week. Using information and hashtags provided to me by the global Social Media Week team, I spent the weekend loading up Heartbeat so that I could be prepared to catch as much content as possible through out the week. I’ll be posting daily on the Social Media Week blog interesting stats and information that I find coming from our official 12 host cities, so keep checking back here during the week.

Since today is the first day of Social Media Week, I decided to take a look at some high overview stats around talk of Social Media Week in general. To do so, I built a query that looked like this: smw OR smw11 OR socialmediaweek OR “social media week”. I started off by looking at all the talk of Social Media Week from the end of the last event in February of this year up to last night and found 7,456 blog posts, 2,489 online news articles, 35,120 forum postings and 248,295 tweets.

To make it a little more relevant for today, I did the same search again for just the past month leading up to today’s launch. In that time frame I found 1,367 blog posts, 648 online news articles, 3,546 forum postings and 44,666 tweets about Social Media Week.

Trended out over time, that activity for the last month looks like the chart below. We can see a steady stream of activity coming from all channels. We can also see activity starting to peak at the end of last week as people prepared for today. There looks like a bit of a drop off over the weekend, but that tends to happen on weekends.

I then looked at the geography of where all this activity was coming from. We can see that most of the activity was coming from countries that are home to some of our Social Media Week host cities. The most activity was seen in the United States (35%), but Indonesia is hot on their heels (31.1%). While this information is great to know, it doesn’t really do much visually to see all the activity in a pie chart, so I took to Twitter (because it had the most activity) and plotted out where tweets about Social Media Week were coming from on a map of the world.

Next I pulled up a wordcloud that spans across all the mediums Sysomos covers to see what some of the most popular words being used in association with Social Media Week talk were. It looks like a lot of talk over the past month are reflecting the various events going on for Social Media Week. In the wordcloud we can see a bunch of our cities, some topics that are going to be covered at events and of course, a call to register for the events you’re interested in checking out.

Lastly, for my high overview, I wanted to give you a taste of just how excited people are for this week. To do so, I pulled up the sentiment of all mediums collectively. The positive response and talk is overwhelming and accounts for 56% of all the conversations. That gives Social Media Week a favourable rating of  87%.

Not to leave our Social Media Week host cities out of today’s kick-off post, bellow you can find the social media activity for each of city. Each city has been populated to only find mentions of that specific city’s Social Media Week activity over the last month leading up to last night. To do so, each city has been programmed in Sysomos Heartbeat with hashtags specific to that city and mentions of that city that are found with mentions of Social Media Week.

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

Well, that’s it for me for today. Be sure to check back here daily to see my reports on what’s been happening each day throughout Social Media Week.

If you’re in one of our host cities, be sure to get out and enjoy some events. Also, if you’re in Vancouver, Chicago or LA, be sure to come out and see our Sysomos team at events in those cities.

Happy Social Media Week everyone!

New Webinar: Going Back to the Future: Reading the Market’s Memory for Product Development Initiatives

For those unfamiliar with the Sysomos Business Library for Social Media, it is a resource center we’ve filled with content to help your entire business really succeed at implementing and using social media. Currently you can find reports, white papers and past webinars focused on how different parts of an organization can effectively use social media. As part of our ongoing efforts at the Business Library for Social Media we are proud to announce our next free webinar.

Join us on September 21 when Paul Gillin, principal independent content management consultant and writer, with co-host Nygel Weishar, Sysomos’ social media and community relations specialist, will present “Going Back to the Future: Reading the Market’s Memory for Product Development Initiatives,” a free one-hour webinar. This webinar will take a look at how you and your business can use social media monitoring to successfully develop new and exciting products for your customers.

Product development is one of the most costly, time-consuming, and risky aspects of a business. Bringing the wrong product to market can mean millions in lost time, revenue and human resources. Today’s smartest manufacturers and service providers are using long-term social media research to gauge exactly what the marketplace wants. This webinar, together with Sysomos’ September featured white paper, “The Market Has a Memory: How to Leverage it for your Next New Product Development Initiative,” will equip organizations with practical applications for using long-term social media monitoring as a form of market research to track industry trends to drive successful product development. Attendees will learn more about how to:

  • Identify trends and target markets as they evolve to help you bring new products and product features to market at the right time and to the right audience
  • Track the evolution of public perception of your product and brand
  • Spot seasonal shopping and buying trends
  • Establish benchmarks for how long it will take for a new product to catch on and begin generating buzz on the social web

Webinar details:

  • What: Free webinar “Going Back to the Future: Reading the Market’s Memory for Product Development Initiatives” (#blsm)
  • When: Wednesday, September 21, 2011, 10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT
    Note: The session is 60 minutes in length and is archived for later viewing. All registrants receive access to the archived webinars.
  • Who: Paul Gillin (@pgillin) principal independent content management consultant and writer, and co-host Nygel Weishar (@nweishar) Sysomos’ social media & community relations specialist

How Would Social Media Have Affected 9/11?

What would 9/11 have been like if social media was as prevalent in 2001 as it is today?

It’s an interesting question, and one that could yield many answers. As we have seen with so many important events over the past five to seven years, social media has played a vital, paradigm-shifting role.

Many were surprised when the last FIFA World Cup didn’t overload Twitter but most people can agree 9/11 would have had the most potential to break the service (and others) in a substantial way.

The amount of tweets, status updates, content creation and blogging throughout the digital world would have been unlike anything we’ve seen to this point.

As noted by in a previous post, it is amazing to see people have not forgotten 9/11, and that social media is now the outlet for reflection and communication about the event. Even before the 10th anniversary, 9/11 and its satellite subjects were discussed daily throughout all of social and online traditional media.

Social media has been a game changer for almost a decade. It changed the way we communicate, connect and share – three lasting tenets of 9/11. It has become a means to heal (see the recent airplane crash in Russia and the Norway terrorist attack) and a way for people to connect over the same experience.

Even though social media is a forum that lends itself to communal healing, it is content curation and dissemination where social media would have made the biggest impact. The stories, opinions and photos would have flown with more frequency than they did in 2001.

It is fair to say social media would have played a major role in the 9/11 aftermath. Imagine the increase in the number of photos and stories that would have been published. Even without social media, the number was staggering.