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:
- @Ford
- @MariSmith
- @Problogger
- @mayhemstudios
- @prosperitygal
- @WeBlogtheWorld
- @TedRubin
- @chrisbrogan
- @markdavidson
- @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.
In Union Station, here in our home town of Toronto, stands a 30-foot Christmas Tree that relies on social media Christmas spirit to light it up. Created by Tribal DDB for Canadian Tire, a Canadian national retailer, the tree takes positive Christmas chatter in social media and uses the data to light up the 30,000 LED lights strung around it. Each colour of light represents Christmas spirit coming from a different social channel. White lights represent social networks like Twitter and public Facebook statuses, red for blog and forum posts, green for online news, and blue lights for messages sent through text message and on ChristmasSpiritTree.ca. The more social media spirit that comes in at one time the brighter the tree shines. As well, there are a few easter egg words (#santa, #snowflake, #magic) that you can send to the tree to make it do some pretty fancy light patterns.
Here’s the thing about social media: it fueled by innovation and creativity while being layered with many elements of human nature.
