Here we are again. Another November full of moustaches. Of course I’m talking about MOvember, the month where men all around the world rent out the space on their upper lip in support of charity. MOvember has become the month synonymous with raising awareness of prostate cancer and the number of participants and the money they help to raise for research continues to grow every year. Of course, us here at the Marketwire and Sysomos family will be participating again as well.

I did a little digging using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, on the social media lead up to the start of MOvember. Over the month of October I found 261,570 mentions of MOvember. It was mentioned in 2,027 blog posts, 1,807 online news articles, 3,442 forum posts, and 254,294 tweets.

When I looked at those mentions over time, we can see that people have been getting ready by talking about MOember all month, but the biggest push has come in the last few days.

I also found that MOvember is being talked about the most by the countries that raised the most amount of money last year. We can see a lot of MOvember chatter coming from the USA (31.8%), the UK (26.1), and Canada (16.6%).

The best thing that I found in my little search though was the sentiment around MOvember. From all the talk I looked at over the past month, an astounding 44% of it was positive. Only 10% was negative, but most of that was from people’s fear of moustaches.

Last year the Marketwire family raised over $11,000 on behalf of the MOvember charity. This year we intend to do even better. If you’d like to help us raise some money for this noble charity we would greatly appreciate your donations. You can find our Marketwire MOvember network here and then donate to our American or Canadian teams as whole, or find your favourite Marketwire or Sysomos employee and donate towards their moustache. Thanks so much in advance!!

And, for anyone who wants a little more information on how MOvember started, how it helps and the role that social media plays, check out this video with MOvember’s founder and CEO Adam Garone I made last year:

Movember from Marketwire on Vimeo.

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!