Posts Tagged ‘social media analytics’

Everyone’s Talking About The Royal Wedding

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, I’m sure that you’ve heard about the big upcoming day. Yes, I’m referring to the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton that will be occurring on Friday. Even if you didn’t want to hear about it, I’m sure that you did anyways because the nuptials seem to be being talked about everywhere and social media is no exception.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I decided to take a look at all of this online talk. In the last six months our system was able to find 142,665 news stories, 195,713 blog posts, one million tweets and even 116,482 forum posts talking about the royal wedding.

What was interesting was the spread of how much talk was happening and when. In the blogosphere our popularity chart shows that there was a small burst of talk when the engagement was first announced on November 16th. From there talk about the wedding seemed to fuel a fair bit of conversation until about two weeks ago when posts really seemed to pick up. The chart for online media looks very similar to the blogs.

However, if we look at Twitter you can see that there was a big burst in talk when the engagement was announced and then it fell off the radar until very recently.

Also interesting was when I found out where all these blog posts were coming from. Surprisingly, the majority of blogs mentioning the royal wedding were coming from the United States (33.4%), who are not part of the Monarchy, while the UK only held 29.2% of the conversation.

When I looked who was writing all of these blogs I found that the 21-35 year olds seemed to care the most about the royal wedding with 44.8% of the conversation, but people of all ages seemed to be talking about it. I was also surprised to find that both men and women were talking in even amounts about the wedding.

What did separate the two genders was how they were talking. A look at our sentiment comparison shows that women had more negative things to say at 18% (compared to men at 15%) while men were saying more positive things about the wedding at 48% (compared to women at 37%).

Looking at our word cloud to see just what all the talk was about, we can see that the most talked about things in the royal wedding are of course the bride and the groom, Prince William and Kate Middleton. We can also pull out of the cloud that people were talking about how Kate is now becoming a “princess”. People are also talking about “watch”ing and “read”ing about the wedding. And, what wedding talk would be complete without talking about the “fashion”, “style” and, of course, the “dress”?

Were you one of the people contributing to this conversation? Are you going to be tuning in to the wedding on TV or streaming on the net? Let us know in the comments.

What Happened at SXSWi?

I just finished attending my first ever South by Southwest Interactive Conference and it was an experience I will never forget. Thousands of people that work in digital professions such as digital agencies, web developers, app developers and others, descended on Austin for five days of learning and fun. I can say now that the learning that happens in sessions is only part of the experience. Some of the greatest things that came from my experience was meeting new people and having really interesting discussions with them in the hallways and parties.

Earlier this week, Mark Evans wrote a post looking at what talk was coming out of the conference halfway through. Now that the conference has come to a close, I decided to look back at all five days using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, and found a few different results than earlier in the week.

To get an overview of just how much talk was happening these five days I pulled up an activity summary. I was able to find nearly 1,800 blog posts, 540 news articles, 87 forum discussions and over 51,500 tweets mentioning “SXSWi”.

Walking around the convention center I met people from all around the world that had come to Texas just to attend this conference. A look at our Twitter geolocation map to see where all the tweets from the conference were coming from shows just how far and wide people came from to attend.

Not only did I meet people from all over the world, but also people of all ages that were interested in learning more about our digital world. While younger professionals between the ages of 21-35 seemed to be the majority at 52.3%, we can see from the pie chart that the digital world doesn’t only attract younger folks.

As well, conference attendees from numerous industries had come to learn how they could best use digital ideas and practices to help benefit them.

Looking at the talk from blogs in our buzzgraph, which shows the words most used in conjunction with our search term, we can see that people were writing about a lot of the new technologies, applications and ideas that were being shown off around the convention.

A look at the buzzgraph from Twitter shows that people were tweeting more about their experiences. While Mark’s post showed that a lot of Twitter talk earlier in the week focused around the parties that were happening, we can now see that parties has taken a back seat to meeting new people and making interesting finds. We can see that some things people were finding were “startups”, “apps” and the odd geek celebrity sighting.

All and all, South by Southwest Interactive was a great time. I had a chance to meet people I had only talked to through the internet before, as well as people I had never spoken with but will continue to for a long time. As well, the sessions provided some really interesting new ideas, concepts and applications that I’m sure people will be talking about until next years conference.

Were you at SXSWi? Were you not there but trying to follow what was happening there through tweets and blogs posts? Let us know in the comments what you were able to take away from SXSWi.

The ‘Staches Were A Success

Well, MOvember is over. No more creepy looking men running rampent through our streets. No more women scared to leave their houses.No more scaring myself every time I look in  the mirror.

While the official numbers are still being tallied by the MOvember foundation, a quick peak at their Mo Money page shows the total money raised nearing $60 million. Our home, Canada, raised $19.5 million of that and Sysomos is proud to be part of that. Thanks again to everyone who helped support our team and MOvember in general!

As promised, we used MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, to look back at the social web for the month of MOvember. We can see right away from our activity summery that the social web was abuzz with talk about MOvember. We found over 11,000 blog posts, almost 3,000 news mentions and over 320,000 tweets. Most surprising to myself was the 8,000 mentions we found in forums.

A look at our world map plotting out the over 320,000 tweets shows most of the activity coming from the six official countries participating, but we can see mentions of MOvember being tweeted from around the world.

Next, we broke down some more demographics to see who was talking about MOvember. We found that the 21-35 year olds dominated the conversation with 71.5%. I thought that the under 20 crowd would have had the least amount of mentions (since there would be less of them that could participate), but they mentioned MOvember more than the 51 and overs. Another interesting thing we found was that women were talking about MOvember almost as much as the men were (47% and 53% respectively).

Lastly, we took a look at our buzzgraph through Twitter to see the words being most used in conjunction with MOvember. We see a lot of words we would expect like “moustache”, “mustache” and “stache” paired with words like “donate” and “support”. Some of the more funny things we found were that people were also talking a lot about “dirty” and “shave” in conjection with the different variations of moustache. Another interesting thing we are able to pick out from this buzzgraph was that people liked to share pictures of their ‘staches because the picture services Twitpic and Yfrog have very strong connections and are appearing close to the middle of the graph.

Overall, it seems this year’s MOvember was a huge success. Congratulations to everyone who participated by growing a moustache and thanks to everyone who donated. Your faces may now return to their normal state… Until we do it again next year!

Looking At the US Mid-Term Elections

Earlier this week we took a look at what the social universe thought about a mayoral election that was happening in our hometown of Toronto. Sticking with the same theme we thought it would be interesting to take a look at another upcoming election.

Next week in the United States residents will head to the polls to cast their vote in the mid-term election. For those of you unfamiliar with what the mid-term elections are about (like I was until five minutes ago) here’s a good brief explanation from the good folks of the BBC:

“The elections are called mid-terms because they come halfway through the four-year term served by the president, though the polls are in fact for Congress – the two houses of the US legislature – and for some state governorships (gubernatorial elections).

In Congress, all 435 members of the House of Representatives face the voters, as they do every two years. But only a third of the 100 members of the Senate are up for election at any one time. This year 36 Senate seats are being contested and there are 37 gubernatorial elections.”

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, we looked at some chatter happening in the social media universe about the mid-term elections.

If we look at our popularity chart for the past six months we can see that people have been talking about the election for a while, but as the voting day draws closer the talk seems to increase.

Sysomos MAP - popularity chart

We then decided to delve into some demographics and see just who was talking about the upcoming election in the past month. When we looked at age, it’s interesting to see that the share of voice between people of legal age to vote was almost even all around. People aged 21-35 were talking about it just as much as those 51 and over with both having 31.4% of voice, and those aged 36-50 very close behind with 29.6%.

Sysomos MAP - age chart

We looked at which states the chatter was coming from. Here we can see that New York had the most political chat with 13.7% followed by California (12.5%). The next two most talkative states were Texas (6.6%) and Pennsylvania (6.2%).

Sysomos MAP - state chart

Next we decided to analyze some info about the two major parties in the US, the Republicans and Democrats. Looking at the share of voice between the two parties we see that they are almost in a dead even heat.

Sysomos MAP - compare SOV

From there we looked at the sentiment around each party. Looking at the graph below we see that there is more positive sentiment for the Republicans (48% vs 42%), but at the same time they also have more negative sentiment aimed at them (23% vs 21%).

Sysomos MAP- compare sentiment

As a non-US resident this looks like a pretty close race to me, but there is still five days left until the election and only time can tell what will happen.

Social Media Can Bring the World Together in Times of Crisis

Last week the entire world watched as 33 Chilean miners who were trapped 2,050 feet underground for 69 days were finally freed and brought back to the surface. Not only were we watching, but we were also talking about it. A lot.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, we looked at just how much talk went on the day the miners were rescued.

Looking at the 13th and 14th of October (the day and the day after the miners were brought to the surface) we found over 9,000 blog posts, 6,000 new items and nearly 250,000 tweets that included the phrase “Chilean Miners”.

Sysomos MAP - share of voice activity summery

Long before social media, stories such as this would get attention worldwide, but very limitedly. News programs and papers around the world could do some coverage on the story, but depending where in the world they were located the depth of coverage would vary. Thanks to social media, people around the globe were able to talk about this event regardless of where in the world they were located.

The following image is heat map showing all the locations around the world that were talking about these 33 lucky men via twitter. Larger heat bubbles represent a larger concentration of chatter. As we see, the entire world seemed to have the Chilean miners on their mind.

Sysomos MAP - geo location world map

We were also able to delve into some text analytics and see just what all this talk was about. If we look into the middle of our buzz graph we see that the conversation mainly revolved around the words “rescue” and “rescued”.

Sysomos MAP - buzzgraph

We can see by the thicker lines that a lot of the conversation showed that people were “happy” that the miners were “safe”. As well, a lot of people were calling the whole situation a “miracle”.

Thanks to social media the entire world was able to come together and show support for these 33 blessed men who survived what one could imagine was 69 days of hell trapped underground. This is proof that social media has the ability to unite an entire world in times of crisis in a new and fantastic way.

Who Will Take Home The World Cup?

Fifa World CupLast month, just before the start of the Fifa World Cup, we looked at who would win based on online chatter. From our results we made the prediction that England would come out on top.

Boy, were we wrong! (Sorry England)

It’s now time to head down the final stretch into the big final to the tournament. This Sunday will see Spain play The Netherlands for the championship. Even more exciting is that neither of these teams has ever won a World Cup before.

Since our first prediction was wrong, we decided to take a look at who the social web thinks will win now; Spain or The Netherlands. Using the same methodology as our first attempt to predict the winner, we ran queries on the two World Cup contenders to assess the level of social media conversations over the past month (from June 11th, the date of the first match) using our social media monitoring and analytics platform.

In terms of overall conversation, Spain is by far the frontrunner. In the blogosphere Spain comes in first with 69.2% of the total conversation. As well, Spain is also towering above the Netherlands on Twitter with 77.4% of the conversation.

However, when we look at sentiment surrounding these two teams we seem to find a much closer battle. Spain has a 35% positive rating while The Netherlands is very close behind at 34%. We can also see that The Netherlands has less negative sentiment around them at 18% while Spain has 21%.

This is a tough one to call, but if we judge by share of voice and positive sentiment it looks like Spain will be taking home their first ever World Cup.

Who do you think is going to win the big game on Sunday?

Sysomos, Now a Marketwire Company

Sysomos, Now a Marketwire Company A hallway discussion in 2005 led to the creation of Sysomos. Today, we are excited to announce that Marketwire Inc. has acquired Sysomos. Marketwire is a dominant leader in press release and content distribution, and workflow solutions for public relations, investor relations, journalists and communication professionals.

We started working on several social media analysis problems as a challenging research project in 2005. A lot has changed since then.

Today, Sysomos is a profitable business. We operate the most advanced social media monitoring and analytics platform, collecting and processing more than a billion new online conversations a month. We have two very successful products in our portfolio: MAP and Heartbeat.

Thousands of brands around the globe are using analytics from the Sysomos platform. The list includes boutique and international agencies, mid-sized companies and some of the world’s biggest brands such as Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Disney and Shell.

Most important, we have been fortunate to build a team that consists of some of the most talented and dedicated individuals, bringing together innovation, technical leadership and superior customer service. As a very important milestone in our corporate evolution, we are now part of the much larger Marketwire family.

As the communications industry moves forward, the union between Marketwire and Sysomos makes perfect sense. Our common goal is a customer-centric approach to apply technology to meet the challenges of communicating in an ever-changing environment. Together, we will bridge the established world of communications services and the rapidly changing social media landscape.

Marketwire’s products and services will integrate social intelligence from the Sysomos platform to provide public relations and investor relations professionals, marketers and advertisers with better tools for their business needs. New products are in development to holistically address the needs of modern communications professionals. The integrated platform will have emphasis on ROI and measurable results to drive value.

Together, we are set to become the global leader in the communications industry. Continue reading the complete press release.

Nick Koudas & Nilesh Bansal
Sysomos Co-founders

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: I am a Sysomos user, how does this affect me?
A: If you are using any of our services (MAP, Heartbeat and Audience), you will continue to have access to them, along with the great support and superior customer service. Nothing changes except you now have access to resources and expertise of a much larger company.

Q: How does the acquisition affect enhancements to the Sysomos platform and new products?
A: We will continue to frequently release new product features and updates frequently. All three products – MAP, Heartbeat and Audience – will continue to evolve. Our engineering team is already working to develop more to meet your needs.

Q: What brings Sysomos and Marketwire together?
A: There is a natural fit and synergy between Marketwire and Sysomos. With access to thousands of clients, both teams will work together to revolutionize the communications industry. This synergy creates a set of unique offerings that will define the evolution of corporate communications. Sysomos will continue to lead the social media landscape, and smoothly integrate its products with Marketwire services. This union shows it is possible to keep pace with technological and sociological changes in communication and information sharing, and stay one step ahead and set the new standard.

Q: Who will be leading the team?
A: The two founders of Sysomos, Nick Koudas and Nilesh Bansal, will continue to lead the Sysomos division of Marketwire as President and CTO respectively, along with Michael Nowlan, Chief Executive of Marketwire.

Q: How do I get access to your products?
A: That’s simple; just contact our sales team at sales@sysomos.com, and we will send you all the details and pricing.

Twitter Users With the Most Updates

When we looked at the most active Twitter users, there was a huge amount of fascinating information. Most of it, we published last week in our second Twitter Report.

There’s still a lot of interesting data that we wanted to share. For example, here’s a list ranking people who have made the most updates that takes into account users who have more than 5,000 followers but update less than 50 times/day – a group that captures enthusiastic users as opposed to bots, which account for 24% of overall Twitter activity.

1. Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) Number of updates: 41.352

2. Thomas Clifford (@tommytrc), 37,547

3. BBC World (@bbcworld), 35,591

4. Lucretia Pruitt (@geekmommy), 35,326

5. John Johnston (@jjprojects), 33,816

6. New York Times (@nytimes), 32.250

7. Lucky Days (@luckydays), 32,031

8. Meg Fowler (@megfowler), 31,748

9. buzztter (@buzztter), 31,286

10. ZDNet Blogs, (@zdnetblogs), 29.683

Other notables include:

- David Armano (@armano), 25,294

- Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki), 25.250

- Aaron Brazell (@technosailor), 22.830

- Robert Scoble (@scobleizer), 21,246

- Tara Hunt (missrogue), 18,827

Exploring Twitter’s Most Active Users

TwitterWhen Sysomos published its initial “Inside Twitter” report last month that examined the people on Twitter and how they were using it, we discovered that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity. This was based on indexing 11.5 million accounts, and then looking at the top 5% users who accounted for most number of Tweets.

Not surprisingly, we wanted to learn more about this enthusiastic group. What we discovered is that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day.

Based on our previous “Inside Twitter” report and this “Most Active Users” report, 24% or one-quarter of all tweets overall, are generated by these very active bots. Many of these bots, however, are not spam, with some examples being @diggupdates, @deliciousrecent, @imdb, @twitseeker, @rosehose, @ladyreporter, @nieuwslijstnl, @dogbook, @ combatsi.

Among the things we discovered about the most active Twitter users are that:- Of the most active Twitter users updating more than 150 times/day, nearly all of them are bots operated by sources such as hotels offering deals, regional and national news services, regional weather services, the top news within Digg, games, anim services, tags within del.icio.us and financial aggregators. These very active bots account for one-quarter of all tweets.

Read the full report on most active users. Our main findings are:

- Among the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers, we find singer Tyrese (@tyrese4real), actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), celebrity Tila Tequila (@officialtila), TV host Jonathan Ross (@wossy), tech evangelist Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) and blogger Robert Scoble (Scobleizer).

- 60.6% of the most active Twitter users live in the United States, while 6.9% are located in the U.K, 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada.

- The split between genders among the most active Twitter users is fairly balanced with 54% male, 46% female.

- 88% of the most active Twitter users have never missed a day without making at least one update, while another 2.1% have only been inactive for one day.

- 48% of the most active users have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for overall Twitter users.

- 44% of the most active uers more than 100 friends, compared with 7.5% overall.

- 33.7% of the most active Twitter users have joined Twitter this year, compared with 72.5% of overall Twitter users who have signed up this year.

ReadWriteWeb has a good analysis of the report.

Twitter Traffic Spikes on News About Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson’s tragic death of an apparent heart attack yesterday attracted a tremendous amount of attention from the mainstream media and bloggers from around the world. More than 25% of all Tweets posted yesterday evening around 7 p.m. were about about Jackson’s death.

Many Web sites and blogs crashed after being inundated with visitors looking for the latest updates about Jackson as reports started to circulate he had been found not breathing by paramedics at a home in Los Angeles.

To get a better sense of the social media activity over the past 24 hours, we used our MAP tool to conduct an analysis. Here are some of our findings:

In looking at Twitter for mentions of Michael Jackson, activity peaked with 25% of all Tweets happening at about 7 p.m. (EST), as reports were confirmed that Jackson had died.

Twitter

More than half of the blog posts about Jackson were done by people in the 21-to-35-years-old demographic, while nearly 25% were written by people under the age of 20.

In some respects, this is interesting because people who are now 35-years-old would have only been 11-years-old when Jackson’s iconic “Thriller” album was released in 1984. (Here’s the “Thriller” video).

Michael Jackson
Given Jackson’s stature as a global celebrity and pop music superstar, blog coverage came from around the world. The most coverage was from the U.S. (21.1%), followed by Germany (8.6%), the U.K. (7.1%), the Netherlands (5.3%), Brazil and France (4.4%) and Malaysia (3.9%)

World Chart
In terms of the major conversations, the most active keyword was “cardiac” in relation to Jackson’s reported heart attack. There were also strong associations with “tributes”, “pop”, “UCLA” (hospital, UCLA Medical Center, where Jackson was taken yesterday afternoon by paramedics).

Buzzgraph
Among the more interesting stories and blog posts about Jackson’s death are a report that his family and friends were concerned about Jackson’s use of prescription drugs to recover from dance-related injuries as he prepared for a sold-out 50-concert comeback in London.

Time Magazine, meanwhile, has a story looking at the “Top 10 Michael Jackson Moments”