As the excitement of Super Bowl XLIV winds down, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at related Twitter conversation as reflected via the WE twendz protm service. Specifically, we set out to see what trends and topics had everyone buzzing before, during and after the big game. Below are a few items that jumped out for us. But we’d also like to hear from you — what did you notice? Let us know in the comments!
Volume. Anticipation trumps the actual event?
At the time this post was written, there were over 47,500 tweets in the past 7 days, with the majority (nearly 31,700, or 67%) appearing prior to game day. Super Bowl Sunday saw just over 11,000 tweets, and while we’re still early in the post-Super Bowl hours, nearly 4,000 tweets had appeared as of 10 am (PST) Monday, February 8.
Velocity and Reach
Average VpH (velocity per hour) since February 1 was 265.7 tweets/hour. VpH spiked to an average 460.4 tweets/hour on game day. The Total Potential Reach on Super Bowl Sunday alone was 14,712,373. (Potential reach = tweets x followers)
Frequently used hashtags
The NFL promoted #SB44 as its hashtag with great results — #SB44 was used in nearly 5,000 tweets over the past 7 days! #superbowl had 2,212 uses for the same timeframe, followed by #nfl (1,178). After the Saints’ win, #saints and #whodat both moved up in the rankings, overtaking #nfl mentions. Meanwhile, uses of the #colts hashtag dropped.
Celeb tweets were among the top retweeted
@mashable and @NFL were tops with respect to retweets (397 and 308, respectively), but celebrities also had a fair showing:
- Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano) congratulated New Orleans and noted that all the gear made in the event of a Colts victory would be donated to Haiti. In total, Milano’s tweets were retweeted 45 times.
- Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) was retweeted 77 times, with the ever-popular “What are u doing for superbowl? #sb44” RTed most frequently.
- Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) tweeted a link from his Alltop perch about past Super Bowl stadiums: Super Bowl Stadiums from I to XLIV http://om.ly/euQF.
Top influencers
Not surprisingly, top influencers in the Super Bowl Twitter conversation included @NFL, @CNN and @Nightline. Other key influencers:
- @Zaibatsu: “just a guy who loves Social Media.” Aka Reg Saddler from Denver. 99k followers.
- @_SEM: search marketing guy from Dusseldorf. 66k followers; 4 tweets.
- @mlomb: mobile apps developer from Argentina. 23k followers.
- @BrianTomkins: from Chicago – just trying to make a difference with Social Media. 30k followers.
Interestingly, many of the most recent tweeters tend to be lower influence. Will this shift as higher-ranking influencers weigh in on the game or begin offering their take on the always popular Super Bowl ads?
Check out the twendz pro service Super Bowl dashboard for yourself.
Lucy Allison-Pursley contributed to this post.
Last week Forrester announced a shift in its blogging policies. It was first reported on the Sage Circle blog and then on ZDNet. Since then, analysts Josh Bernoff, Augie Ray and Cliff Condon the VP in charge of Forrester’s social media efforts, have all chimed in.
The three main tenants of their argument seem to be:
- In rolling out a new platform they are actually enabling all of their analysts to be more involved in social media.
- They are providing greater Value to Customers by having all of their analysts thoughts in one place.
- Control of IP: Analyst firms are a content business and all content from their employees, in their given areas, belongs to Forrester.
This was not an easy decision for Forrester to make. They had to anticipate some fallout from the decision. Any time you take away something from someone there will be an outcry, especially when it’s related to social media.
This decision was surprising to many of us and logical to others. It triggered a very lively debate at Studio D over the weekend, one that I don’t think is fully settled and while there is some divergence of opinion there are some clear similarities.
Josh Bernoff summed up the most logical argument:
I cowrote Groundswell, and I believe our policy is the right one. Groundswell says that your employees will be blogging — it doesn’t say that content companies should have their content creators blog anywhere they want. If you’re creating content for a content company, that company ought to host your blog.
That last sentence is the most logical and dangerous. As more and more businesses move online, not just for their marketing but as part of their business, aren’t we all becoming content companies? If you extend this line of reasoning to its end you can see a very dangerous path that results in no personal/professional blogs by any employee.
The problem with Forrester’s decision is the heavy-handed nature it is taking in implementing it. All three Forrester bloggers talked about the new blog platform being developed and the new capabilities it would have. This is the real missed opportunity. Forrester’s goal should be to create such a powerful platform with its new blog and with the Forrester name that employees would jump at the opportunity to leave their personal/professional blogs in order to have access to this great platform.
Our own Jon Silk summed it up best:
The internet tends to have this effect on businesses, making them think it’s reasonable to stifle ideas and creativity just in case someone has a good idea and makes the corporation look bad. In reality, freedom of ideas forces everyone to up their game. Shutting down personal blogs just makes the company look scared that an individual might out-innovate them, when in reality they should push the quality of their reports to match. Information control just dumbs everything down.
The discussion should not be “does a company own your opinions, ideas and any content you create?” The discussion should be “how does a company create such an amazing platform, using both technology and its brand that the employees (and even customers and partners) will be eager to join and leave all else behind?”
What do you think? Was this smart or not on Forrester’s part? Is this a trend of things to come? Is that a good or bad thing?
A couple of hours ago Vodafone UK’s Twitter account carried an offensive message (complete with poorly placed apostrophe). It’s been deleted, but you won’t need to search hard to find it.
It got retweeted immediately, and a storm is brewing. The company is frantically addressing every complaint via Twitter, and I’m sure there are a thousand blog posts and news stories being written about it right now.
This is a classic example of how easy it is for things to go wrong. Is your business prepared should this happen to you?
To be honest, I’m more than a bit worried when it comes to kids and their communication skills. I’ll take it multiple steps further and say I’m concerned about the current trends around how we all get and share information.
While Idiocracy was an absolutely terrible movie, it did paint what many fear may just be the future of mankind. For those who have avoided wasting 84 minutes of your life on the film, allow me to summarize the concept briefly. In the movie, survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the dumbest as laziness and an obsession with mindlessness has rotted our species’ brains over time. We in turn are left with societies that can’t think for themselves and spend days on end watching trash TV, contributing nothing and rapidly devolving.
Results from a recent survey by the Pew Research Center underscore what may be construed as a similar, though far less exaggerated decline. The study, which was released on Wednesday, indicates that the percentage of teens and young adults who actively blog has dropped off by about 50 percent when comparing 2009 with 2006. As was predicted, the other main trend of the study revolved around the meteoric rise in the popularity of social networks.
As long(er) form methods of communication drop off in favor of status updates and wall posts, where will the future content creators of tomorrow hone their writing skills? Will uploading mobile photos and clicking “like” displace thoughtful discourse and ultimately lead to a dumbed-down society? Before LiveJournal there were journals but what comes after them both?
Image credit: Marind
I mentioned Blippy in a post on this blog last month about capturing content. It’s drawn a fair number of comments and some positive and negative attention for me. In fact, many people in my social media circles know me as the crazy Blippy guy. As a result, I got to be on KING 5 TV news talking about the service and my general feelings on openness, transparency and living a public life. (Click on image below to view video on the KING 5 site.)
Of course, the flip side of living in a glass house is what most people hear more about and live in fear of. For example, how does this movie trailer for “We Live in Public” grab you?
Which camp do you fall into? What are your thoughts on living a public life?
My colleagues on our consumer team have an interesting discussion going regarding the Engadget vs. Gizmodo approach to blog comments. For those unaware, Engadget has temporarily disabled comments due to a recent spike in trollish behavior; Gizmodo has responded with a post pointing to the merits of its somewhat more complex tiered comment system. Gizmodo concludes with an observation that the drastic measures Engadget is taking speak to the sad state of Internet commentary – abusive loudmouths are getting the upper hand.
In explaining its position, Engadget notes: “Some of you out there in the world of anonymous grandstanding have gotten the impression that you run the place, but that’s simply not the case.”
Really?
The consensus my colleagues have come to – thus far – is generally that conversation is the essence of blogs. That it’s precisely this feedback mechanism that differentiates blogs from static news outlets. And that a strong community should self-moderate – if it doesn’t, then there’s a bigger problem than the individual rogues and trolls.
I think this also unearths a bigger discussion about the role of the blogger and the role of the readers within the context of social media. Is Engadget right in asserting that it’s the editors, not the readers, that run the site? Or as news gathering and social journalism open up the playing field, is the role of an editor more of a social curator?
As a writer I’m frequently asked to work my “magic” — usually under deadlines that would confound even the greatest masters of the black arts. What many people lose sight of is that any well-written piece of content, whether blog post, e-mail or web copy requires a significant amount of advance thinking and subsequent editing. A recent historical discovery in Philadelphia underscores the importance of these steps in creating a well thought out document of any type.
While conducting research, a doctoral candidate stumbled upon an early draft of the U.S. Constitution at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Thirty-year old Lorianne Updike Toler noticed the familiar phrase “We The People. . . .” written upside down on the back of one of two known drafts of the historic document.
One of the framers of the Constitution, James Wilson, penned the words in 1787, but historical experts always considered the writing to be nothing more than a fragment. That all changed when Toler found the remainder of Wilson’s draft in the society vaults.
Wilson was one of five Constitutional Convention members selected to serve on a smaller group known as the Committee of Detail. For roughly two weeks these men sought guidance from the Articles of Confederation, the Virginia Plan and each state’s constitution before fleshing out 28 resolutions established by the convention.
They returned to the larger group with a report of their findings. Lore’s discovery, titled “The Continuation of the Scheme,” may very well be the first draft of that report. Much of the thinking and hard work that went into that report was preserved in the final version of the Constitution.
What was “especially thrilling” to Toler was seeing the framers’ thought processes in these early drafts. They are testament to the fact that creating any masterpiece of original content begins with the hard work of identifying what you want to communicate. The same principle holds true whether designing a web site, developing a story board or writing a feature story.
It’s also worth noting that when the time came to write the first draft of this very important (major understatement) document, the 55 men who were members of the Continental Congress looked to a much smaller group of five. When your goal is clarity your chances of success increase as the number of contributors decrease.
Image by Nic’s events
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Fragments” is a unique comic book anthology that donates its proceeds to those in need, but not without your help.
The book is now accepting submissions for comics and artwork to be featured in the first volume, benefiting the victims of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. If you’re an artist, please consider contributing. If you know an artist, please direct his or her attention to this project.
With our combined creativity, we can make this an amazing book that actually saves lives.
For more information, please visit the project’s Web site or follow @FragmentsComic on Twitter.
Ever since I joined Facebook in 2004 (and MySpace at some forgettable moment likely before then), I’ve been interested to see how social networking impacts an individual’s social structure. When one of my more outgoing friends reached the 1,000-friends mark during Facebook’s first year, my interest in that question intensified. Would this friend truly be able to maintain meaningful relationships with such a large group of people?
The short, predictable answer is no, and countless numbers of people have been interested in this very question, including, most famously, Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. Though the results of his study will be published later this year, the Times Online has the early scoop on Dunbar’s latest findings. Some key excerpts below.
Dunbar is now studying social networking websites to see if the “Facebook effect” has stretched the size of social groupings. Preliminary results suggest it has not.
“The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” said Dunbar.
“People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s.”
Having some scientific proof of this constraint, how will this affect how companies attempt to become a part of their customers’ online life?
Image by acordova
Over the past few weeks (especially yesterday), there has been a lot of talk in journalism circles about new portable devices changing the way people don’t pay for consume media content. While there is a lot to be excited about for content creators, these devices aren’t necessarily going to make people want to pay for content.
Journalism institutions and news media businesses need to be concerned about creating the kind of high-quality, engaging, shareable content that matters in today’s world, not how they can squeeze more money out of old-format content.
Time Inc. seems to understand this. A while back, the company released an awesome conceptual video of its content modified for a touch-screen tablet experience.
Sports Illustrated (and likely many other Time publications) know that money can be made in offering readers an excellent overall content experience.
Sports Illustrated always has great content, but this concept video shows that SI can bring that content to life on a tablet-like device in ways that a normal browser can’t. On a good e-reader or tablet, content jumps off the screen in the form of photo galleries, embedded video and audio, sharing options, and ways to engage with other readers. Plus, it just feels natural to hold the content in your hands and interact with it using your fingers — like a book or magazine.
Getting people to use an excellent content experience isn’t the hard part; getting people to pay for the experience is the hard part. Content creators have to meet a few requirements to get anyone to pay:
- You must provide top-notch, awesome content that nobody else has. And you have to provide it in a way that blows minds.
- You must make it inexpensive and so easy to pay that people don’t even think about it (like buying iPhone apps).
- You must make content shareable. You’re selling the experience, not the content. When paying customers share your content, think of it as free word-of-mouth marketing, not stealing.
Many musicians have learned that you’ll never stop people from freely sharing songs. People pass things along, and not everyone is paying for the content. The best way to capitalize on the popularity is to charge people for a superior experience, like a live show or private appearance.
Perhaps news organizations can do something similar by selling access to great content experiences and private chat sessions with content creators and newsmakers.
This approach alone likely won’t bring in enough revenue to sustain a news operation, but along with advertising and other creative revenue models, it can help.
What do you think? Can e-readers and tablets change the way content is experienced?
Image by mattbuchanan