And we’re off and running! We’ve officially began another exciting Social Media Week and Sysomos is super proud to once again be part of it. I’m Sheldon, the community manager for Sysomos, and I’ll be using our industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, to track what’s being said through social media. We’re tracking the conversation using hashtags and keywords provided by the Social Media Week global team to see what people are saying about their sessions and parties in Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington DC and by those watching the live streams around the world.

I started by looking at Social Media Week in general. These were mentions that contained things like “Social Media Week” or the general hashtags, such as #SMW12 or #SMW. On just day one alone I found over 14,000 mentions throughout various social channels. 12,300 of those mentions came from Twitter, which will most likely be the key medium driving Social Media Week talk all week. I also found that all of this chatter had a favourable rating 99%, which is a fantastic way to start the week.

What’s even cooler than the 99% favourable rating is what I found when looking at some demographic information about the general Social Media Week chatter. Here, I found that 51% of the talk was coming from men and 49% women. That means that we’re getting equal participation from both sides of the gender fence. I also found that people of all ages are taking part in the conversation. The greatest concentration was coming from people aged 36-50 with 40% of the conversation. Another cool thing is that our other three age categories, 20 and under, 21-35 and 51 and over, each made up for 20% of the conversation.

I also pulled up a buzzgraph to get an idea of what the general conversation was about. A buzzgraph shows us some of the words that came up a lot in conversations about Social Media Week and how they’re interconnected with other frequently found words. For this buzzgraph we can see that “social media” is right in the center of conversation. Around it, we can see all kinds of interesting topics related to social media that people were discussing, such as “business,” “mobile,” “algorithms,” and of course popular social networks liek “Facebook,” “Twitter” and “Pinterest.”

I then started to dive into the conversations coming from the individual host cities. In San Francisco we can that “social media” is again smack dab in the middle of the conversation. However, here we can see that the conversation around social media seemed to center around “business” as people were talking about thing like “experience” and “tools” as well as “results” and “value.” This is no surprise as San Francisco is home to many social media and tech start-ups that become large businesses in the area known as “Silicon” “Valley.”

In Singapore I found that one of the more popular Social Media Week sessions was put on by Trendwatching.com. The session, hosted by “Henry” “Mason,” seemed to focus on actually “defining” what makes a “trend” and how to do trend “spotting.” It also highlighted some interesting trends, like one they called “faux”-real, which is the altering of something real, and points towards “Instagram” and its filters as an example of this. Another interesting one we can see people were talking about was a “Brazilian” trend of “lingerie” for men.

In Hong Kong I found a few key conversations taking place. One of the main ones seems to be an event that was put on by “Ogilvy.” However, I was quickly distracted by noticing that another conversation happening around an “Openbar.” While at first I thought there must have been a really good party in Hong Kong, it actually turned out that Openbar was a “winner” at a start-up competition. From what I could find, Openbar is app for finding interesting night spots in Hong Kong by seeing activity from other social users at the venues and also giving coupons for near-by hot spots.

Back in my home town of Toronto I found something interesting that I didn’t see in any other city this day. Here there were two main conversations. One was coming from a session about “ROI” in social media. However, the other conversation had nothing to do with an actual session, but rather people saying “thanks” to sponsors of Social Media Week Toronto. We can see some sponsors like Via-”Rail,” “Chobani” “Yoghurt,” “Rdio” and, of course, “Sysomos.” I guess we were really feeding into the Canadian politeness stereotype (because it’s true).

These are just a few of the interesting conversations I was able to find on the first day of Social Media Week.

Now let’s take a look at the activity that was coming from each of our host cities for day one:

Hamburg

Hong Kong

London

Miami

New York

Paris

San Francisco

São Paulo

Singapore

Tokyo

Toronto

Washington DC

That’s all for me for today. I’ll be back again tomorrow with a Sysomos look at some interesting things going on around the world for Social Media Week on day two. Feel free to leave a comment below if you saw something really interesting in here or you’d like to see something particular in my investigations over the next few days.