What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: Hamburg

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What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: Hamburg

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

Hey there! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back again. As a lead up to Social Media Week I’ve been using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, to see what the social universe has to say about our host cities. This time, I’ll be looking at what people are saying about Hamburg, Germany.

I started my exploration by pulling up all the mentions of Hamburg over the past six months. In that time I found Hamburg mentioned in 207,016 blog posts, 433,100 online news articles, 170,578 forum postings and 247,446 tweets.

I then trended those mentions of Hamburg out over time. When I did that, I found something that I don’t usually see and haven’t seen in any other host city. The mentions of Hamburg in online news happens way more than in other social channels. Usually, Twitter is the channel where we find the most mentions of anything, but here we can even see points where blogs mentioning Hamburg out number tweets.

I then pulled up some geographic information about where all the mentions of Hamburg were originating from. Again I found something interesting. Only three countries were mentioning Hamburg enough to show up individually in the chart. The first is, of course, Hamburg’s home country, Germany (63.4%). The other two countries that were the United States (15.7%) and the UK (3.5%).

Next I pulled up a buzzgraph to see what all the talk surrounding Hamburg was. The talk that I found seemed quite interesting though. While I don’t speak German myself, it didn’t make much sense to me. The contents of the buzzgraph seem to indicate that people are talking a lot about making and buying cheap medicine in Hamburg. The words were things like “medzin” (medicine), “rezepte” (recipes), “ausverkauf” (sale), “billig” (cheap) and even “rezeptfrei” (without prescription).

I then took a deeper look into who was talking about Hamburg. When I dug into see who was creating the blogs mentioning Hamburg I found that only 37% of those blogs were written by females. On the other side of that, the other 63% were written by males. I also found that younger bloggers aren’t talking about Hamburg too much as only 9% of blogs that mentioned it were written by bloggers 20 years old and younger. The majority of blogs talking about Hamburg were written by the next generation though. 40.9% were written by bloggers between the ages of 21-35.

When I looked at the categorization of these blogs mentioning Hamburg I found something that didn’t quite seem to match up though. While young bloggers didn’t seem to be talking about Hamburg, I actually found that the second largest industry category of blogs mentioning it were student blogs at 12.9%. The largest industry category I found was communications blogs which accounted for 19.3%.

Next I dug into the Twitter chatter. Here I found that more women seemed to be mentioning Hamburg a bit more with the females now accounting for 41% and males the other 59%. I then looked at the Twitter accounts that were mentioning Hamburg the most and had higher than average authority scores. Here I found that the Twitter account mentioning Hamburg the most is actually an account that lets people know about fun and interesting things going on in Hamburg called @qype_hh (21.45%). I also found quite a fair amount of accounts that advertised jobs in Hamburg like @Renego_Jobs_DE (5.59%) and deals like @hamburh_markt (10.88%).

Lastly I looked into some of the larger activity spikes around Hamburg I found in the popularity graph. I started with the largest spike on the graph which occurred between November 14-18. In this spike we can see that there was a great deal of mentions coming from the news, but blogs and Twitter also seemed to spike, just not as high. Again here I found a theme of talking about selling things like “medizin” (medicine) “rezepte” (recipes) for “billig” (cheap) “rezeptfrei” (without prescription). If anyone speaks better German than I do (which is probably anyone that can speak German at all), please feel free to leave your insights on this buzzgraph in the comments section for me.

The second spike I decided to investigate happened between August 19-24. During this spike online news still seemed to be the main driver in conversation, but we can also see that in this spike Twitter mentions almost caught up with the news. When I investigated further into this spike I found that it had a lot to do with the German national football (soccer) league. In the buzzgraph we can see the word “Bundesliga” which means something to the affect of federal league (or nation-wide league). We can also see scattered throughout the buzzgraph names of football players like “Rajkovic” and names of different cities with teams around Germany like “Cologne” and “Bavaria.” Again, while I can’t read German myself, I believe that this spike was caused by either a very important game, or the start of their 2011-12 season.

Well, that’s all for my look at what the social media world is talking about in terms of Hamburg. I’ll be back with a Sysomos look at our last city, New York, the original home of Social Media Week, soon. After that, we get into the highly anticipated festivities of Social Media Week!

Tags: #smw, analytics, Hamburg, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: Washington, DC

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

Hello again everyone! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back again to explore what the social media world is saying about one of our Social Media Week host cities. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve been delving into the social media universe to see what people are saying about our host cities. Today I’ll be exploring the capitol of the USA, Washington, DC.

Doing a search for Washington, DC over the past six months brought up a ton of results throughout social channels. In that time period I was able to find 3.6 million blogs, 4.3 million online news articles, 3.2 million forum postings and 6.7 million tweets that mention Washington.

Trending those mentions of Washington over time we get the popularity chart below. Like most cities I’ve looked, Twitter is seems to mention this city the most. It’s interesting to note however, that unlike most cities, online news articles seem to mention Washington more than blogs or forums. Chances are this is because a lot of news stories are written about or from Washington as it’s the capitol of the US and home to the president, senate and congress.

When I looked for where these mentions of Washington were coming from, it helped to prove my suspicion as to why there was so much news mentioning it. We can see that 66.7% of all mentions were coming directly from the United States, meaning that the US talks a lot about what is happening in their nations capitol. We can also see that countries with strong ties to the US are showing here as well, like the UK (4.4%) and Canada (3.5%).

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to show what all the talk of Washington was about. Again, this helped to confirm my suspicion that a lot fo the talk had to do with politics coming from Washington. Here we can see words like “Barack” “Obama,” the President of the United States, “senator,” “congress” and “government”.

Next, I dove in a little deeper to see who was doing all this talking about Washington. I started in the blogs section and found that males seem to blog about Washington a lot more than females. Male bloggers make up 69% of the Washington conversation, while females round out the remaining 31%. I also found that bloggers between the ages of 21-35 talk about Washington the most, holding more than half of the conversation at 57%. Bloggers aged 36-50 also seem to be talking a fair bit about Washington at 26.3%

I then dug into what industry category of blogs were mentioning Washington the most. Here I found that blogs categorized as communication and art blogs are talking the most about Washington at 14.5% each. Education and accounting blogs come in second with 9.6% each. And I found another tie for third most amount of mentions between publishing and student blogs with 6.4% a piece.

I then looked into Twitter. Here I found that males were again dominating the conversation, but not nearly as much as they were on blogs. On Twitter, males accounted for 60% of the mentions of Washington while females made up the other 40%. I then pulled up a list of the top Twitter sources mentioning Washington. Again I found that news seems to be one of the main drivers in conversations about Washington. For instance, the two accounts with the most mentions of Washington were both news related. @livewashington accounted for 30.82% of the top accounts and @washing_dcnews another 17.12%.

Lastly, I dug into a few of the activity spikes we saw on the popularity graph above. The first spike I looked into was the large spike in Twitter mentions between August 22-24. Looking at the buzzgraph for this time period it became very clear that this spike was due to the “earthquake” that was felt up and down the east coast of North America. The “epicenter” of the “quake” was in “Virginia” which is right next to DC. The quake shook so hard that people were talking about the Washington “Monument” now having a slight lean to the left.

I then examined some of the other spikes I saw, but because there’s so much political news, there were very few full compelling stories to tell from looking at some of the text analytics of what was going on in them. So, I thought that I would just show an example of what I mean. Below I looked at the second largest spike in the graph, which was December 22-24. In the buzzgraph we can see a bunch of general political talk about things like “tax” “cutting” and “unemployment.” We can also see talk of the people in the US government like “senators,” “congress” and, of course, “Barack” “Obama.”

It appears that when it comes to Washington, even when the social media world thinks of it, it’s all politics. I’ll be back again shortly with another Sysomos look at another host city as we get ever so close to Social Media Week.

Tags: analytics, social media, social media week, sysomos, Washington DC
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: Tokyo

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Greetings everyone! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back again to explore what the world has to say though social media about each of our Social Media Week host cities. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve been looking into online chatter around our host cities. Today, we’ll be diving into Tokyo, Japan.

I started by pulling up all the mentions of Tokyo I could find across social media in the past six months. In that time I was able to find 659,223 blogs, 558,501 online news articles, 361,481 forum postings and 1.5 million tweets.

When I trended that data out over time I came up with the popularity graph we see below. Like most popularity graphs we’ve seen (except London’s), the talk about Tokyo through social media has some very noticible spikes in activity that we’ll be exploring a little later in this post. The thing I found interesting in this graph though, is that if you look carefully, it seems as though the mentions of Tokyo on Twitter seem to be slowly tapering off more and more as time goes on.

I also found something else that was very interesting when I looked at where all the talk about Tokyo was coming from. In almost all of my previous host city explorations the most amount of talk about the city was coming from the country the city was located in. However, when I looked at the country distribution for talk about Tokyo, Japan actually came in second place with 18.4%. The country that actually mentioned Tokyo the most was the United States with 29.8% of the conversation.

When I pulled up a buzzgraph of all the talk surrounding Tokyo I found that there were two major themes that seemed to stand out. The first had to do with business in Tokyo and Japan as a whole. This was emphasized by words such as “yen,” the Japanese currency, “Nikkei,” the Japanese stock market, “banks” and “investor.” The other theme that we can pick out has to do with natural disasters that have been affecting the country. This is highlighted in the buzz graph with words like “tsunami” and “earthquake.”

Next, I dug into the people that were creating all these mentions of Tokyo through the social universe. Starting with blogs, I found that most of the chatter being created about Tokyo was coming from males. Male bloggers accounted for 71% of all the mentions while females only made up 29%. I also found that the majority of bloggers talking about Tokyo were younger bloggers. Over 75% of the bloggers were under 35 years old with the 20 and under crowd making up 29.6% and those aged 21-35 accounting for 51.9%.

Over on Twitter I found the gender split to be a little more even. On Twitter females mentioning Tokyo accounted for 45% of all the mentions and males made up the other 55%. I then looked at the top Twitter accounts that had a higher authority score and were mentioning Tokyo the most. I’ve seen a lot of news based Twitter accounts appear in these lists before, but when it came to Tokyo, one account blew all the others out of the water. @tokyonewsnow accounted for almost 3/4 of all the mentions of Tokyo from these top sources with 73.23%. Another interesting account I found in this mix was @AkibaGieger_Bot which is a Twitter account that tweets out radiation levels in Japan. After the earthquake that happened there last year and the damage it did to the nuclear power plant, I would think that this was an important account for residents to watch.

Lastly, I dove into a couple of activity spikes that I found over the past six months around mentions of Tokyo. The first spike I investigated happened between the dates of September 1-6. Looking at the buzzgraph for this time period I found that it centered around something called “SMTown.” After doing a little research I found out that SMTown is a project of compilation albums put out by S.M. Entertainment. It turns out that around this date, a bunch of the artists from the compilation were performing at the Tokyo “Dome” and this was causing a lot of talk on Twitter. We can also a lot of business related terms in the buzzgraph. It turns out that the Japanese stock market had also been “rising” for six days and hitting highs that they had not seen in a while.

The second spike I decided to investigate wasn’t one of the largest ones, but seemed interesting as between November 29 and December 5 we can see a rise in activity coming from Twitter, blogs and online news. A quick look at the buzzgraph for this time period made it easy to understand this spike in activity. This spike was due to the opening of the Tokyo “Motor” show. We can easily pick out car company names like “Honda,” Nissan,” Subaru” and “Toyota.” We can also see car trend words like “concept” cars, cars that run on “electricity” and “hybrid” cars.

And that’s all I have for our look at what the social world is saying about Tokyo. I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at what the social world is saying about another one of our Social Media Week host cities.

Tags: #smw, analytics, social media, social media week, sysomos, Tokyo
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

Future Hipsters: The Future of Social Media

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

In the year 2062, a bunch of elderly hipsters are interviewed about the good old days of social media.

Created for Social Media Week 2012 with Entrinsic in Toronto, this video captures interviews with octogenarian hipsters as they take a look back on what social media and digital culture were like in the year 2012.

Future problems include: your grandkids refusing to retweet you, finding a pair of skinny jeans that don’t restrict hip mobility and not being able to buy your dream condo because the co-op board has seen that photo of you (you know which one).

What’s cool in 2012 won’t be so cool in 2062. And if you’re not careful, you might not be either.

So, what will you be like in 50 years?

Share your future stories with us at FutureHipsters.com

Tags: future, hipsters
Posted in Featured, global

Global Keynote Spotlight: Don Tapscott, Author & CEO of The Tapscott Group

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Don Tapscott, CEO of The Tapscott Group

This post is a part of a continuing series of Keynote Spotlights– check back here throughout the week for more information on the phenomenal individuals who will be gracing #SMW12 events next week!

You can hear from Don on Monday February 13th from 12:30-2:30pm at the Social and Environmental Change Hub in SMWNYC.

Hailing from Toronto, Don Tapscott is one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, and the economic and social impact of technology. For over 30 years, he has introduced many ground breaking concepts that have embedded into contemporary understanding. And this year, we are honored to have Don as our global curator.

He has authored or co-authored 14 widely read books including the 1992 best seller Paradigm Shift. His 1995 hit, The Digital Economy changed thinking around the world about the transformational nature of the Internet, and two years later he defined the Net Generation and the “digital divide” in Growing Up Digital. His 2000 work Digital Capital introduced seminal ideas like “the business web,” described by Business Week as “pure enlightenment.” Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything was the best selling management book in 2007 and has been translated into over 25 languages.

The Economist described his newest work Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World a “Schumpeterian story of creative destruction,” and the Huffington Post said the book is “nothing less than a game plan to fix a broken world.” His work continues as the Chairman of the innovation think tank, Moxie Insight, a member of World Economic Forum and an Adjunct Professor of Management for the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Click here to register for his keynote and read his discussions on our global theme.

Tags: author, curator, Don Tapscott, Empowering Change, Theme
Posted in Featured, global

What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: London

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Here we go again! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back again to help us all get prepared for Social Media Week. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve been exploring what the social universe has to say about each of our Social Media Week host cities. Today’s post will be exploring London, England.

Doing a search through social channels over the past six months for mentions of London I was able to find 2.7 million blogs, 3 million online news articles, 1.7 million forum postings and 10.9 million tweets.

When I take that data and trend it out over time we get the popularity graph below. We can see that six months ago there was the ending of a large spike in talk talk of London, which we’ll dig a little deeper into later on in this post. What’s even more interesting is in this graph is that talk of London seems to stay fairly steady across all channels for the rest of the six months minus what appears to be a slight lull around Christmas time. This we don’t see very often.

I then looked into where all this social chatter about London was coming from. No surprise that most amount of mentions were being generated from the UK (37.3%). Like all the other cities I’ve explored previously, the United States and Canada are also among the top countries creating chatter (29.2% and 3.9% respectively). We can also see that London is being talked about around the world with countries like Germany (3.7%) and Australia (2.9%) also creating significant amounts of mentions.

When I pulled up a buzzgraph about all of the London chatter it started to become clear why there was so much talk from all over the world. Looking at the buzzgraph we can see two main themes; the London riots that occurred last summer and the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics, which are being held in London.

I then a dug a bit deeper into who was creating all of the London chatter. I started on Twitter and used technology exclusive to Sysomos to discover that 55% of the mentions of London were made by males while females accounted for the other 45%. I also pulled up the top Twitter sources that were mentioning London. These were the Twitter accounts that mentioned London the most and had a higher authority score. In most of the cities I’ve previously looked at the account with the most mentions of a city were news or classified accounts. In the case of London though, it turns out that the most mentions came from @H2kRadioDotCom, a local radio station (12.87%). The second most mentions of London came from two job classified accounts, @jobldnit and @mathfi_jobs, who accounted for 10.89% each.

Next, I delved into the blogs that were mentioning London. Here I found almost the same gender split as I did on Twitter, except the ladies had gained a percentage. Male bloggers accounted for 54% of those mentioning London and the females 46%. I also found the bloggers mentioning London the most were aged 21-35 (43.1%). While bloggers aged 20 and under talked about London the least with only 13.6%.

While bloggers who are 20 and under accounted for the smallest age group talking about London, I found that blogs categorized as student blogs made up the largest amount at 16.1%. Student blogs were tied for the most mentions with arts blogs. These were followed by blogs that were classified as education blogs at 10.2%. This may have something to do with the riots in London that drew attention from and were mainly being acted on by a lot of college and university aged people.

I then dug into some of the activity spikes we found in the popularity graph above. The first and largest spike was right at the beginning of my six month look between August 9-12. As I stated earlier, this was the tail end of the London riots that occurred this past summer. We can see a lot of riot related chatter in the buzzgraph including the terms “riot,” “riots,” “rioter” and “rioting” right in the center. We can also see locations of the riots like “Totenham,” “Liverpool” and “Manchester” scattered around te outside of the graph along with other riot related words.

Since there wasn’t a second large spike in activity to really dig into, I decided to try something a little bit different. Here I decided to investigate this big dip in activity that seemed to happen across all channels. This dip occurred between December 23-27, which could leads to one obvious answer as to why it happened; Christmas. When I looked at the buzzgraph for this time period it became obvious that the dip had to do with “Christmas,” which was one of the most connected words. It’s interesting that most of the talk mentioning London at this time focused around the Royal Family’s Christmas. We can see words like “royal” and “Buckingham” as prominent words in the buzzgraph.

And that is going to bring my look at London to a close. Join me again next time as I use Sysomos to find out what the world is saying about another one of our Social Media Week host cities.

Tags: #smw, analytics, london, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

Can Man Live on Social Media Alone? We’ll See…

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Two individuals swap cities– equipped with nothing but a Lumia 800, they attempt to live off the goodwill of the locals through social media for a week!

In conjunction with Social Media Week, Can Man Live on Social Media Alone is a daring cross-city social experiment to evaluate whether one intrepid traveller can depend on nothing but the good will of locals and the power of social media to survive in a foreign city for one week.

From 9th – 15th February, our #CanManLondon and our #CanManSG will trade cities, power up their social media channels and prepare for the best (or worst).

The #CanMan Candidates

After weeks of searching for the right candidates we would like to introduce you to our #CanManLondon and our #CanManSG (or woman in this case). Meet Martin and Daphne:

Along with the clothes on their back and a smartphone, Martin and Daphne will be given the opportunity to bring ten non-digital items in a backpack as part of their survival kit.

In addition to having to ensure they have food and lodging each day, the candidates will be issued daily tasks, which will be posted on their Facebook Fanpage walls. In the spirit of social good, the tasks will be charitable in nature and will help raise awareness around specific causes within the respective city.

You can get involved with their exciting journey and help them along the way. Simply follow both candidates on Facebook by liking their fanpages:
www.facebook.com/CanManLondon// www.facebook.com/CanManSG and following their updates on Twitter: @SMWLoveMessengr // @deafknee.

Stay tuned with the #CanMan experiment as we will be announcing more exciting updates and giving you a sneak peek inside both agendas soon.

This is a reposting from our team, SMW London. Check out their blog regularly for highlights and to keep up with all that’s happening with #SMWLdn!

Tags: can man, london, Singapore, social experiment
Posted in Featured, global

What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: San Francisco

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

Hello again! Sheldon from Sysomos here as we draw ever closer to the kickoff of Social Media Week. As we lead up to the big week, I’ve been using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, to look at what the world is saying about our host cities. For this installment, I’ll be focusing in on a social media and tech leading US city, San Francisco, California.

Searching over the past six months for mentions of “San Francisco” or the commonly used “SF” in social media, I was able to find 1.4 million blog posts, 1.3 million online news articles, 1.6 million forum postings and 2.5 million tweets.

Being that San Francisco is a hotbed for social and tech related startups, it’s no wonder that when we trend that data out over time we see a lot of activity talking about it over the past six months. The activity seemed to lul a bit over the holidays in December, but then picked right back up again in January. But we’ll explore some of this activity in a little bit.

I then looked into where all this talk of San Francisco was coming from. Not surprising is that the majority of talk is coming from right within the United States (65.9%). We then also see the other two countries that tend to always be sources of activity, Canada (4.3%) and the UK (3.9%). Here we can also see that France seems to mention San Francisco quite often as well (3.3%). Perhaps this is because France is becoming well known as a home for European social and tech startups, so they feel the connection, or are at least interested, in their American counterpart.

Next, I pulled up a buzzgraph to see what all this talk over the past six months was about. What is interesting in this buzzgraph was that I was expecting to see a lot of tech related talk, and there was some, but there was a lot more talk about sports. Right in the center of the graph we can see words like “release” which refer to some tech companies from San Francisco releasing new and updated programs and devices. However, around the outskirts of the graph, we see a lot more words that making reference to sports, such as “49ers,” the San Francisco NFL team, “winning,” as they went quite far into the football season this year, and “Giants,” the team that beat them to go on to the Super Bowl.

Next I dove a little deeper into tis data to find out who the people that were creating this buzz were. On Twitter I found that 61% of all San Francisco mentions were coming from males and only 39% from females. Perhaps this ties back to the abundance of football related talk we saw in the buzzgraph. I also pulled up the top twitter accounts talking about San Francisco. This is a list of the top 12 accounts that mention San Francisco the most and have a higher than average authority score. Most of the accounts I found seem common, such as classified type accounts like @jobs4SF (11.76%), and news accounts like @breakingsfnews (12.61%). As well, I also found the football theme again when @49ersbuzztap also showed up as a top source (5.88%).

I then examined the people creating the 1.4 million blog posts mentioning San Francisco. Here I found that the gender split was the exact same as on Twitter, with the males at 61% and females at 39%. Interestingly enough, the age of bloggers aged 21-35 are usually the highest group we see, but here they only accounted for 39.2% of the blogs. I found that bloggers aged 36-50 actually talk about San Francisco the most and account for 50% of all the mentions.

I also found something interesting when I looked at what industry the blogs talking about San Francisco belong to. Again I was thinking that we would see a lot of technology focused blogs and possibly sports. However, I found that education blogs mentioned San Francisco the most at 12.5%. The second largest industry was publishing at 10.4%. Marketing blogs came in third at 8.3% which I suppose plays a little towards my tech theory as a lot of marketing blogs these days talk a lot about online and social media related marketing.

Lastly, I delved into a few of the activity spikes we’ve seen about San Francisco over the past six months. I started with this spike in both Twitter and forum activity that occurred around October 17-21. Once again I was shocked to learn that most of the talk at this time revolved around football. Here, there was a game in which the “49ers’” “manager” Jim “Harbaugh” had a little outburst in the game against the “Detroit” Lions’ coach. This event seemed to grab the attention of the entire football community who aren’t used to seeing such public emotion from a coach.

Lastly, I looked into the two large spikes we see towards the end of the chart between January 13-23. Again, this spike revolved around the San Francisco 49ers. These two spikes took place during the NFC playoffs. The “49ers” made their way into the playoffs this season and made it past the first round by defeating Drew “Brees” and the New “Orleans” “Saints.” However, the 49ers lost their chance to go to the Super Bowl the following week to “Eli” Manning and the New “York” “Giants.”

The one thing that I learned from doing this study was that geeks like myself may mainly think of startups, tech and social medi when we think about San Francisco, but the rest of the world seems to have football and the 49ers on the brain. I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at yet another Social Media Week host cities.

Tags: #smw, analytics, San Francisco, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: Paris

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

Hello once again. This is Sheldon from Sysomos back once again to help us prepare for the upcoming Social Media Week. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’m taking a look at what the world is saying through social media about each of our host cities. Today, we’ll be exploring the city of Paris, France.

I started off my search by looking for all of the talk about Paris going on in the past six months. In that time I was able to find 1.9 million blogs, 1.7 million online news articles, 1 million forum postings and 4.8 million tweets mentioning Paris.

Trended out over time we can see that like most other cities we’ve looked at, with Twitter being the dominent social channel. What’s interesting to note in the popularity chart below is how the news seems to dip every weekend. It’s as if much less is going on in Paris on the weekends, but I find that hard to believe.

I then broke down where all the chatter about Paris was coming from. Paris has a reputation of being one of the most romantic places on earth, so it’s not surprise that it garners a lot off attention from the rest of the world. 29% of all the talk about Paris was coming out of France. The next three countries talking about Paris seem to always be top countries in conversations; the USA (26.8), the UK (6.5%) and Canada (3.8%). What’s interesting is that Germany talked about Paris just as much as Canada, and Brazil (3.2%) wasn’t far behind either.

Next, I pulled up a buzzgraph, which shows us words we find most connected to talk about our search terms, which in this case is Paris. Unfortunately, there was nothing terribly interesting in this particular buzzgraph. Most of the words were quite generic, such as “France” in the center, the country Paris resides in. As well we see “Sarkozy” who is the current president of France and “Europe.” However, there is one thing that seems to stand out a bit here. You may have noticed the word “niggas” towards the top of the buzzgraph. This isn’t there because of racism in any way, but rather thanks to Jay-Z and Kanye’s wildly popular track “Niggas In Paris” from their Watch The Throne album which came out in the fall.

I then started to dig a little deeper into the people that were talking about Paris though social media. Over in the blogs that were talking about Paris I found that both men and women seem to have an affinity about Paris. The split between the two genders was almost dead even with females making 51% of the mentions and males the other 49%. I also found that bloggers aged 21-35 talked about Paris the most (51%). What’s interesting here is that every other age demographic talked about Paris the exact same amount, with 16.3% of conversations coming from each other category.

I then moved over to Twitter. Here the gender split was almost the same as it was in the blogs, except that females moved up another 1% to 52% while males made up the other 48%. When I looked for the top Twitter sources mentioning Paris the most I found something interesting that I hadn’t found in any other city before. The usual classified type accounts still existed, like @Perfectly_Paris, which does apartment rentals for Paris, but there was also a great amount of accounts from outside of France. One of these accounts was a music producer named @HeleneScrive who seems to have a popular song called “Paris sous La Pluie.” There were quite a few other music related accounts like @Hitboy_SC, from California, who seemed to mention Jay-Z and Kanye’s track “Niggas In Paris” quite often.

For the last part of my analysis on what the social world is saying about Paris I looked into two of the larger activity spikes that I found in the past six months. The first spike mainly occurred on Twitter between November 7-11. During this time the ATP World Tour was holding it’s French Masters in Paris. We can see that “masters” is a strongly connected word in the buizzgraph, but we can also go through and pick out a few tennis player’s names such as Novak “Djokovic” and Tomáš “Berdych” who were playing in the tournament.

The second spike I looked at was much more recent. From January 26-29 we can see a spike in activity about Paris on Twitter as well as in the news and on blogs. This spike was a little more interesting as their are a few key things going on here that mention Paris. First, is that the football (soccer for the North American’s) are all abuzz about the potential for Chelsea player Rodrigo Alex Dias da Costa to transfer over to the Paris St “Germain” team. The other thing going on in the buzzgraph actually has nothing to do with Paris the city. It actually has to do with Paris “Jackson,” daughter of the King of Pop, who recently said in public that she has a thing for Justin Bieber. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from analyzing social medis stats over the past few years is that anything that has to do with Bieber spreads quickly and in large amounts through social channels. Why that is, I can’t really tell you. Ask the closest 13 year old girl, she’ll probably be able to tell you why.

This was one of the more interesting host city studies I’ve done so far just because “Paris” seems to appear in talk all over the world and not all of it has to do with our Social Media Week City. I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at yet another Social Media Week host cities.

Tags: #smw, analytics, Paris, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: Hong Kong

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Hello again! This is Sheldon from Sysomos here again. Using our industry leading software MAP and Heartbeat we’ll be monitoring and analzing all of the social media talk for Social Media Week. We’ll also be taking a look at what the world is saying about each of our Social Media Week host cities through social channels as we lead up to the big week. Today, we’re turning our focus on what the world is saying about Hong Kong.

Searching for Hong Kong and variations of it in both English and Chinese, I was able to find Hong Kong mentioned in 785,867 blog posts, 1.7 online news stories, 3.4 million forum posts and 1.3 million tweets.

What’s interesting about this activity is that Twitter is usually the medium where I find the most amount of action. However, because Twitter was banned in Mainland China, the service never took off there like it did in the rest of the world. Instead, we see very large amounts of forum use. This is happening for two reasons. The first is simply because forums are quite popular in China. The second reason is because forums are used a lot for selling things and many forums offer cheap items shipped around the world from parts of China, including Hong Kong.

Yesterday when I looked at talk about Toronto I found that almost half of the talk was coming from residents inside Canada. When I looked at where talk about Hong Kong was coming from, the mentions were coming from all over the world. China was still the country to mention Hong Kong the most if you add together the mentions from Hong Kong (17.3%) and Mainland China (14.9%). The USA was the country who wrote about Hong Kong the second most through social channels at 22.7%.

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to see what all of the talk about Hong Kong was. The buzzgraph shows us words most connected to my search terms and how they’re connected. Interestingly enough, the word “family” shows up directly in the middle of our buzzgraph (although I realize in the graphic representation it only came out as “fami”). I tried to look a bit deeper into why this word might have been in the center, but couldn’t pin down one single reason to explain it. The rest of the words have a lot to do with people talking about the stock market. Words like “trade” and “investment” show that. As well, it seems that Hong Kong gets mentioned in market talk quite often with other Asian markets like “Singapore” and “Taiwan.”

The next step of my investigation was to see just who was creating all of this chatter. Since we already saw that the majority of talk about Hong Kong was coming from within China, it’s fair to say that younger people in China make up the majority of bloggers talking about Hong Kong. Bloggers under the age of 35 make up almost 75% of the talk about Hong Kong. I also found that males account for 59% of bloggers talking about Hong Kong and females make up the other 41%.

To confirm suspicion that the bloggers mentioning Hong Kong are young, when looking at what industry the blogs are categorized as, 14.8% are student blogs. Communications blogs mentioned Hong Kong the second most with 12.9%. Technology blogs came in third with 11.1% of the mentions.

Over on Twitter the gender split of people talking about Hong Kong was split almost evenly with women mentioning it 48% of the time and men 52%. I then pulled up the Twitter accounts that mention Hong Kong the most and have a higher authority ranking. The Twitter account with the most mentions @meta_guide_hk, a travel account. Second was a classifieds account called @mathfi_jobs. A lot of the other top accounts were news channels like @twinews7. The one I found interesting, because I had to do some research to figure out what it was, was @1dhong_kong. Turns out that this account is the Hong Kong chapter of the fan club for a British boy band called One Direction.

Lastly, I took a deeper look at two of the larger activity spikes about Hong Kong to see what people were talking about. The first spike occurred July 26-30 last summer. We can see that there was a large spike in forums and blog posts at this time. I pulled up a buzzgraph from that time period, but there was nothing that seemed to really standout to equal such a large spike in activity. The only thing I can find that seemed to stand out was the word “Chelsea” because the Chelsea football club was doing a tour of China and were making a stop in Hong Kong at that time.

The second spike I investigated came more recently on January 14-17. While this wasn’t the largest overall spike in activity, it was the largest spike in Twitter about Hong Kong in the past six months. I thought it would be interesting to see what would cause the Twitter spike as Twitter was obvisouly not the first choice in social media communication when it came to Hong Kong.. A look at the buzzgraph from that time shows two things occurred at this time. First, there was a large stock downgrade happening in Europe that was having a great effect on the Asian markets. This is highlighted by words like “downgrade,” “trade” and “yuan,” the Chinese currency. The other thing that was happening at this time required a little more research to understand. Turns out that at this time there was a “concert” in Hong Kong by a very popular Korean group known as Girls’ Generation, but they used to be known as “SNSD” which is what showed up in the buzzgraph.

Well, that’s what I was able to find the social media world saying about Hong Kong in the past six months. I’ll be back again soon to do another Sysomos look at another one of our upcoming Social Media Week host cities.

Tags: #smw, analytics, hong kong, social media, social media week, sysomos
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports