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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.

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Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

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

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Greetings once again! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back for another exciting look into one of our Social Media Week host cities before the big week kicks off. I’ve been using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, to see what the entire social world has been saying over the past six months about each city that Social Media Week will be taking place in. In this installment I’ll be diving into talk about Singapore.

Doing a search across social channels for the past six months I was able to find Singapore mentioned in 662,337 blog posts, 638,857 online news articles, 769,831 forum postings and 2.5 million tweets.

Trending that data out over time we get a popularity graph as the one below. We can see that over the past six months there have been some major spikes in activity surrounding mentions of Singapore, and we’ll dive into a few of those a little later in this post.

When I pulled up the country distribution of people talking about Singapore I found that the chatter was coming from all over the world. As with most cities I’ve looked at previously, the majority of chatter is coming from Singapore itself (32.8%). However, when we look at the rest of the activity, there is actually a broad spectrum of where talk fo Singapore is originating from. For instance, we can see the United States (22.3%), the UK (6.9%) and Canada (3%) as I have in previous explorations, but we also see that places like Australia (3.7%), Indonesia (6.2%) and Malaysia (3.3%) are also generating significant buzz about Singapore.

I pulled up a buzzgraph around all the talk about Singapore in the past six months. Unfortunately, there was nothing of great significance to be learned from this graph. Most of the words we see connected have to do with other Asian markets such as “China” and “Malaysia.” We can see that it’s market related as well by the appearance of words like “trade” and “operations.”

I then dove a bit deeper to discover who was creating all of this social chatter about Singapore. I started with the blogs that were mentioning Singapore. It seems that a younger demographic of blogger seems to be interested in Singapore as 57.1% of the bloggers talking about it are between the ages of 21-35 and another 22.4% are 20 and younger. However, I did find that the gender of these bloggers seem to be about equal with males making up 52% and females 48%.

To further the notion that the younger bloggers seem to be interested in Singapore, I found that when I looked at the industry the blogs mentioning it were being categorized as, the largest group was student blogs accounting for 20%. What’s interesting after that is that there was a three-way tie for the industry with the second most mentions of Singapore. I found that blogs representing government, technology, and tourism accounted for 6.6% of the talk each.

I then moved over to Twitter. Here I found that there was a shift in balance of the genders. On Twitter 55% of the mentions of Singapore were made from women while men accounted for the other 45%. I also pulled up the top Twitter sources mentioning Singapore. Here I found that the landscape was dominated by news and classified type Twitter accounts. News spreading accounts like @DTNSingapore made up half of the top 12, while classified accounts like @sgpopertybuzz made up the other half.

Lastly, I looked a bit deeper into two of the larger spikes in activity we saw in the popularity graph above. The first spike in talk about Singapore occurred around September 21-26 and caused a spike on blogs, forums and Twitter. When I dug in to see what this spike was about I found that it had to do with the Singapore Grand Prix. We can see “Vettel” in the middle of the buzzgraph, who is “Sebastian” Vettel, the winner of the race. We can also see strong connections to revealing words like “race,” “laps,” and “formula” as in Formula-1. The edges of this buzzgraph are also populated by other racers names like Nico “Rosberg” and Michael “Schumacher.”

Next I looked into the giant spike in Twitter activity we see around November 26-30. I looked into this spike as it was the largest one on the popularity graph. When I started to explore the spike, I found a buzzgraph that tells me the talk seemed to be about the Asian markets, as we can see strong connections to “Hong” “Kong,” “Malaysia,” “bank,” and “trading.” However, I wasn’t able to deduce a specific reason around this market talk. All the words I was able to find around it were quite generic and even a Google search for the dates brought up very little answers. If you know why, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

Well, that’s all at my peak into what the world is saying about Singapore.  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.

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Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Reports

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.

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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.

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Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

What The Social World Has to Say About Our Hosts: São Paulo

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Hello again! Sheldon from Sysomos here with another look at another one of our Social Media Week cities. Using Sysomos’ social media monitoring software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve been looking at what the world is saying through social media about our host cities. Today we’re taking a look at the talk about São Paulo, Brazil.

Doing a search for mentions of São Paulo coming from around the world in the past six months I found 1.1 million blogs, 934,323 online news articles, 109,913 forum posts and 1.8 million tweets.

Trended out over time we see the popularity chart below. It appears that forums are not a popular place for talk about São Paulo. However, Twitter seems to be widely used to talk about it. This is no surprise as Brasil has been known to be one of the worlds largest Twitter using countries.

As I just said, Brazil is known as having a large Twitter using population. That probably helped in mentions of São Paulo coming from Brasil accounting for 71.4% all the mentions from around the world. The US makes up the second most mentions with only 7.1%. Interestingly, the Netherlands seem to talk quite a bit about São Paulo as they have the third most mentions with 6.1%.

Next, I pulled up a buzzgraph to see what all the talk of São Paulo was about. Most of the words I found contained in the buzzgraph were worlds talking about the city like “cidade” which means city and “Brasileiro” which mans Brazilian. What I found very interesting in this buzzgraph was the word “automovel” which mean automobile or car. I dug a little deeper into that and found out that São Paulo has a very large automotive industry. In fact, São Paulo is slated to soon become the world’s third largest automotive manufacturing city.

I then started to dig into who was creating all this talk about São Paulo. I started with the blogs and found that 77% of all mentions of São Paulo in blogs are made by males. That’s a fairly large amount. No clear reason on why women only mention São Paulo 33% of the time. I also found that there are a lot of bloggers aged 21-50 mention São Paulo. There was almost an even amount of bloggers aged 21-35 and 36-50 (35.2% and 36.1% respectively).

Looking at the industries that are talking about São Paulo, I found that communications blogs mention it the most. Again, this plays into the fact that Brazil is a heavy Twitter using country and a lot of communications blogs these days have a strong focus on social media. Education is the second largest industry to mention São Paulo in blogs at 16.2%.

I then explored the Twitter users mentioning São Paulo. Here I found a bit more evenness between the genders with males making up 63% and women 37%. I also looked at the top sources on Twitter mentioning São Paulo. These are the accounts that have a high authority ranking and mention São Paulo the most. The top Twitter source I found was @buscami, which is a Twitter account that tweets for an Ebay like service called Mercado Libre. Football (or what North Americans soccer) is quite popular in Brazil, so it’ no mystery as to why a few Twitter accounts that talk about São Paulo FC, like @spfcradar, are on the list.

Lastly, I looked into two of the larger spikes in activity that I found around talk of São Paulo. The first spike that I found occurred between September 20-22. When I pulled up a buzzgraph for that time period I found the love of soccer shining through again. In the middle of the buzzgraph we can see the word “Corinthian.” The Corinthians are one of largest football clubs in all of Brazil, who happen to play in São Paulo. At this time there was a huge match between the São Paulo FC and the Corinthians, and that drove this conversation spike. It’s also closely connected to words like “jogo” (game) and “jogadores” (players).

The second spike I explored was very recent. This spike started on January 24th and still getting a large as I write this post. Here we see a very strong connection to “Pinheirinho” which is  a section of São Paulo currently getting attention. Apparently Pinheirinho was a forgotten part of the city where over 6,000 residents were squatting. Police are currently trying to evict these people and they refuse to go. The people have been using social media to try to draw attention to what is happening here, and it’s been working. The current battle in Pinheirinho has got the whole world talking.

Those were some of the interesting things I found about the social world talking about São Paulo. I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at yet another Social Media Week host cities.

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Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Reports, Uncategorized

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

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Greetings! Sheldon from Sysomos here again to shed a little light on where we’ll be going for Social Media Week. Using Sysomos’ powerful social media monitoring and analytic tools, MAP and Heartbeat, I’m taking a look at what the social web has to say about our Social Media Week host cities. In this post I’ll be taking a look at sunny Miami, Florida.

First, I looked up how many times Miami had been mentioned through social channels in the past six months. In this time period I found Miami being spoken about in 962,147 blog posts, 915,499 online news articles, 841,453 forum postings and 4.3 million tweets.

Trending that data out over time, we see the popularity graph below. It’s interesting to note in this graph how blog and news activity about Miami seems to fluctuate almost in unison. Forums seem to follow the pattern mostly as well, except for a big noticeable lul around the end of August and beginning of September. We’ll be exploring the activity spikes a little later on.

Most of the talk about Miami was coming right from the United States, 63.1%, where it’s located. There’s also a good reason for this as we’ll see when we get to the buzzgraph. And, just like I’ve also seen in the past two posts about Hong Kong and Toronto, Canada (5.2% ) and the UK (3.5%) are right behind it. This is likely happening because these three countries are some of the highest content producers in the world.

As I said before, there’s a good reason that the United States owns over half of the conversation about Miami. When I pulled up a buzzgraph about Miami over the past six months, we can see that a lot of the talk is about Football, an American favourite. The words we see most connected are “Florida,” “Dolphin” as in the Miami Dolphin NFL team, and “winning.” As well, all around the buzzgraph we can pull out football related terms like “coaches,” “quarterback” and “offense.”

Next I looked into the people who were talking about Miami through social channels. This time I started with Twitter. Using a system exclusive to Sysomos, I was able to determine that 61% of people that were tweeting about Miami were male. This may not come as a surprise as the Miami talk was football focused. The top 12 Twitter sources talking about miami seems to be dominated by local news related Twitter accounts like @miaminewsnow who accounts for 43.4% of the talk. There’s also some classified accounts, like @motorvenfsbo, an account for car sales. Both of these kinds of accounts seem to be a trend we’re seeing in all cities.

When I looked at the people that were writing blogs that talked about Miami I cam across this football trend peaking in yet again. The skew of gender in the blogs is 77% are written by males, while women make up the other 23% of blogs that mention Miami. The age also points towards football fans as almost half of the bloggers fall between the ages of 21-35 (45.9%).

When I looked at the industry these blogs fall under, I found something that goes against the football theme I was seeing. The industry mentioning Miami the most in blogs was the communication industry (18.1%). This was not the surprise. The surprise was that sports related blogs only accounted for 4.5% of all the Miami talk. Instead of being in second place as I was starting to suspect, it turns out that real estate seems to be a big blogging industry. I guess there’s lots of property to sell in Miami.

As I looked into the larger activity spikes that we saw about Miami, I found more evidence that Miami is a sports town. The first large spike of data we see happened around August 16-18. The buzzgraph for that time shows a lot of “NCAA.” It turns out from some investigation that at this time there was a scandal going on Miami University, home of the “Hurricanes.” Apparently “Nevin” “Shapiro” had been giving benefits to the schools team that were outside of NCAA regulations. This was a hot topic in the college sports world and caused this particular spike in all the social channels.

The second large spike that I found was mainly on Twitter, but we can also see a slight rise in blog activity as well. This spike is yet again another sports related theme. On December 25th, the NBA finally kicked off their season. Miami loves their basketball, so this spike is related to the Heat’s first two games of the season in the date range of December 25-27. We can see a lot fo talk about the “Heat” and their star player “Lebron” James. We can also see strong connections to their first two opponents, the “Dallas” “Mavericks” on the 25th and the “Boston” “Celtics” on the 27th.

Well, that’s some interesting things I was able to find around talk of Miami. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this analysis it’s that whoever is doing Social Media Week sessions in Miami might want to think about incorporating some sports into their events. I’ll be back again soon for another Sysomos look at one of our upcoming Social Media Week host cities.

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Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Reports, Uncategorized

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.

 

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Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

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

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

It’s getting close to another Social Media Week and once again Sysomos is very happy to be a part of it. We’ve teamed up once again with the global Social Media Week team to help provide social media tracking and analytics for everything SMW. Using our industry leading software, MAP and Heartbeat, we’ll watching all the talk in social media and providing updates to the organizers and public about what we’re able to see. I’m Sheldon, the community manager for Sysomos and I’ll be the one doing all of these posts.

They say that you can learn a lot about a city if you listen to people’s opinions about it. Because of that, this time around I’ve decided to try something a little different. For the last Social Media Week in September, I took a look at talk about social media coming from each of our host cities. This time instead of looking at talk coming from just our host cities, I’m going to be using MAP to see what the world is saying about our host cities. Using search terms such as names and abbreviations for our host cities, I’ll be looking at what the entire social media world is saying about the city. I’ll be looking at what’s being said, who’s saying it, who talks the most about each city, and I’ll also take a dive into large spikes in activity surrounding each city.

Since there’s no telling just what the online conversation will say about each of our Social Media Week cities, I thought it would only be fair if I started with mine and Sysomos’ home, Toronto, Ontario, in Canada. Doing a search to see how often it’s mentioned through social channels, I found Toronto being talked about over the past six months in 815,011 blog posts, 1 million online news articles, 686,436 forum posts and 2,7 million tweets.

Trending that data over time we get a popularity graph that looks like the following. We can see two large spikes in activity over the past six months, one towards the end of August and the other around mid-September. We’ll take a deeper look at those two spikes in a bit.

Next, I looked into where all the talk about Toronto over the past six months was coming from. Not surprisingly, the majority of talk about Toronto was coming from within Canada. Canada accounted for 47.5% of all talk about Toronto through social channels. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that the majority of talk about all of our host cities winds up coming from the country they’re located in. The other two countries I found talking about Toronto the most were the United States at 34.7%, followed by the UK with 3%.

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to see what people were saying about Toronto. A buzzgraph shows us some of the most common words being used in conjunction with our search terms and how they’re connected. Darker lines between words mean they’re used more often together, while the dotted lines means less frequent use together, but still enough to stand out. The terms we found most being used when talking about Toronto were “Canada,” “Canadian” and “Ontario.” We can also see other Canadian cities seem to be talked about a lot when people talk about Toronto. Cities such as “Vancouver,” “Ottawa” and “Montreal.” Two other things seem to stand out in this buzzgraph. The first being “TSX” which is the short form for the Toronto Stock Exchange, and second, “Raptors” the name of Toronto’s NBA team.

For the next step, I dug into who was doing all the talking. I started with the blogs that are talking about Toronto. Finding user provided information I found that both men (53%) and women (47%) bloggers have been talking about Toronto almost evenly.  I also learned that bloggers aged 21-35 (40%) mentioned Toronto the most in their blogs.

I then looked at the industry of the blogs that were talking the most about Toronto. Here I found that arts focused blogs were talking the most about Toronto (13%). I can speak from experience that Toronto is a Canadian hotbed for music, theatre and other arts. The industry that talked the second most about Toronto were communications blogs (9.8%), followed by a tie for third place between architecture blogs and publishing focused blogs (8.1% each).

Next, I moved over to Twitter. It’s a bit harder to find demographic information from Twitter, but thankfully Sysomos can pull some. Using a method exclusive to our Sysomos software I was able to find the gender of tweeters talking about Toronto. I found that like blogs, the split is almost even with 55% being male and the other 45% female. I also pulled up the Twitter accounts that mention Toronto the most and our system has given a authority ranking of more than seven. In this inspection I found that many classified type Twitter accounts mention Toronto the most, like the account with the most mentions, @TorontoBizCaf. The account with the second most mentions is an account that just retweets people talking about Toronto known as @Toronto_RT. Also among the top accounts I found @nationalpost, a Canadian national newspaper, and @fan590, a Toronto based sports radio station.

For the last part of my look at what the world of social media has to say about Toronto I dug a bit deeper into the larger spikes in social activity I found. The largest spike in activity I found occurred between August 21-25. I focused in on those dates and pulled up a buzzgraph to get a overview of the convcersation happening those days. Turns out that this spike in activity was due to the death Jack Layton, the head of one of Canada’s major political parties, the NDP. Layton had lived in Toronto and brought his party a large rise in popularity over recent years and his death was a big deal across all of Canada regardless of political beliefs.

The second largest spike I found in conversation of Toronto came the following month in September. From September 7-14 the city is host to The Toronto International Film Fest, also known as TIFF. During that time the city receives a lot of attention from all over the world as big stars and movie premiers are all anyone can talk about.

That’s all for my look at what the world of social media has to say about Toronto. I’ll be back here quite frequently looking at the other 11 host cities as we lead up to the start of Social Media Week. See you then.

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Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Reports

Nielsen– The Social Media Report

Friday, November 11th, 2011

A recent study by Nielsen – the State of the Media: The Social Media Report (Q3 2011) – is a revealing snapshot of the current social media landscape and audience in the U.S. The results reinforce the growing popularity of social media as a way to connect people with brands and ultimately the influence social media has on consumer behavior. What follows are a few of the key results shared in the study examined closely through a business lens.

 “Social networks and blogs are still the top online destination– accounting for a total of 23% of time spent online. 4 in 5 active internet users are visiting social networks and blogs.”

 

Nielsen study

 

With so many people spending more time on social networks than on your average business page, are you engaging your customers where they are? What are you doing to engage in conversations, raise awareness of your brand’s products and services or are you still expecting consumers to come to you?

Times are not what they used to be. The simplistic ‘Build it and they will come’ approach just doesn’t cut it any longer. This isn’t about not investing in your corporate website, but rather looking at bringing some of it to where your consumers are hanging out– social networks. As well, it means paying attention to what consumers are saying about your brand and engaging where possible. Businesses need to humanize their brands on social networks. This is something many are still struggling with.

To be successful, firms must ensure they have a content strategy that includes social media. Ask yourself, what are you doing to ensure your brand is on the same social networks that your consumers are on? Remember to include the right listening and engagement strategy as well as a good content plan.

“Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other U.S. website.”

To paint a more detailed picture– 53.5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook, with Yahoo at a distant 2nd with only 17.2 billion minutes spent.

While this may not be surprising, this is something that companies should pay attention to, especially if there is a lot of investment made to drive people to the main corporate website. With stats supporting people flocking to Facebook and spending a lot of their online time here, it would make sense for brands to not only have a presence here but to develop the right content and engagement strategy that could help meet their goals.

It’s not about doing away with your corporate website as there are lot of good reasons to continue investing in it but rather looking at how you can bring your brand to Facebook and how to incorporate some of the Facebook functionality onto your own corporate site.

Are you allowing consumers to make purchases directly from Facebook or view television shows while engaging with their Facebook friends? What about the reviews and other comments that users leave on your brand page, are you listening, engaging and responding regularly?

“Close to 40% of social media users access social media
content from their mobile phone.”

According to NM Incite, nearly 2 in 5 social media users access social networks form their mobile phones.

Always on the go and engaging with friends, this is your new consumer. What does this mean for business? For starters, it means that listening and engagement doesn’t stop when business hours are over. With the mobile user accessing their social networks on the go, it means having a content and offer strategy that caters to this.

Are you including updates that would be relevant to users– tips, latest news, offers– that are short, easy to access and shareable via a mobile device?

It is worth thinking about how your business content, products and services could be of use to the on-the-go person who stays connected to their networks by way of their mobile device. Are you considering things like Foursquare and GetGlue where users who check-in can receive tips or offers related to your business?  Are you doing anything to encourage users to review and upload photos from their mobile device– making it easy and possible.

As well, are you ensuring that your business is monitoring the conversations that are happening within the social media space at all times– engaging, responding when necessary?

Think about it. With more people accessing social media content from their mobile phone, this could mean that people could comment on an experience had with your business immediately as it happens via their mobile phone– broadcasting to all of their friends and followers. Do you have a plan in place to address this?

“70% of active online adult social networks shop online, 12% more likely
than the average adult Internet user.”

What is interesting to note is the high percentage of people that are active participants in social networks and how this correlates to online shopping. There is a huge opportunity here for businesses to leverage this fact and relooking at their ecommerce strategy to make any necessary changes.

For one, look at your current online shopping experience. Have you integrated social into the purchasing process, allowing consumers to read and write reviews, share what they are looking to buy with their friends, add to a wish list that they can then share with friends and family?

What about taking the shopping experience to social networks where your potential and existing consumers already are? Look at integrating some of the key products/services right onto Facebook, allowing them to use Facebook credits as a way to purchase right from where they already are engaging. Here’s an opportunity for their purchase to be shared with their other Facebook friends,  reaching an audience your business may otherwise not have been able to reach.

Shopping is more often than not something that is ‘social’, so why not ensure that your business’s online experience is also ‘social’ – whether it means integrating straight onto your ecommerce site or by bringing some of that ecommerce to where your potential consumers already are – social networks.

“53% of active adult social networkers follow a brand, while 32% follow a celebrity.
60% of social media users create product and service reviews.”

Those statistics surprised even me. What would be interesting to note is how active these people are on the brand pages, and conversely the brands with their consumers.  Are their specific brands people seem to ‘like’ more than others? Nonetheless, this is an important number to note for many reasons. For one, does your business have a content strategy in place to keep people coming back and engaged with your brand page once they’ve” liked” it?

Active social media users are more influential. Consumers trust peer recommendations first. These reviews and recommendations by peers are their way of finding out the information they need – price, quality, value – before making a purchase.

Their influence should not be understated. Peer reviews are powerful and can influence online spending. If you are receiving a lot of negative reviews about a product or service, chances are people reviewing these are thinking twice before making the purchase or coming to your establishment. Are you listening and making appropriate changes where possible?

Chances are, many of the people you know are on at least one social network and participate on a frequent basis. With the growing number of people on social networks and spending more and more of their time here, brands need to ensure they have the right strategy in place to listen, monitor and engage with these influential consumers. With social media making it possible for consumers and brands to connect, and with its growing popularity and power of influence, it is more important than ever before for brands to target the right audience with the right message in the right media setting.

Click here for the full report.

Di Gallo is the Director, Social Media Partnerships at Rogers and a contributor to the Social Media Week Global Editorial Team based in Canada. The opinions expressed here are her own. Follow her on twitter @digallo

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Posted in Reports

Social Media Week: Sysomos Looks Back Through Social Media

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Hello for what will be my last time posting on this blog! This is Sheldon from Sysomos here with a follow up to all the action we saw last week during Social Media Week. From what I gathered through Sysomos it looked like a fantastic time was had around the globe by all those that spoke, participated and even those that just watched the action through their computer screens (I was one of the latter). Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytic tools, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve put together some stats and charts to highlight the social media activity during the week.

I will start this final post as I’ve started all of my other posts, with a look at the general talk around Social Media Week. Doing a search for all mentions of “Social Media Week” and the hashtags “#SMW” and “#SMW11″ over the course of five days last week I was able to find 261 YouTube videos, 614 forum postings, 299 online news articles, 1,074 blog posts and 17,871 tweets. Not too shabby for five days.

I then thought that I would dive into some demographic information about who was creating all this Social Media Week buzz from around the globe. Since this was a global event I thought it would be best to start with some geographical info. Below you can find a heat map that shows where talk about Social Media Week was coming from. The darker a country is in the map shows more conversation coming from that country. I also pulled up a little chart to show the top four countries that were generating the most Social Media Week talk. If you couldn’t see from the heat map, Indonesia and the United States were generating the most talk at 26% of all talk each. The next two countries talking the most about Social Media Week were the UK (13%) and Canada (6%).

I also pulled up a graph to see what languages the talk was happening in. I was ecstatic to see the range of langues being used to talk about Social Media Week. What’s even more interesting and cool at the same time, is that some of the languages being used to talk about Social Media Week are native to places that weren’t home to our host cities. That means that even people who were physically at Social Media Week were still talking about it. That’s fantastic.

Next I dove into the users that were doing all of the talking online during Social Media Week. What’s really great here is that I found that Social Media Week was being talked about across all ages and genders. First, I found that both men and women were almost equally contributing to the online conversation. I found that males accounted for 51% of the conversation while females made up the other 49%. That counts as pretty much even in my books. Then I looked into the ages of people talking about Social Media Week. Here I found that people 20 and under made up 14% of the conversation, those 21-35 accounted for 36%, those 36-50 made up 29% and the 51 and older crowd made up the remaining 21%. That’s a pretty good spread and showed that people of all ages were engaged in the talk. It’s no surprise that the 21-35 year olds were the largest crowd, as that tends to be the case a lot as they’re a generation very involved in social media. It was great to see that even those 20 and under were getting involved as well.

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to show what some of the Social Media Week talk was about and how it was interconnected. What’s really great is that we can see a whole bunch of different languages represented in the buzzgraph. One of the deeper connections we can see in the chart is to the term “livestream” which tells us that people were talking a lot about the livestreaming of the diffferent talks and events. That also probably explains how so many places and languages that weren’t physically part of Social Media Week got into the conversation. Right below the buzzgraph I’ve also included a word cloud to show us some of the most popular words being used in conjunction with Social Media Week.

One last thing I looked into about Social Media Week in general was how the conversation on Twitter was happening. Because Twitter seemed to be by far the most active Social Media Week channel I thought I’d give it a little bit of focus. Out of the 17,871 tweets I mentioned above I looked to see what kind of tweets they all were. My analysis showed that 49.03% of the tweets were regular tweets. That means that nearly half of all the tweets were people sharing what they were hearing to their followers. 39.93% of the tweets were retweets meaning that people were passing along the Social Media Week info they were seeing from other people. The final 11.04% were tweets were @ tweets, meaning people talking to each other about Social Media Week related things. As well, I found that of all the tweets that happened during the week there was a potential reach of 42.4 million impressions.

Half way through the week I posted on the Twitter users that were creating the most amount of mentions per city. Since the Social Media Week is now over I thought I would update that list. The following are the Twitter users with the most mentions of individual host city events (note that I removed the official city Social Media Week accounts):

Beirut

Berlin

Bogotá

Buenos Aries

Chicago

Glasgow

Los Angeles

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

São Paulo

Vancouver

Lastly, I thought we would dive into the activity of each of our 12 host cities. Before I list them out for you, I thought it would be interesting to look at them all combined. Below you can see a chart that I put together made up of all the host cities activity as tracked by keywords and hashtags provided to me by the Social Media Week global organizing team. The chart shows the level of activity for each day combined, but also shows how much was contributed by each city individually.

The following shows the activity broken out to the city level. Here you can see how activity levels were each day of the week, activity in each of the social channels and the sentiment rating for each city. Keep in mind that because Twitter was such a dominent channel during the week it tends to out shadow the activity of other channels in the line graphs, but the activity was there. I’ve also included below each city a buzzgraph of that city so that you can get a feel for some of the conversations that were happening.

Beirut

 

Berlin

 

Bogotá

 

Buenos Aries

 

Chicago

 

Glasgow

Los Angeles

 

Milan

Moscow

Rio De Janeiro

 

São Paulo

 

Vancouver

Well, that’s it for me (at least until the next Social Media Week). I hope that you all enjoyed these posts and got a better idea of what was happening around the world during Social Media Week.

It was a real pleasure for both myself and Sysomos to be a part of Social Media Week. We think it’s a great event and hope to continue to be a part of it.

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Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

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