Social Media Week

Local Updates

social media week

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: , , , , ,
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, global, Reports

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: , , , , ,
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.

Tags: , , , , ,
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.

Tags: , , , , ,
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: , , , , ,
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.

Tags: , , , , ,
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.

Tags: , , , , , ,
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.

 

Tags: , , , , ,
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.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Analysis, City Focus, Reports

Empowering Change Through Collaborative Engagement

Friday, October 14th, 2011

With our return coming February 13-17 to New York, Miami, Washington D.C., London, Rome, San Francisco, Toronto, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore and Sao Paulo, we are beginning to look at how we expect the week to take form. Reflecting on the global impact of social media and its role as a catalyst in driving cultural, political, economic and social change, Social Media Week’s theme in February will focus on Empowering Change through Collaborative Engagement.

This theme is designed as a call to action, allowing individuals- like you- and organizations around the world to explore how social media empowers citizens, increases mobility, enables mass collaboration, develops hyperlocalism, maximizes interconnectedness, fosters knowledge creation & sharing, bolsters leadership, and encourages global empathy.

Institutional themes will underpin this framework, elucidated in our content hubs. Our institutional themes include

  • Education & Learning
  • Health & Well-being
  • Energy & Environment
  • Politics & Government
  • Media & Entertainment
  • Science & Technology
  • Banking & Finance
  • Transportation & Mobility
  • Art & Culture
  • Marketing & Advertising

For example, those attending in New York will see our Art & Culture theme at Hearst and Advertising & Marketing at JWT.

It’s not to early for you to get involved. Join the likes of ING Direct, BBC, CNN, Funny or Die, and BASE_Camp by sharing your voice with your city. We’ll be going live with our first set of premiere events November 15th. Start planning your event now, and have it listed among our featured events when we release our first round of events. Or if you’d rather be behind the scenes, sign up to volunteer and have an active hand in shaping how Social Media Week looks in your city.

As we lead up to February, how do you see the power of social media to empower change through collaborative engagement?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Featured, global

Page 1 of 812345...Last »
Login to Save
Save to Favorites
Remove from Favorites
close

Achtung!

Who are you?
Are you on the internet?

This info helps us make cool apps for you.

Where are you?
close

Achtung! The username or password you entered is incorrect. Please try again.

Returning Users: Sign In

Lost Password?

Not a Member Yet? Join Today