NXNE & Social Media

A quick breakdown of all the talk that rocked Toronto

Things really heated up around Toronto last weekend for the 17th annual NXNE music and new media festival. Everything seemed to be a hit from reading their website : “NXNE wrapped up on Sunday June 19 with one last massive free outdoor concert at Yonge-Dundas Square. This year’s NXNE festival – the 17^th annual – was the best-ever edition of the weeklong event, marking a 15 percent increase in overall festival attendance.Over 300,000 people were entertained by NXNE Music, Film and Interactive over 7 days”.

After spending more time working with bloggers and digital strategists this year I quickly learned that the interactive portion of the festival was more than complimentary to the music acts and 4am last calls . We decided to see what people were writing, coming up to and during the mayhem, by reading tweets, blogs and classic news articles pertaining to NXNE and NXNEi respectively. We are lucky enough to have Sysomos SMM tool for all the hard work.  For all the nerds that would like to see what keywords and spread sheets we used please feel free to contact us and we will make a point to send you all the details.

First thing was to figure what was really find out what conversations were happening between all of the events by comparing the use of NXNE to NXNEi. We took in to effect that some people referred to the festival as both NXNEfest AND NXNE2011. Common sense would figure that conversation happening around social media would have dominated volume charts but we were pleasantly surprised that tweeting and sharing is no longer just for bloggers and tech nerds.  It’s for concert goers, indie kids and late-night party-types alike.

Things also seemed clear that blogs and news were easier to amp up about the music portion and that tweeting for NXNEi really took off only when the festival did :

Without Twitter :

With Twitter:

Another interesting breakdown was to see what bands were being mentioned in conjunction with the NXNE hashtags. We pulled in 15 of our favorite bands and broke things down to blog mentions, news mentions and Tweets. Funny to think that the top runner is a band from the eighties that always talked about the future :

Knowing that this was going to be a large social media event, many companies decided to create their own Social media campaigns. Two of the biggest roles that we  saw were Windows running their #rockwithwindows hashtag, Pepsi using the #NXNEpepsisecret hashtag and we were also was introduced to a new bookmarking website SHWEET. This is where things get interesting. Rather then spending big dollars on paid advertising. SHWEET built an alternative NXNE iPhone app that ran constant giveaways that really showcased great marketing creativity and dominated conversation all weekend – Showing that it’s easy to create likes but it will never be easy to create conversation.

Just a analyst’s look at what was happening online while people were happy kicking it offline.