To preface: we took a look at the volume of conversation around L’Osservatore Romano‘s twitter handle to understand the change impacted by yesterdays tweet.

Over a 6 month time period we had Romano’s account coming up in a search around 87 times per week. On average there was 1 blog and 1.5 news posts written per week as well. Relatively modest numbers, but still numbers at that.

Taking a look just at content from yesterday mentioning Romano’s twitter account we see a 3838% rise in content on a weekly basis (Yesterday alone there were over 3340 tweets.) That over doubles the entire last 6 months worth of content. Not only that, but the next highest day of tweets in this range topped at 145 tweets when the beatification of Pope Jean Paul II took place in the beginning of May. We saw with the 3340 tweets yesterday, over 6.5 million twitter handles received some type of notification regarding the Pope’s tweet. For only 140 characters, that’s power, and clearly not just in the space of twitter.

Now this permeated across both blogs and traditional media outlets where we saw a 8500% and 4866% rise respectively on a weekly basis. (85 Blogs and 73 News posts in a single day!) This for us highlights the power that twitter has built in the space of sharing information and creating interest. Pretty impressive for one tweet if you ask us.

Some other points of interest would be that the United States had by far and large the lions share of the conversation taking place, with about 33.6% share of voice.  This is over 3 times the next closest countries in terms of volume and uptake (Countries placing second and third were the U.K. and Brazil respectively). Furthermore, we saw the majority of the conversation being picked up by males. (66/34 split of conversation over the past day.)

The statistics don’t lie. They actually affirm some assumptions that many Pope supporters have promoted for a long time. The interest level of the Pope rivals that of a Justin Bieber or a Lady Gaga in todays age. Even with a single tweet we have tracked uptake numbers that rarely exist regarding a single person (We find events have a much larger uptake in conversations then people do!).

The questions we’re still asking ourselves: Will he tweet again? If so will the impact be greater/smaller?  Was the impact this time around simply the awe of a religious leader embracing Social Media?

Current Hunches: Yes, Smaller, and Absolutely. Let us know what you think!

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.

Since the riots, Vancouver police have been using the photos found on Facebook and Twitter to identify the violent rioters and lay charges. So really, it may of helped fuel it a bit, but really some people that should be held dearly accountable for their actions now will be. This for me is a great example for the accountability social media brings to our daily lives. Not just for us as individual people, but also corporate/political as well.

Before a CEO could hide behind their PR team and carefully prepared speeches they would give on occasion. Today it’s a different playing field. Social media breaks down the walls of an organization and shows it for who everyone is, not just what the Marketing/PR team decides. This means businesses will become increasingly accountable because information will flow much easier (and more so as social media becomes even further common place.)

This means looking ahead we need to be prepared and educated on an organizational level. Have proper social media codes of conduct in place that do not infringe on our staff but empower the to be ambassadors for our company/brand. Not only push conversation out, but understand the right ones to draw in, and this is just the beginning.

Social media is not only the next generation of media, it’s the next generation of communication in general. Accountability is nothing new for an organization, it just brings the issue closer to home when everyone now plays a role. In my opinion though, being scared is far worse a stance then being prepared.

I just ran a quick search to see what twitter looked like around here by comparing at all mentions on NXNE and NXNEi with a number of different NHL terms and #hashtags from users that have been kind enough to provide us with their location.

Hopefully we can spend a little more time diving into NXNE stats and show case how people were talking bout bands this year.

-White papers, This will probably be links to our Slide Share account and blog posts of the past, But I would like to be able pull them out and link them seperatly with pitures and such.

- Blog

- Social Media Measurement compare guide.

- Let me know if you have any ideas.

Focus on Social team