WEC Final: Love 161, Fiasco Zero

One of the great things about Social Media is your ability to monitor conversations.

The general consensus at MPI’s World Education Conference in Vancouver last month was that the Twitter conversations were up and complaining via Twitter was down.

So, I did a short analysis on the Twitter conversations from WEC to see if this was true. My analysis was purely structural and did not allow me to do any deep categorization of the tweets.

Here are some statistics:

• 511 Unique Tweeters on the #wec10 hashtag from 24-28 July
• 5126 Individual Tweets under this hashtag.
• 80% of the Tweets (4100) were made by 20% of the Tweeters (97 people).
• 36% (1826) of the Tweets were “RT” version retweets.
• The word love appeared in 161 Tweets, the word great in 469 tweets and the word like in 200 tweets.
• The word bad appeared in about 40 tweets.

For those of you that are curious, the word “Fiasco” appeared zero times.

What do these statistics mean?

First, they show that we can measure and frame the conversation. However, statistics on their own need to be put into context. I don’t have any statistics about the other MPI events to know if these statistics are above, below or on par with the normal tweetage. (I just made that word up.)

Second, the large number of retweets tells me that the twitterati found ideas tweeted by others worth sharing with their own social networks. Since, we were trying to spread ideas and information outside of the MPI and WEC community – I think this is a valuable statistic.

Third, I did a light keyword analysis and found that the sentiment was mostly positive among the tweeters. I think this is great – because at some events – the twitterati can be brutal. If I had the resources, I would have taken a closer at the keywords and phrases to see what appeared to be the most popular. (The wordcloud above is the best that I could do.)

Finally, these statistics give us insights on participation. Social Media participation does not follow a standard bell curve distribution. You rely on a few people to create most of the Social Media content and a larger group to comment and share that content.

A Word About “Social Media Kung Fu”

Live Tweeting during a session takes some Social Media Kung Fu type skills. Speaking from experience it is hard. Here’s what your live-tweeters have to do: Listen to a sound bite from a speaker, synthesize it into a simple 140 character message, type it into your smartphone without errors and tweet it. All of this happens in seconds. It takes practice to become proficient at it. Not all Social Media people can perform at this level on-site at an event. I still consider myself a student.

Bottom Line

If your intent is to spread ideas from your event to the world, then be sure to recruit some twitterati to live tweet during sessions. When selecting them make sure that they know Social Media Kung Fu and have some tools (like a table and chair with power) so they can type faster.

There is a lot here for us to talk about. What else would you add?

Note: I did receive partial registration reduction for agreeing to participate in the Social Media Guru program at MPI’s World Education Conference.