By now, it’s probably abundantly clear that I’m a stats addict. I’m thinking of starting a support group.

Since we do a lot of research in the food world, I read a lot of blogs that talk about taking it local. I see challenges and advice on a daily basis. While many of the posts and mentions are small scale, I was curious what it looked like in aggregate. So, naturally, I ran with it.

The search was for ‘locavore’ and ‘localvore’ in the past 4 months across all social platforms. And what I found did not surprise me.

(Note that ‘bit’ refers mostly to bit.ly links. Yes, I had to look.)

Sure, food and local and organic and farmers (yay, farmers!) show up well. But are you surprised that only one location, York (ostensibly New York, right?), shows in the cloud?

If you’re like me, you’re saying to yourself, “Sure, but who writes out a state name or city name in a post? Particularly in Twitter.” And you’d be right. But wouldn’t it be cool to see where the mentions were coming from?

So 72.7% of the mentions captured are from the U.S. Is that a monitoring issue or reality? Not sure. Canada, UK, Australia sure had quite a few posts.

So I started wondering. Are the percentages of posts representative of the population distribution of the U.S. I mean, seriously. Weren’t you wondering that, too?

Population stats from 2008 Census estimates, by the way. The highlighted states have significantly more posts than the population distribution would suggest, leading me to believe there are more locavore-enthusiasts (or more vocal locavore enthusiasts) in those states than in other states – percentage-wise.

I could do this all day. (Hey wait, I do!)

~Wendy