Twitterville, the book.
I heard about the new book Twitterville a bit ago – I mean, really, if you hang out on Twitter at all, you are bound to have come across it in the past month or so. A few weeks ago, I got an email from the Final Blog Potomac organizers telling me that I’d get a copy of the book at the un-conference. Oh yay! Shel Israel would be speaking there, and he’d be signing books.
Cool. I was going to score a signed copy of Twitterville. Woot!
At the last minute, I decided to go to the pre-Blog Potomac happy hour. What the heck. And I met Shel. I could start now about how I feel about social media being a gateway drug… one that leads to in-person meetings but that’s a post for another time.
But what a nice guy. Okay, I know I sound surprised. Don’t mean to. It’s just that many business authors I’ve met have left me feeling a little… dismissed. You know what I mean?
Anyway, back to the point. Sorry.
I have a signed book to give away. To one of you. I am not kidding.
But first, you have to read my statistical analysis of social mentions of the book for September and October 2009 to humor me. I have included charts, graphs and maps. I love this stuff.
Sure I won’t know if you skipped all the way to the bottom to find out how you can score the book, but please look at my graphs. I worked hard on this! Thanks. See you in a minute…
Groovy Charts and Graphs Section of the Post
I ran several searches through Techrigy’s SM2 – and infused some custom searches of my own – for the time period of September and October 2009. The searches were aggregated.
The theme graph below shows the entire body of social mentions for book, as defined by my searches. (Hey look, Don is there again. Funny.) No big surprises, really.
What is surprising is the tone of the mentions. I am all the time telling people that none of these monitoring systems does tone well. And it’s true. Believe what you want. I did meet someone at Blog Potomac who tells me his system is better. I hope he’s right & can’t wait to see it. But…
Of the thousands of mentions that make up the theme cloud above, I went through each one by hand (really, I did) and judged the tone. After all was said and done, less than 1% of the mentions were negative, about half were neutral and about half were positive. The neutral mentions were truly neutral; for instance, “Have you read Twitterville? I’m looking for a recommendation,” or “Twitterville has been released.” You get the picture.
Honestly (and why wouldn’t I be honest?), I have never done an analysis of this sort where the chatter was so overwhelmingly positive.
This next Theme Cloud was made by Kate, one of our analysts, who thought that it would be interesting to isolate the Twitter mentions. Kate would have written this post, too, had it not been for her coming down with H1N1 in a bad, bad way. Get well soon, Kate!
So what looks different? Well, of course Twitternames come up. Interview, more feeling-words (love, like, awesome, excited, nice) and (doh) fewer blog, blogger words.
So that’s interesting, no? More social mentions on Twitter use emotionally positive words than in the whole universe of social mentions. Hmmm. I need to think about this some more and do some testing of that theory.
And not super surprising is that more of the mentions are on Twitter. Of course we know that @shelisrael is very active and the subject of the book is, well…pertinent to the platform. (note that not all mentions from 9/1-10/31/09 are included in the graph below. Some were categorized as mainstream news and other…and are not included here for simplicity’s sake.)
I just love plotting mentions against a calendar.
But even more fun looking geographically. While the U.S. and Canada seem fairly predictable, Australia has quite a lot of noise.
And looking at the U.S. by itself….
And then I had to do one more thing. I isolated all the mentions that also mentioned Blog Potomac. Why? Because that’s where I got my book, met the author, and because it was a really great day. And because I could.
What you’ll see, to me, represents the conference in its entirety more than the book itslef. You see Shel and the book, of course, but also Ning and Andy Carvin and Beth Kanter and Geoff Livingston and people. Yes, folks, PEOPLE.
You made it. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Leave a comment here (be sure to include your twitter name or email address in case you win). One commenter will be randomly selected to win on November 6th. That’s this coming Friday.
I sure hope we get more than one comment. But if that’s the case, it’ll be easy to select the winner.
Cheers!
~Wendy
Oct 31, 2009
Sounds like a cool book, looking forward to reading it. I’m Domainating on Twitter.
-Doug
Oct 31, 2009
I never cease to be amazed at the amount of data that can be culled and analyzed from 140 character posts. I especially like your “tagcloud” charts. They are intuitively informative, no explanations needed.
Good work.
Oct 31, 2009
Wendy, I greatly enjoyed reading this article, especially having been at BlogPotomac, meeting Shel Israel, and realizing that some of my tweets are accounted for in the above graphs and maps. Fascinating!
Nov 02, 2009
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by wendyscherer: Social mentions for Twitterville: visually speaking. (you can win a signed copy of the book!) http://bit.ly/2XP9F…
Nov 02, 2009
I love tag clouds. They’re so pretty.
You are such research geeks! I love it!
Nov 02, 2009
How do you do the data overlays with Google maps?
Nov 02, 2009
most interesting analysis of social networking I’ve seen to date. Keep up the good work!
Nov 02, 2009
I’m @pastinson.
Great analysis. I’d never thought much of tag clouds… well, until now… before, I found them, well, interesting, but not helpful. Your analysis is going to force me to rethink things and consider that even a basic cloud can provide useful information… thank you…
Nov 02, 2009
Awesome job!
It’s interesting to see so many people in Missouri and western Florida are interested in Shel’s book. I am surprised to see that fewer were taking place closer to the location of the conference, though.
What’d be interesting (to me, at least) would be to correlate mentions with other statistics such as website traffic, book purchases, etc. It would also be interesting to see how many tweets were RTs, how many contained links, and search volume on major search engines.
thanks for doing this!
Nov 02, 2009
Lot of work! Interesting analysis which also reveals some of the drawbacks of the measuring tools.
Nov 02, 2009
Very interesting research on what promises to be a very interesting read. Thanks for all that you do!
Mercedes Millberry
Twitter: mmillberry
Email: mmillberry@gmail.com
Nov 02, 2009
Neat info. I never really appreciated theme clouds until now…and the maps were cool too, although I also expected a higher concentration around the “conference” site.
On Twitter I’m @LSwann
Thanks!
Nov 02, 2009
I actually had forgotten how much Techrigy’s measuring tools could be until I read this through. You really showed some fun stuff and I agree – it would be interesting to see if certain social media tools encourage more positive comments and tone. Overall, I wasn’t bored, really enjoyed the article, and now am looking forward to reading my copy of Twitterville once you mail it out.
Cheers,
Michael
Nov 02, 2009
Ok, I’m loving the word cloud and now the maps too. Bar charts still make my head hurt… And you were VERY diplomatic in your summary of some authors. Nicely done. Glad to hear this one was a nice guy…
Jodi
Nov 03, 2009
I like the “Mentions Against the Calendar” graph. I’m having discussions with people here about Forums (Fora?) and this is useful. Thanks from the UK. SteveB
Nov 03, 2009
Now I have a much better view of YOU from this blog post. I’m going to forward your blog to my graph & map loving geek friends. They are going to die happy.
Nov 06, 2009
8
Random numbers generated Nov 6 2009 at 16:21:45 by http://www.psychicscience.org
AND number 8 is Peter Stinson. Peter, I’ll ping you on Twitter. If you see this sooner, email me with your snail mail address! wscherer@socialstudiesgroup.com