Last week San Francisco and New York hosted the inaugural Social Data Week - a conference exploring the strategic advantages that social data can generate for businesses and brands.
Now, this is a topic close to our hearts at FACE and we wanted to demonstrate a research perspective on the wealth of opportunities that social data offers. So alongside Datasift we decided to sponsor the conference and take our social data intelligence platform Pulsar on the road.
We had an amazing and very productive trip – as you can see our stand was deluged with inquiries!
We were of course live-tracking the Social Data Week event, and people were fascinated to see which speakers were making the biggest impact, and which ideas got the most traction.
You may be aware of a certain rivalry between the Silicon Valley and ‘Silicon Alley’, as New York is sometimes called. Since the 1970s the San Francisco Bay Area has been the cradle of tech entrepreneurship, and it’s home to its biggest companies such as Google and Apple. But New York’s start-up scene – with the city’s media and cultural capital plus Wall Street financing – has caught up rapidly in recent years.
And when it comes to talking social data, the cities are almost level pegging, with New York just sneaking ahead by only 10%:
So we can tell that the two audiences were engaged at a similar level with the conference, but what were they talking about?
Top Topics at Social Data Week
Even though both events were about social data, the online conversation did differ between the two. In San Francisco, marketing outreach, customer service, and brand-crafted consumer experiences were popular topics. Context for this audience meant using multiple data streams to provide better services and picking the right time to join an online conversation.
The New York event’s online discussion was more about identifying online behavior, such as sharing and identifying “influencers”. Of course they also discussed what to do with this information, like content strategy and encouraging brand advocacy, but there was more emphasis on “context” in terms of understanding who people online are as individuals.
Top Speakers at Social Data Week
Looking at the top keywords doesn’t just tell us topics – it can also tell us who the top speakers were for each event. These are the people getting the most quotes and retweets for their talks:
San Francisco top speakers:
- Guy Kawasaki, Author and Entrepreneur (@guykawasaki)
- Rob Bailey, CEO of Datasift (@RMB)
- Robert Scoble, Blogger and Journalist (@Scobleizer)
- Gavin Newsom, Lt Gov. of California (@Gavinnewsom)
- Susan Etlinger, Altimeter Group Analyst (@setlinger)
New York top speakers:
- Gary Vaynerchuk, Author and Entrepreneur (@garyvee)
- Rob Bailey, CEO of Datasift (@RMB)
- Jeff Dachis, Dachis Group Chairman and CEO (@jeffdachis)
- Stacy Morrison, Editor in Chief at Blogher (@bklynstacy)
- Robert Scoble, Blogger and Journalist (@scobleizer)
If I were running Social Data Week, these are the people I’d definitely invite back to my events. Of course one is the CEO of Datasift, the hosts – proving their investment paid off! It’s also no surprise that big-name speakers such as Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble are high up on these lists. What’s more interesting is the success of speakers such as Susan Etlinger or Stacy Morrison – who aren’t such tech world household names, but have nonetheless had just as much impact. This helps demonstrate the value for conferences of inviting new (and diverse – not just male) voices into the conversation – surfacing new ideas and influencers is part of a good event’s contribution to the wider industry ecosystem.
What did people share from Social Data Week?
Pulsar is unique for being able to analyze social media sharing behavior, by visualizing the top news, videos, blogs and other URLs people tweet. From this we can understand at a glance the content created in response to Social Data Week – and which blogs and news stories gained the widest reach and the most traction.
In San Francisco, the top 5 links were:
- “How to Build a Global Passion Brand” from Social@Ogilvy
- http://socialdataweek.com/ – Social Data Week’s own website
- “Social Data Intelligence, by Susan Etlinger” the slideshow of this speaker’s presentation
- Tableau’s data visualizations from the event
- A picture of the Pulsar booth!
In New York, the top 5 links were:
- Best First Part of NYC Social Data Week Conference
- Social Data Week’s Opening Video
- Best Second Half of Social Data Week in NYC #sdwk13
- Nicest Person in Social Media Gets Goal for Christmas
- Global Pulse’s Website
In both cities we see people looking up items mentioned by speakers and then passing them around to their wider social networks, extending the reach of the speakers well beyond the conference hall.
Audience Comparison
But enough about what people were talking about. Who were these people at Social Data Week? Again, Pulsar comes in handy. We index not just social media messages but related metadata such as user bios, so all we had to do was set up a couple of “cluster” charts analyzing these to find out.
From these charts we can see that just about half of San Francisco’s digital mentions came from marketers, though they did have more entrepreneurs than New York. Meanwhile New York had a slightly larger journalist presence, befitting its status as the US media center. Both events attracted about the same number of C-level execs, perhaps the most sought-after decision maker audience.
Top Audience Members
We can also look at who had the most influence at Social Data Week among the attendees. We’ve seen who the top speakers were, but who were the top audience members?
You’re probably familiar with a few of the various ways of measuring influence, but Pulsar is a bit unique here. Pulsar was built by researchers for researchers, and we like to look at data in as many ways as possible. Consequently we’ve developed 3 measures of influence:
The first is the most vocal – the people most active in speaking about a subject. It’s a measure of volume of messages:
It is probably no surprise to anyone that @SocialDataWeek produced the most tweets around the conference. But besides them, @HighTechDad produced the most tweets for San Francisco and @alexandrakirsch was the most vocal NYC participant.
These were also the most visible attendees for each conference, Pulsar’s second measure of influence. This was because both of them also have a significant number of followers, particularly @HighTechDad with 9,300, and tweeted considerably more than their peers, raising the likelihood that someone might see their content. Pulsar looks at more than just audience size when determining visibility.
Pulsar provides yet a third way for measuring influence – the network. And here we begin to see yet some more differences in the two conference audiences.
San Francisco had some key heavy-weight players in its audience. These were @RMB, @KloutBusiness, @SocialDataWeek and @setlinger. For the most part, these four were the ones generating reactions from the wider social media audience for SDW.
New York, on the other hand, saw less centralization of attention on a few key accounts. There was less of a difference between the most retweeted and the least, indicating that visible and popular accounts had less of a hold on the audience’s digital attention.
So how did San Francisco and New York stack up?
Both conference events did very well – just ask any attendee!
San Francisco was more business focused with a heavier emphasis on marketing and outreach and business uses for social data. The audience had clear influencers, too.
Meanwhile New York saw a bit more of interest in consumer behavior and how brands can understand it to provide better experiences and content. It was also a less influencer-led audience with people engaging with the content and with each other a little more.
Of course this was just a quick analysis of Social Data Week, but it gives a taste of what you an see through social data when you look at an event online, including a marketing event. You can see not only what people are saying, but who they are and what links and content sources are catching their attention. This is the power of social data that the speakers were talking about.
If you’d like to see more about how Pulsar can help your brand better understand your audience, just send us an e-mail at info@pulsarplatform.com. To learn more about Pulsar’s capabilities, check out the Pulsar website, PulsarPlatform.com.
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Want to see how social data can help craft a better communications strategy? Join our next Viral Video Webinar: Learn How Stuff Spreads” on October 23rd at 11am EST/4pm BST. Learn more here.