Word of Mouth - Social Media

Jam's ‘buzz' research uses Onalytica, specialists in this area, to monitor conversations across the web, including blogs, forums and publications.  By tracking and analysing the conversations, a brand can gain valuable consumer research, insight and evaluation.

This month, Jam turned the spotlight on the media industry, monitoring the phrase ‘social media'. For the most part, only the media industry uses this term, so it's an objective phrase to use to separate industry debate from everyday chat.

What Jam found was that there have been close to 4,000 mentions of the term ‘social media' within industry blogs and trade websites during the three week period until 5 June, reinforcing the amount of interest there is in the subject.

Below is a list of the top blogs on the topic, based on influence (in brackets) a weight calculated by analysing the structure of references between all participants in the debate.

1. Read Write Web www.readwriteweb.com (15.4)

2. TechCrunch www.techcrunch.com (7.6)

3. Jeremiah Owyang www.web-strategist.com/blog (7.6)

4. Beth Kanter beth.typepad.com (5.3)

5. Steve Rubel www.micropersuasion.com (4.6)

6. Chris Brogan www.chrisbrogan.com (4.5)

7. Brian Solis www.briansolis.com (4.4)

8. bub.blicio.us http://bub.blicio.us (4.3)

9. Top Rank Blog www.toprankblog.com (4.1)

10. Todd Defren www.pr-squared.com (4.0)

11. Robert Scoble http://scobleizer.com (3.8)

12. Rohit Bhargava http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com (3.8)

13. Shel Israel http://redcouch.typepad.com (3.7)

14. Darren Rowse www.problogger.net (3.6)

15. ‘Maki' www.doshdosh.com (3.5)

16. Search Engine Watch blog.searchenginewatch.com (3.3)

17. Copy Blogger www.copyblogger.com (3.2)

18. Shel Holtz blog.holtz.com (3.0)

19. Melcrum Blog www.melcrumblog.com (2.7)

20. Marketing Pilgrim www.marketingpilgrim.com (2.7)

(Top 20 most influential blogs on the subject of social media. Source: Onalytica)

Over the last few weeks, ‘Read Write Web' has been the most influential (the most cited) blog by far and this group of writers has rated 223% higher than Business Week. Jeremiah Owyang, of Forrester Research, is the most influential individual with his blog on web strategy. Unsurprisingly, the US dominates in this sector (further ahead of the game, more bloggers per square inch), but the UK is still shockingly under-represented.

One of the most popular topics is the rise and fall of social networks. Jam explored this debate by analysing ‘share-of-buzz' (SOB) - which sites are people talking about most? The graph below looks at the most talked about social networks, again weighted for influence.

(Share of UK industry buzz around social networks (weighted for influence). Source: Onalytica)

Although social media is not new, Friends Reunited launched in 1999 and MySpace in 2002, a look at the UK scene reveals that the recent buzz is all around Facebook, with 33% share-of-influence of the debate, in stark contrast to Bebo, whose share of the buzz was only 2%. Digg, meanwhile, punched above its weight with a 10% share of influential buzz.

Jam, however, suggested that the disproportionate share-of-influence figures could be misleading. While both Facebook and Bebo networks enjoy similar user numbers Jam concluded that there's a biased demographic (led by the media and advertising industry, including media journalists) who are over-talking Facebook.

It's worth noting that a number of sites with very large audiences that advertisers are aiming to engage with, such as Habbo Hotel, Piczo and Netlog, are not on the radar of the mainstream industry and have therefore generated a small amount of buzz in comparison. The UK definitely needs to catch up.

The final chart shows the UK's big social media sites ranked by audience figures and compares that against its share of buzz. As you can see, and as we noted earlier, there are a number of popular sites that aren't currently generating the kind of levels of debate they probably deserve.

(Top 15 Social Networks in the UK with share of voice. Source: Onalytica and comScore)

Jam Tip: Looking at audience figures alone, one social network to watch is cafemom.com, which had a 253% growth in unique users from February to April - validating the trend that parenting sites are one of the biggest niche areas growing in popularity.

Methodology
Jam, the new social media unit from i-level, used data from buzz analytics firm Onalytica to track conversations over a two-week period across the web. Influence is a weight, which is calculated by analysing the structure of references between all participants in the debate.

To suggest topics for The Buzz: Word of Mouth email rich.sutcliffe@haymarket.com

 www.i-level.com www.onalytica.com