Facebook Lexicon Picks Your Brain...Sort Of.

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist

Here's a good indication of how social media has its finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Here's a graph of a certain keyword mention on Facebook from October of last year to February of this year:

The keyword in question? "Laid off." Unsurprisingly, it begins to peak right around the time that most major news organizations started reporting on the recession, something that has popped up in the top stories one way or another.

This data comes courtesy of Facebook Lexicon, which is more or less Google Trends for the Facebook crowd. It's a useful way to basically survey what words pop up most on the site, and an interesting way for Facebook to finally put all that data they've acquired to good use. You can even compare up to five keywords, separated by a comma.

It doesn't yet boast the comprehensive features that Google Trends does -- for example, it stalls on some two-word phrases or low-frequency words, and lacks a demographic spread that covers things like geography or language. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, and a great tool for someone trying to read the minds of Facebook users.

Incidentally, a glance at Google Trends for this same time period reveals a very similar spread, suggesting that reading the minds of Facebook's diverse users may be a good makeshift indicator for the feeling of the times.

Thanks to the Social Media Blog.

Statistics that will blow your mind

Apple’s 2008 Fiscal Q4 was one of the best quarters in Apple’s history posting revenue of $7.9 billion and net profit of $1.14 billion. A total of 6,892,000 iPhones and 11,052,000 iPods were sold during the quarter…which is more iPhones than every previous quarter combined (6.1 million) and the most iPods ever sold in a non-holiday quarter.
www.technologyexpert.blogspot.com

August 26, 2008 Mark Zuckerberg founder and CEO of Facebook announced they had hit a huge milestone: 100,000,000 people around the world are now using Facebook. www.facebook.com

Blogs allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it. There are over 175,000 new blogs every day and bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day…or over 18 updates a second. www.technoratimedia.com

A web server survey for October 2008 indicates that there are 182,226,259 websites online, which reflects growth of 948,000 over September 2008. www.newsnetcraft.com

Q. How many emails are transmitted daily around the world?
A. About 1.2 billion are sent from non-spam sources. If you count the spam/phishing ones, it’s about 75% more…or 2.1 billion daily. www.wikianswers.com

It is estimated that YouTube consumed as much bandwidth last year as the entire Internet in 2000; and that over 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute. In March of this year, bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately $1 million a day. In April of this year, there were more than 83 million videos on YouTube. www.wikipedia.org

The First Interactive Election in History

With the flurry following the election results of the past week, it's no wonder that many industry insiders are pointing out the importance of social media in Barack Obama's campaign. These snapshots of social media stats, taken Nov. 3, 2008, show the figures behind each candidate's online standing:

Facebook

Obama: 2,379,102 supporters
McCain: 620,359 supporters

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

MySpace

Obama: Friends: 833,161
McCain: Friends: 217,811

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

YouTube

Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006, Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day), Channel Views: 18,413,110
McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007 Subscribers: 28,419, (uploads about 2 a day), Channel Views: 2,032,993

Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain
Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

Twitter

Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers
McCain: @JohnMcCain (is it real?) 4,603 followers

Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

[Stats taken from the Web Strategy Blog by Jeremiah.]

Even just glancing at these statistics make it clear that Obama dominated the social media stratosphere. And given that the 2008 election had a record turnout, with media coverage that looked more like the Oscar pre-show, it seems clear that using this kind of platform grants access to a wide, diverse group of individuals who are ready and willing to listen.

There's a lesson about the future of interactive marketing in all this. The success of the Obama campaign, and its seamless integration of social media with other, more traditional campaign tactics, serve as a excellent reminder of the growing importance of social media, and how many companies must learn to embrace these new trends if they want to get their message heard, like Obama...or be left behind surrounded by unheard, mixed messages like McCain.

An amazing stats based video on the information age

http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=x7aVOMrlfkkijQwcLllwk6WjB5JE0zrF