South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, is one of the largest interactive conferences in the country. For SXSW 2009, PBS held a three-day event at the Moose Knuckle Pub on famed 6th Street. The event was an interactive social media studio.
Epic Fu’s Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf hosted up to 20 interviews per day. All the interviews were available via live stream and then on YouTube. PBS employees and those involved also used Twitter and their blogs to promote/discuss the studio.
Data collection began on February 23, 2009 and ended on March 20, 2009. The goal was to monitor the buzz and content related to PBS’ social media studio.
Ecosystem Growth
From February 23 to March 20 the amount of sites in the ecosystem grew nearly 3,000%. Of all the sites, 89.7% are linked via first-order connection. When it comes to site categorization, nine of the 16 possible categories are represented.
These categories and the percentages that they contribute to the total ecosystem evolved over time. Here is a breakdown of how the ecosystem evolved over the week of SXSW:
Friday 3/13
• Social Networks: 39.15%
• Blogs: 21.69%
• Reference: 12.7%
• Company/Organization: 13.76%
• Press Release: 8.99%
• News: 2.12%
• Video: 1.06%
• Social Bookmarks: .53%
Sunday 3/15
• Social Networks: 50.55%
• Blogs: 19.64%
• Reference: 9.82%
• Company/Organization: 10.55%
• Press Release: 6.18%
• News: 1.45%
• Video: .73%
• Social Bookmarks: .36%
Wednesday 3/18
• Social Networks: 55.16%
• Blogs: 18.94%
• Reference: 6.71%
• Company/Organization: 7.43%
• Press Release: 4.08%
• News: 2.16%
• Video: 4.8%
• Social Bookmarks: .24%
Social networks saw increases as attendees continued to post Tweets and Flickr photos, but look at the Video category.
Videos posted on YouTube by PBS and user-submitted videos to Vimeo and YouTube caused a surge in this category after SXSWi had ended. This statistic shows that monitoring and reacting to buzz after an event is equally as important as before and during the initiative.
Semantics
The Semantic Cloud provided critical information about communication at SXSW for PBS. The cloud lists the top 100 most frequently used words on all of the sites in an ecosystem (dismissing “a,” “the,” “and,” etc.) in the form of an organized tag cloud.
Of the words on the list, one that stands out immediately is “RT.” To those in the Twitter world, RT stands for “ReTweet.” ReTweeting a message is a method for spreading information on Twitter while crediting the original source. It looks similar to this.
The usage of ReTweeting fluctuated as Spark collected data. The statistics below shows these changes in two ways: The first percentage represents the amount of ReTweets over the entire ecosystem. The second percentage represents the amount of ReTweets for social networks only.
• Friday: 15%/30%
• Sunday: 18%/33%
• Wednesday: 16.6%/34%
Other percentages worth noting include the words “interactive” and “video,” which appear on 33% and 39.5% of all sites in the ecosystem, respectively. A large part of the PBS effort included video, so the dominant presence of these words indicated that PBS communicated the highlights of their efforts effectively.
Sentiment
The graph to the right monitors sentiment in seven degrees: very positive, positive, slightly positive, neutral, slightly negative, negative and very negative. PBS saw overwhelmingly positive sentiment related to their interactive studio.
Only 6% of comments were “slightly negative” or “negative,” with no comments in the “very negative” category.
Nearly 85% of positive sentiment came from social networks. Of this group, 95.3% of the sentiment was “slightly positive,” “positive” or “very positive.”
Judging by these statistics, it can be inferred that PBS pleased the crowd that came to the events associated with their interactive studio.
Influential Sites
Spark uses inbound linkages and ranking systems to determine the influence of a particular site in any ecosystem. Below is a list of the top sites ranked by inbound links. The numbers in parentheses represent the amount of inbound links and the influence ranking of that particular site. The ranking system is like golf – the lower your score, the better. To give some perspective, most sites will have influence rankings over 1,000.
1) http://pbs.org/sxsw AND http://pbs.org/engage/sxsw-2009 (both direct to the same page)
• Inbound links: 56 + 43 = 99 (Note: roughly 20% of the sites in the ecosystem linked to these pages)
• Influence ranking: 237
2) http://www.pbs.org
• Inbound links: 29
• Influence ranking: 237
3) Twitter/Steve Woolf
• Inbound links: 20
• Influence ranking: 84
4) Twitter/Jonathan Coffman (PBS employee)
• Inbound links: 17
• Influence ranking: 84
5) Twitter/Zadi Diaz
• Inbound links: 14
• Influence ranking: 84
Virtualization
This is an embedded file of the actual virtualization, or visual map, of the PBS interactive studio’s presence online. Here are a few keys to understanding this file:
• Each sphere is a website mentioning the PBS studio at SXSW.
• The lines connecting spheres represent sites that link to each other.
• The spheres with the greatest amount of lines attached are the websites listed above.
• Green spheres are websites with positive sentiment.
• Red spheres have negative sentiment.
• Gray spheres are neutral or no sentiment.
