This is the final post in a series of three about Old Shawnee Days. View post 1 and post 2 to catch up.
Old Shawnee Days was a huge success, and Spiral16 was proud to participate as a sponsor. The four-day festival is a great tradition in the Kansas City area.
Part of our sponsorship included monitoring the social media efforts for this year’s events. Ben Smith, OSD publicity chair, managed a Twitter account, Facebook page, and MySpace page (Twitter and Facebook were new this year).
Ben created a hashtag, #osdays, for Twitter and consistently updated the Facebook fan page with photos and links. In a few weeks time, the fan page grabbed over 1,800 fans and the Twitter account had 230 followers.
Objectives
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Night Ranger @ Old Shawnee Days. Photo: Estuardo Garcia, Shawnee Dispatch |
On top of monitoring the effectiveness and popularity of the Old Shawnee Days social media campaign, I wanted to highlight a few themes I see emerging in the industry:
Merging “real world” with “digital world” – Creating social media campaigns around festivals, concerts, conferences, and other events is becoming a great way to organize information and generate content from attendees. If people who attend know someone is listening, they are more inclined to share their thoughts, photos, blogs, and videos. It’s also a good way to monitor sentiment in near-realtime.
Localizing social media – Old Shawnee Days isn’t a national event. It’s exclusive to Shawnee, Kan. and only happens once a year. However, by generating interest and excitement through online channels, Ben created an online community that didn’t previously exist. Any event can have a community, be it local, national, or global.
Insight Growth
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As of Monday, June 8, the Old Shawnee Days ecosystem had grown to over 460 web pages.
That means their ecosystem grew 105% since Thursday, June 4 (the first day of the festival).
The Insight Growth gadget is a line graph that shows the growth of the Old Shawnee Days ecosystem over time.
The data points represent the amount of conversations pulled in on that specific day.
The gadget has adjustable date features, so I set the dates to represent growth from 06/04/09 to 06/07/09, thus representing conversations about OSD over the four full days of the festival.
The graph data reveals that Friday (06/05/09) saw the most online conversations about OSD.
Site Type Breakdown
Spark separated the 460+ web pages into categories. These pie charts below illustrate that breakdown. The chart on the left is from Thursday, June 4. The chart on the right is from Monday, June 8.
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One significant change in these graphs is addition of blogs. As of Thursday, no blogs were returned, but by Monday blogs comprised 5.13% of the total conversation.
Another development is the increase in pie slice for social networks. This category includes sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and TwitPic. The 6% increase over four days shows that Ben achieved his goal of increasing conversations about Old Shawnee Days throughout the event.
Semantic Analysis
The Semantic Cloud is a gadget that scrapes the words on all pages in an ecosystem and displays the most frequently used words in the form of a tag cloud.
Using the cloud for Old Shawnee Days was an easy way to see which events generated the most conversation during the festival.
Here are some of the most frequently used words and their significance:
“Night Ranger”
- Appeared on 24% of all web pages in the ecosystem
- Was the headlining band for the festival
“Parade”
- Appeared on 17% of all web pages in the ecosystem
- Was one of the major events scheduled through the weekend
“OSDays”
- Appeared on 30% of all web pages
- Appeared on 59% of all social networks
- Was the Twitter hashtag through the weekend
- Usage grew 5% on social networks and 6% overall in four days
“Good,” “Great,” and “Fun”
- Collectively appear on 35% of all web pages
- Sentiment-related adjectives
- Suggest 35% of people used these words to describe Old Shawnee Days
Sentiment
On Thursday, sentiment scoring had 92.3% positive and 7.7% negative comments about Old Shawnee Days.
The negative sentiment increase slightly through the weekend. As of Monday, positive sentiment was at 87.2% and negative sentiment was at 12.8%.
Negative comments were about cost of rides at the carnival and the large crowds.
The graph on the left is the Sentiment Breakdown from 06/05/09 (Thursday) and the graph on the right is from 06/08/09 (Monday). Despite the slight increase in negative comments, sentiment was overwhelmingly positive.
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Part of monitoring sentiment is understanding at what time it entered the ecosystem.
The Composite Daily Sentiment By Volume graph displays both positive and negative sentiment by day, and shows us that both positive and negative sentiment peaked on 06/05/09 (Friday). This is the same day that online conversations peaked. Compare the Insight Growth graph (seen above, too) to the sentiment graph, and notice the similar spikes.
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Influence
The Top Engagement Targets gadget provides a list of the top 10 most influential web pages in an ecosystem. To put that in context, these are the web pages that Ben should target in order to have the most influence over his audience.
1) Twitter account
2) Facebook (fan page)
3) Facebook (fan page events)
4) Facebook (fan page photos)
5) Twitter (Night Ranger contest entry)
Now Ben knows that his Twitter efforts were the best way to reach his online audience. Facebook was a close 2, 3, and 4. Next year, the best place to start his social media campaign will probably be these networks.
Virtualization
Click the image below to view the virtualization for Old Shawnee Days.
