Spiral16 is very excited to be a part of Old Shawnee Days!

This four-day festival in Shawnee, Kan. (suburb of Kansas City) is a huge tradition in our area, and this year the organizers have made a move toward publicity and interaction by using social media.

We’ve been working with OSD’s publicity chair, Ben Smith, to monitor his efforts.

The events kick off today, so I thought I’d share an update on their results. Look for more on this project over the next week.

Background

In 2008, Ben focused mostly on the festival’s MySpace page. For 2009, he’s bringing Old Shawnee Days to Facebook and Twitter. He’s also encouraging festival goers to post pictures and video online for everyone to share.

By reading this preview and its follow up, I hope you see the impact you can make locally by merging festival-style events with the digital world.

For this project, we’re only monitoring content related to OSD 2009. Spark has already pulled in over 225 conversations about this year’s events.

Site Type Breakdown

As seen in our previous case studies, this pie chart categorizes the individual URLs in an ecosystem. You can see the majority of conversation thus far has been on social networks. Ben has spent a lot of time building the @oldshawneedays Twitter brand and promoting the #osdays hashtag over the past week.

One important note about this chart: Company/Organization sites include any site affiliated with Old Shawnee Days or the city of Shawnee. Also, it includes Tweets from the @oldshawneedays account. The point of lumping those together is so Ben can compare what he published to what users not associated with the festival published.

The Site Type Breakdown is as follows:

• Social – 47.67%
• General – 37.82%
• News – 9.84%
• Blogs – 4.15%
• Shopping – .52%

News coverage has been all local from the Kansas City Star, Shawnee Dispatch and NBC Action News (KSHB).

The Shopping sites are vendors who will be setting up booths at the festival, and are advertising their appearance on their website.

By the end of OSD and in the immediate days following, we’re hoping to see an increase in social networking activity and the addition of video URLs.

Top Engagement Targets

Spark has a new feature to share. It’s our custom influence ranking system. Based on a proprietary algorithm, it shows you the top 10 most influential websites in an ecosystem. What does that mean? It means we give you the top 10 targets for your engagement strategy. Basically, if you have a message… take it to these URLs. To save space, I just included the top five targets on this post:

1. Twitter (@oldshawneedays)
2. Facebook (fan page)
3. Facebook (events)
4. Facebook (photo galleries)
5. Twitter (Night Ranger contest Tweet w/ hashtag)

Based on these top five results, Ben should take his OSD messages to Twitter to have the most influence over his audience. Also, making sure the Facebook pages stay current and interactive should be an extremely high priority.

Semantic Analysis

View larger image

A large part of Ben’s social networking strategy is the #OSDays hashtag. (Don’t know what that means? Learn about hashtags.)

The hashtag will help organize OSD content, help attendees find information easily, and allow other Tweeters to find each other (there is a Tweetup before the Night Ranger concert on Saturday).

The semantic cloud lists the most frequently used words in an ecosystem and organizes them in the form of a “tag cloud.” The most frequently used words appear with bigger font.

The cloud displayed to the right is for OSD, and lists the top 100 words across all categories of web pages in the ecosystem.

According to Spark, the hashtag has been used 54 times.

That means it is on 54% of all social networking sites (the category that includes Twitter) and 24% of web pages across all categories.

Ben should have a goal of increasing these percentages through the weekend.

Virtualization

The virtualization is a visual representation of Spark data. What you’re looking at is a Old Shawnee Days’ online presence in a 3D, interactive map. To decrease load time, the virtualization is set to display only pages that are linked to each other. To turn off this setting, click the arrow on the right side and uncheck “Show.”

Here are a few guidelines to help you navigate this tool:

• Each sphere represents a single URL.
• Lines connecting spheres represent pages that link to each other
• Green spheres are pages with positive sentiment
• Red spheres are pages with negative sentiment
• Gray spheres are neutral or have no sentiment

If you’re not seeing the loaded virtualization, try refreshing your browser.

Tagged as: old shawnee days, sponsorships