Anatomy of Mashable’s #MashableSummit Hashtag

On Tuesday, June 8, 2010 Mashable in partnership with CNN and in celebration of Internet Week New York held Mashable Media Summit 2010. I was unable to attend in person but enjoyed a full day of amazing content through Mashable’s generous live stream of the Summit on Livestream. Watching the stream was a treat but engaging with the 1,000+ other viewers on Twitter was like a full scale dessert bar.

As a community builder I enjoy observing and participating in online communities, events, and deconstructing the residual data they create to better understand the chemistry that makes them thrive.  Mashable Media Summit 2010 provided great content from an impressive speaker line up and with the 3,038 tweets of the designated hashtag (#MashableSummit) by 1,181 Twitter users it was a data honey pot to sample. Here are some of my observations and a few data-points that I discovered.

Edit: The tweets were compiled using various external and internal services utilizing Twitter’s Search API, Streaming API, and Twitter’s RSS feed. Tweets were aggregated and de-duped. I have found tweet collection from Twitter NOT to be a perfect science. There may be holes in the data but based on the timestamps the compiled data stream appeared contiguous.

Community Building through Targeted Connections

I enjoy community building and I am passionate about connecting people of like minds. If we have run in to each other on different Twitter chats like #BlogChat or #BrandChat, you are familiar with the participant lists that I compile and provide to the community. These are simply lists of Twitter users that you can follow with a single click. Why? In short I do this to connect people and fuel the momentum of the chats or events. Here are a couple of key Twitter follow lists for you:

• Mashable Media Summit 2010 Speakers List
  The Summit speakers. If I missed any please let me know.
• TOP 250 Tweeters of the #MashableSummit HashTag
  If you are just getting started in social media and want to surround yourself with passionate people who are skilled enthusiast, start here!

Every event has their superstar Twitter tweeters that produce the most tweets and set the pace of the flow of information. Here are the TOP 10 Tweeters of #MashableSummit.

Top 10 Tweeters

• @josephcolon (48 Tweets)
• @jacobLpeck (46 Tweets)
• @MrShri (43 Tweets)
• @LoriMoreno (35 Tweets)
• @topbananas (34 Tweets)
• @ckieff (32 Tweets)
• @PubliGestion (31 Tweets)
• @rae4sunshine (28 Tweets)
• @skiergrrl (28 Tweets)
• @davekerpen (26 Tweets)
  

HashTag Rate – Valid or Novel?

Here is a unique look at the rate of tweets that were flowing during each of the agenda items of the Summit. I refer to this as the hashtag rate. This is not contextual but measured in only quantity of tweets that had the #MashableSummit hashtag. The tweets were matched using their time-stamp with the schedule of the Summit. Lower rates could indicate lack of interest of the audience but at the same time could indicate extreme interest of the audience. When measuring sentiment, interest, and response you need layers of perspectives. This is just one but I found it interesting and thought you might as well. You can find the agenda here if you want to match it up.

I hope you enjoyed this somewhat mechanical post. I have no great epiphany or take away to leave you with except to encourage you to do a little data digging for yourself. Data by itself is just data but when mined you can find a few treasures. In closing here are a few more data nuggets for you:

The top 5 tweeted links during the Summit:

• Foursquare Now Experimenting with Badge Rewards
  by Jennifer Van Grove
• CNN.com Launches New Technology Section at Mashable Media Summit
  by Adam Ostrow
• Yahoo’s Social Media Science Experiments [VIDEO]
  by Christina Warren
• YouTube: ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE (cover) for Global Fund AIDS in Africa
• YouTube: CollegeHumor Originals: Font Conference

Top 5 Hashtags mentioned with #MashableSummit

• #iwny (219)
• #socialmedia (34)
• #cnn (26)
• #marketing (19)
• #foursquare (16)

The top 12 Keywords (non-hashtag):