This past Sunday while you were curled up on your couch with Twitter in your hand and the Academy Awards on your TV, we were hard at work. We spent all night watching what the world had to say about the Oscars. From the red carpet to the best picture award, we saw it all. And today, we want to show you what we found.

First, we tracked the red carpet ceremony to see which celebrities and fashions were generating the most talk. Three glorious hours of finding out who was wearing what and then judging them. As soon as the red carpet ceremonies ended we took a look at the Twitter conversations that happened around it and put together the following infographic. In those three hours we found 403,862 tweets about the red carpet (this is not including tweets that only mentioned the Oscars and not the red carpet). From those tweets we were able to determine that the public at large thought that Jennifer Lawrence in her Dior Haute Couture and Bradley Cooper in Tom Ford were the best dressed woman and man, respectively, of the night. We also found that viewers at home weren’t huge fans of what Anne Hathaway decided to wear. You’ll also find some social media savvy bands, the top hashtags used around the red carpet and that women out tweeted men 69% to 31% when talking about the red carpet.

But we didn’t stop there.

Our amazing Marketwire Reports team put together a full report around the 6.4 million tweets about the actual Academy Awards show. Inside this report you’ll find an analysis of almost everything that people were talking about during the Oscars. In this report you’ll find what people were talking positively and negatively about around the show. You’ll also find out that the highlight moment of the evening was when Michelle Obama presented the Best Picture award, which generated over 85,000 tweets per second. We’ll show you the talk around the #BestDressed hashtag. As well, we looked at the amount of conversation and sentiment around the Best Picture nominees leading up to Oscar night. Take a flip through the report below to see even more info from social media around the Oscars.

Does any of this information surprise you? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments.

By Adam Lovinus, Associate Editor

What is a journalist looking for on Twitter?

News, of course!

A better question is, How is a journalist looking for news on Twitter? A savvy journalist uses Twitter to excavate story angles in a variety of ways. PR pros with a handle on how journalists are looking for news are in a better position to offer valuable, timely expertise and generate media exposure for their clients.

Here are five great ways to leverage your company’s Twitter profile.

FIND YOUR WRITERS: The number-one reason journalists use Twitter is that it is probably the fastest, easiest way to keep up with what news sources (you!) are up to. The first step is getting in touch with them. Acquaint yourself with the search tool in the Twitter platform, peruse contact pages of news organizations, and see who your industry peers are following to bolster your feed.

• PR Tip: There are online services offering journalist directories searchable by news organization, beat, and region. PressPass (www.presspass.me) and Seek or Shout (http://seekorshout.com) are two FREE online programs that can help get you in touch with relevant media entities.

LISTEN TO YOUR WRITERS: Journalists frequently pose questions to their followers to aid in the newsgathering process. Make sure to monitor this, and deliver exactly what they’re asking for whenever possible.

• PR Tip: Journalists looking for sources will post their requests @JournoRequest or #journorequest. Search those handles for potential media opportunities.

ENGAGE YOUR WRITERS: Relevance is the key to good sharing; every tweet should tie in to something else happening on Twitter. This is what is meant by “engaging” with social media. Random posting directed at no one in particular tends to be ineffective. Imagine Twitter as a giant conversation; when it’s your turn to speak, make sure to offer something that fits in with what others are saying.

• PR Tip: Use #hashtags to start conversations. For example, when tweeting at a trade show, always add in the tradeshow hashtag. That way, journalists covering the show will see your input.

PITCH YOUR WRITERS: Every journalist has a preferred method of getting pitches. Some use Twitter, some don’t. Check their profile; it’s often a good indicator. Journalists that prefer Twitter pitches do so because the 140-character limit ensures a quick, to-the-point pitch. Ultimately, it is up to the PR pro to feel out an editor’s preference. When in doubt, simply ask — “Hello @editor, I represent @company; I have #something you might dig; what’s the best way to reach out?”

• PR Tip: A good way to warm up to an editor is to retweet stories he or she posts.

GET IN FRONT OF BREAKING NEWS: Nothing is faster and more useful than a Twitter feed for a developing story. By searching tweets with #hashtags that denote a specific topic, a journalist is able to cultivate leads in real time. 99% of breaking news stories will not have any meaningful connection with your PR, but you never know when you can get in front of a breaking story and turn it into a nice chunk of earned media.

• PR Tip: Use Advanced Search to search by topic and location for happenings that present an opportunity for getting in on news coverage. For example, a tech manufacturer that supplies electrical components for a weather-tracking device could find itself in a position to provide timely information for news media covering a storm system. Refine your search to find news opportunities specific to your client.

I promise, this is the last you’ll probably hear about the Super Bowl, but we have something so great that we have to share it. Our fantastic Marketwire Reports team has put together a deep analysis of how Twitter played a role in this year’s Super Bowl.

Below you’ll find our Super Bowl XLVII Twitter Mention Report. Inside this report we’ve taken a look at the over 24 million tweets that we found associated with Sunday’s big game. We’ve gone through all of the tweets and broken them down so you can see what people were talking about in relation to the game, the teams, the halftime show and, of course, the commercials.

Inside the report we’ll show you:

• A breakdown of what the 24 million Super Bowl tweets were about
• The most used hashtags during the game
• What people talked about positively and negatively during the game
• How Beyonce was the single biggest talked about “event” of the entire Super Bowl
• How the Twitter followers of both the Ravens and the 49ers grew exponentially on game day
• How being “always on” helped get Oreo and Tide get over 100 million Twitter impressions
• Some of the most retweeted tweets about the game
• And much more

From MarkBlevis.com

Mark Blevis analyses the social space using Sysomos’ MAP and Heartbeat tools. He took a look at the Idle  No More movement for the week of January 13-19, part of his monitoring since December 23. Here’s what he has to say:

“Despite a week of continued momentum, media interest and online chatter, and much hype around the National Day of Protest, Idle No More posted a significant drop in online activity between January 13 and 19.”

You can see the full analysis and how Blevis used Sysomos Heartbeat to analyze the data at this link.

Bond is back for his 50th anniversary on the big screen. Judging by the line-ups this weekend, people were eager to see how the suave, spy was going to deal with the latest threat, played by Javier Bardem.

I decided to take a quick look at the general sentiment of the movie (no spoilers yet) using the search terms, “Skyfall” AND “James Bond” AND “Bond” in MAP. I focused on Canada.  (more…)

By Eugene Borisenko, Senior Account Executive – Chicago

Nick Marshall, a successful ad exec from Chicago, woke up one morning and realized he could hear what women were thinking.  He was exposed to the full array of inner workings of female brains, no matter if they were strangers, colleagues or family members.  In plain speak, Nick asuddenly became witness to a real-time stream of unstructured verbatim data from about half of the world’s population.

This scenario is a plot of What Women Want, a romantic comedy starring Mel Gibson, released in 2001.  To some extent, the situation is similar to where many companies found themselves during the advent of social media, witnessing an entire new dimension of data pertaining to their businesses without much of a plan of how to utilize the multitude of social conversations in the cyber space. (more…)

If your blog is hosted on Go Daddy, then you may have noticed it wasn’t working. Go Daddy was the victim of the hacktivist, Anonymous. Of course, the outage was noticed. Here’s what Sheldon Levine noticed in the social space:

Yesterday afternoon the popular domain registrar GoDaddy came under attack by a member of the hacktivist group Anonymous. This was actually an interesting attack because we’ve seen Anonymous take down websites before, but this time they managed to take out almost every website with any affiliation to GoDaddy. Not only were sites that were hosted by GoDaddy down, but even sites that were hosted somewhere else, but still used GoDaddy as their nameserver and DNS (meaning they registered their URL through GoDaddy, but point that URL to their hosting elsewhere) were out of commission. Even us here at Sysomos weren’t safe as GoDaddy provided our DNS (thankfully we’re back at 100% and didn’t miss a beat with our data collection as that happens somewhere else).

GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar in the world, with over 45 million websites, so when something like this happens, a lot of people notice. But just how many people? Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, we investigated.

Read more at the Sysomos blog.

The Toronto International Film Festival begins in two days. Soon the stars of the latest movies and documentaries will be here to talk about their film while the businesspeople move behind the scenes looking to secure distribution rights.

Buzz is building but does buzz lead to box office? Let’s see.  (more…)

Hurricane Isaac is bearing down on Louisiana and has made landfall according to the US National Hurricane Center. It’s a category one hurricane with winds of at least 75 mph (80 mph according to Google).

We took a look at what was being said on social media. The Buzz Graph breaks it down very quickly.  (more…)

Social media, digital analyst and public affairs expert Mark Blevis loves using Sysomos MAP and Heartbeat to discover what people are talking about in the social space. His blog looks at what’s currently going on, whether it be Quebec politics, the one-year anniversary of Jack Layton’s death or the US elections.

From his blog:

A lot has been written about the role of digital in the current US election, and how it differs from 2008. There are many media pieces and blog posts about which candidate is out-digitizing the others, and others which look at which candidate is the most talked about.

What about issues?

I’ve been using Marketwire/Sysomos Heartbeat to capture and analyze online chatter about the US election and using manually selected keywords to identify key election-related conversations. Based on my analysis, I’ve identified the top six most-discussed election issues during the first 19 days of this month… find out the top six most-discussed elections issues at Mark’s blog.

Paul Ryan (Official portrait)

There’s been a lot of buzz about Paul Ryan, the Republican Vice-President candidate chosen by Mitt Romney. Community Manager Sheldon Levine took a look at what’s being said:

On Monday, Mark wrote here about Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s choice for his running mate and Vice President. When the announcement hit on Saturday, tweets were averaging 3,746 per minute. Since then, the talk has died down a bit, but Ryan is still a popular topic across the social sphere. Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, I took a look at the talk about Paul Ryan.

It’s just hours to go before the beginning of the Games of the XXX (30^th) Olympiad and buzz is building around director Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony. It’s estimated that up to one billion people will watch as Boyle’s  “Isle of Wonder” takes the stage in a celebration of “rural Britain” (according to the Telegraph). (more…)

By Sheldon Levine

The Olympics are starting tomorrow, but if you look in the social world you’d think they had already begun. London 2012 is already being dubbed the first ever “social Olympics.” And with very good reason.

This will be the first Olympics where people from around the world will take to social channels to discuss what’s happening at the Olympics while also being embraced by the games themselves. They’ve even gone as far as turning the London Eye ferris wheel in to a giant mood ring that displays Twitter sentiment around the games. (Read more at the Sysomos Blog)

The insight and intelligence that can be gathered from closely monitoring the activity and conversations across the social web are rapidly becoming “must have’s” for any company or brand.  Tech journalist and social strategist Amber Mac sat down with our own Jeff Cann during her Canadian Tech Spotlight series at Toronto’s Dx3 Canada conference to talk about the power of tapping into billions of online conversations, and how companies can monitor and evaluate their brand health, campaign performance and consumer sentiment.

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We continue to be amazed at the variety of creative ways our clients use Sysomos Heartbeat and MAP (Media Analysis Platform) to monitor, analyze and engage in the social sphere. Although the basics are the same, the applications are as wide-ranging as each client’s business objectives.  There’s no doubt that social media monitoring is today’s must-have for every type of organization, whether B2B, B2C, non-profit, government, media outlet or agency. The possibilities are endless.

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Social media is rife with business buyers searching for business solutions. According to Forrester Research, 84 percent of business buyers say word of mouth has the greatest influence over their purchasing decisions, far surpassing any form of paid media. And Twitter is a great place to find business buyers. It’s a veritable goldmine that can pay off handsomely for B2B organizations. Jonathan Astor, social media lead at Valtech and Sheldon Levine, community manager at Marketwire + Sysomos, show us how to find and nurture social media leads. To listen to Jonathan and Sheldon discuss this fascinating topic, tune into the archived version of our recent webinar: “B2B Social Media:  Turning Untapped Conversations into Business Wins.”

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Positive word of mouth and brand advocacy are important to any organization.  But for nonprofits, groups that are typically challenged by strict budgets, limited human resources and government regulations, word-of-mouth and advocacy marketing are key strategies.  Enter social media and the abundance of wide-open channels (most of them free to use) and communities of socially and ethically conscious millions.  For many nonprofits, the opportunity to identify and tap into groups of like-minded citizens helps the organization not only share its mission and mandate, but use the common collective of fans and followers to spread those messages far(ther) and wide(r).   Let’s look at ten nonprofits doing just that.

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If you’re in marketing, PR or any communications role you’ve likely been inundated with expert advice on how to incorporate content marketing into your business strategies and heard why it’s a must-have in your corporate plan. Many practitioners are just getting familiar with terms like content marketing, content strategy, content publishing and content curation, while others are writing books and blog posts about it. If you’re new to it all, don’t despair: You’re probably already doing some kind of content marketing, even if you don’t realize it.

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To be influential in social media can mean many things.  Sometimes it’s all about the numbers — the sheer volume of followers that one individual can amass is truly staggering, and with every Facebook post or tweet, millions of people have the potential to be swayed by that influence on what to buy, where to travel or how to vote.  But it’s not always just about numbers.  The creativity, expertise and unique insight that an influencer shares with his or her community are what truly make them worthy of following.  Take a look at our choices for some of the most influential in the social sphere in 2011. 

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When we read about the importance of listening, monitoring and being active in social media, it is typically in reference to B2C companies. Social media is almost seen as “sexy” and a “must-have strategy” for B2C success, yet we tend to hear less about how important real-time listening and social media monitoring is for B2B companies. Typically, B2B marketers are not looking for the “sexy” solution; they want practical ways to measure their brand, their campaigns, and their place in the market, and they want to use that intelligence to make impactful business decisions. What’s more, many B2B companies don’t think that they have enough brand mentions to warrant monitoring online conversations. But B2B companies, like their B2C counterparts, can benefit tremendously from listening to conversations in the social sphere. 

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