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.

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

This week on the Small Business blog, we’re talking the holidays. Tannette Johnson-Elie takes a look at how to gear up for the holidays.

If you’re not ready for the holidays just yet, entrepreneur Brett Markinson discusses fear can lead to “entrepreneuritis” while Mark Evans takes us through the Cloud and the tools that can help your business.

On the Sysomos blog, Mark Evans shows how Reddit can help you market your product.

Of course, don’t forget to read our MOvember article to see what people are saying about facial fuzz.

Update: Sheldon Levine updates us on the latest MOvember  news.

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…)

Mark Blevis kept an eye on the US elections and pulled a lot of data using Sysomos’ MAP and Heartbeat. In last night’s election coverage, one tweet was the most retweeted tweet ever. Want to know which one?

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…)

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! So it’s not a legitimate holiday (you can’t take days off) but it is recognized around the world by people talking like an old-time pirate.

Of course we had to see what the world is saying about International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrgh!  (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.

Mm…burgers…

In all seriousness, you can download an excellent report on the state of the fast food industry when you go to our Sysomos blog:

The global fast food business is worth more than $200 billion.  Our free Fast Food Industry Insider digs into social media conversations to discover who’s winning (and losing) the burger wars. Get the social intelligence you need for any industry with Heartbeat powered by Sysomos and give yourself a powerful competitive advantage.

You can download and read it here.

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…)

It’s been a busy summer for the Sysomos team. They’ve been upgrading the MAP and Heartbeat platforms to add the Portuguese language to the sentiment engine.

Not only that, you can now visualize Twitter account growth or loss (it’s very cool) in a simple graph. There’s more so why not read the latest blog post?

Mark Evans ponders the question of why journalists need social media. We like it because we can keep track of what’s going on and it’s always fun to chat with journalists from around the world.

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.

If you haven’t heard, pop princess and sk8ter boi fan Avirl Lavigne and Chad Kroeger of Nickelback are engaged. The musicians were collaborating and dating and Kroeger proposed after six months. This has caused some buzz on Twitter as Canadians went, “What? Seriously?” and then started the inevitable CanCon/Complicated/Nickelback jokes. (more…)

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.

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.”

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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. 

(more…)