Social Media: News Travels Fast
Social media’s influence towards an information-driven society is becoming increasingly apparent. A recent online information surge relates to the tragic death of a pop icon, Michael Jackson. Everything that relates to Michael Jackson seems to be playing out on the Web. As web activity is trackable, it is working as an archive for our experience of him. We would like to share a short presentation on this here.
Facebook reported a tripling of the number of status updates in the aftermath of Jackson’s death. Indeed according to CNN Michael Jackson is now the most popular person on facebook, overtaking U.S President Obama. He has over 9M fans on Facebook. Before his death Michael Jackson had around 80,000 Facebook fans.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Los Angeles Times that there were nearly 5,000 Jackson-related tweets per minute on Thursday afternoon. Sysomos documented that as the story broke 25% of all Tweets mentioned his name. Jackson’s Wikipedia page logged 1.8 million visitors, compared to its daily average of just 20,000. A Google blog search between 25th June and 1st July shows 6.7M blog results. This goes some way to demonstrate the volume of people wanting to share their experience and opinion on the internet.
Nielsen’s Buzz Metrics tracks popular conversions on the web. In their most recent ‘State of the UK Market’ study they found that prior to his sudden death conversations about Michael Jackson were not high on the BuzzMetrics monitor. But now, these conversations dominate the web sending Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics even higher than the Obama inauguration, the swine flu scare, the iPhone, and the Iranian election.
The Internet gives access to a variety of content (video, audio, text) and it is this variety that makes it the first place people go to gather information. This is demonstrated on Insights for Search which shows that soon after the news broke search volumes for ‘Michael Jackson’s death’ peaked at +100% relative to the entertainment category. Search acts as a navigational tool.
Video is another medium that fans use to pay tribute and interact with peers across the web. Michael Jackson dominates viral video charts of the past month as documented by unrulymedia. The ‘Thriller video’ on YouTube has over 55M views, over 210K ratings and around 238K comments, with more being added by the minute. Already today fans have uploaded to YouTube over 6,800 videos relating to Michael Jackson.
And of course, people are remembering him by his music. LastFM shared this chart showing how people have been listening to his music in high volumes after the news broke.
Download the presentation (PDF).