We had a great time at Le Web 2013, the innovation and entrepreneurship conference that came to London this week.
Generously hosted by Datasift – our social media data providers – we showed off our social media intelligence platform Pulsar to hundreds of people, and our CIO Francesco D’Orazio also spoke on a panel about what happens when social meets big data.
When we arrived, we realised we had to track what was going on. Within 5 minutes we had a search set up, looking for all mentions of LeWeb, @LeWeb, and the hashtags #LeWeb, #LeWeb13 and #LeWeb2013. And thanks to Datasift we have easy access to Twitter historics, so we could quickly capture discussion about conference preparation a couple of days earlier too.
Friday morning, we started analysis. These are the results – the people, events and topics that mattered at LeWeb 2013…
Most-discussed speakers
Analysing the volume of discussion by hour shows which speakers and events generated the most discussion.
AirBnB were the biggest draw on Wednesday morning, with 1800 tweets and retweets between 10-11am. In fact, tweeting volumes dropped over the course of the conference, perhaps as Twitter fingers got tired or people found more productive discussions face-to-face.
We can also analyse the keywords and topics of discussion to see which people and topics generated the most discussion:
Top 10 People
The most mentioned people in LeWeb discussion were…
- @LeWeb (of course) – 2879 mentions
- @Loic – host Loic Le Meur – 979
- @JOwyang – Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter – 500
- @MSuster – Mark Suster, GRP Partners – 299
- @JGebbia – Joe Gebbia, AirBnB – 287
- @Natital – Natalia Talkowska, live sketching – 270
- @Scobleizer – Robert Scoble, in the Google Glass panel – 247
- @AirBnB – 231 mentions
- @Axelletess – Axelle Tessandier, speaking on Digital Hippies – 194
- @Papadimitriou – Paul Papadimitriou, attendee, analyst & speaker – 180
This may suggest speakers to invite back and prioritise – but also some valuable attendees and infographic sketchers worth paying attention to as well.
Top 10 Topics
- Sharing Economy
- Startups
- Google Glass
- Community
- Collaborative
- Bitcoin
- Data
- Future
- Crisis
- Entrepreneurship
It’s clear the main message of LeWeb ’13 – the sharing economy – came across clearly, and the start-up competition drove a lot of buzz too. But the chance to see Google Glass in the flesh, and hear Loic Le Meur and Robert Scoble debate its impact, was a massive draw for the London audience too.
Here’s a Bundle visualisation of the connections between the topics – everyone was fascinated by this at the Datasift stand! We’ve selected teh keywords most associated with Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang):
Most-shared stories
Pulsar doesn’t just track the content of messages. Using Datasift’s Bit.ly data, it can unpack the URLs mentioned in each tweet or blog post (even if they’ve been through URL-shorteners like ow.ly or t.co) to understand what web content is the most shared. This is extremely valuable for understanding the press and PR impact of the event.
The LeWeb top content included:
- The livestream on YouTube
- London Tech Talk Facebook page, arranging meet-ups
- CNN’s Storify: LeWeb: How Grateful Dead were early adopters and Lily Cole makes wishes true
- Coverage at Frenchweb.fr
- Loic Le Mure’s keynote, The Sharing Economy on Slideshare
- The Next Web: Smart online retail tool Pricing Assistant wins the LeWeb London Startup Competition
Influence
Now we’re not the only people to have been measuring influence at LeWeb. Kred built a leaderboard (with Loic Le Mure on top), and Synthesio’s rankings place Silicon Valley speaker Thomas Power on top.
That’s two ways to look at it. But Pulsar is built by researchers, for researchers – for people who know there are different types of influence and who want to understand the specific benefits and strategies for each. Otherwise you risk up mixing journalists with VCs with self-promoting “internet marketers” and auto-retweeting RSS bots…
So we can measure influence at LeWeb across several dimensions:
Most vocal - that’s @ThomasPower, with 463 mentions of LeWeb – he was retweeting heavily
Most visible - that’s @LeWeb, with 398 mentions of the event to a bigger audience of 138,000 followers, and driving more engagement and retweets too
Most engaging - that’s @TheNextWeb, with 126 retweets for their tweet about the startup competition
Of course, we can build this into bespoke metrics which weight the different dimensions of influence in the most relevant way depending on clients’ strategic goals – awareness, reach or engagement.
Who was the LeWeb audience?
But to focus too narrowly on influencers misses seeing the bigger picture – the whole LeWeb audience. Pulsar is uniquely able to measure this, thanks to the metadata Datasift attach to each tweet (which includes full details of the author and their network) and our ability search this data, tag it by clusters, and build custom graphs.
Of course it’s limited to the data people share publicly – and not everyone has a detailed profile bio – but the indicative results are very interesting:
- Startups are the biggest group, at 43% (startup, founder or entrepreneur in their bios)
- 22% marketers, PR and advertising agency types
- 11% journalists and bloggers
- 10% students
- 6.5% C-Suite influentials (CEO, CIO, CFO etc)
- and a handful of developers and speakers
And here’s where they came from – France narrowly beating the US for second place, as befits LeWeb’s origins as a Parisian conference
So that’s LeWeb – the events, the speakers and the topics that drove discussion.
Thanks again to Datasift for kindly hosting us and promoting our work on stage. (That’s founder Nick Halstead showing off our visualisations of Alex Ferguson’s retirement announcement).
And using PulsarTRAC – built by researchers, for researchers – we found all this out after just 5 minutes set-up and a couple of hours analysis.
Can your social media monitoring tool tell you all that?
If you want to learn more about Pulsar TRAC and how FACE turn social data into social business intelligence – get in touch. My email is Jessica@Facegroup.com – or there’s more info on the website, PulsarPlatform.com. Let’s do a demo to show how Pulsar could work for you.
Or if you’re a LeWeb speaker and curious about how your session did and what people said about it – just drop me a line and we’d be happy to run the data for you too!
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