McLobster And L'Affaire DSK - The Best & The Worst of 2011

It's that time of year, a chance to look back over the preceding twelve months and review what  worked and what did not. And maybe, just maybe, take a sip of Xmas cheer to dull the pain.

Twitter has recently released details of its 2011 highlights and once again sports dominates the re-tweets per second ratio.

Tweets Per Second

In terms of actual topics, the year was dominated by political upheaval and natural disasters. Cairo, Egypt, Japan, Libya and Tokyo all featured in the top ten cities and countries list.

As the Twitter blog states, "from news of Mubarak’s resignation in Egypt to buzz about which McDonald’s restaurants serve McLobster, the top trends that emerged on Twitter in 2011 reflect the diverse things that matter to us in our daily lives.

Among other things, we saw history unfold in the Middle East, mourned the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, celebrated National Whipped Cream Day, and cheered for the Dallas Mavericks, Texas Rangers and Wayne Rooney.

We wondered about Charlie Sheen, speculated about the Sony NGP, and raved (or raged) about Rebecca Black. And we tYp3ed LyK tHi5."

Various luminaries put aside their aversion to social media and signed up to Twitter in 2011.  Each no doubt had a different motive for doing so.

Who Joined Twitter in 2011

In its Ten Worst Tweets of 2011 Time ranks the Anthony Weiner on ... Anthony's 'Weiner' as being the biggest faux pas tweet of the year.

Comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried made a complete 'twit' of himself by tweeting 'jokes' about the Japanese earthquake which included tweets such as "Japan is very advanced.They don't go to the beach. The beach comes to them".  Not surprisingly he was fired from his role as the voice of the Aflac duck as the manufacturer of said product does 75% of its business in Japan.

Don't shoot the messenger or should that be 'elephant?  The largest U.S. web domain registry company, GoDaddy, received a massive backlash when its CEO, Bob Parsons, tweeted a link to a video of himself shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile over at Facebook their "Memology" (a terrible piece of IT jargon if ever there was one) echoes many of the Twitter findings.

The Royal Wedding featured highly as did the deaths of bin Laden, Steve Jobs and Amy Winehouse.

There was some regional variation with the UK Riots coming in at #2 in the UK and two abbreviations (lms & tbh) ranking #1 & #2 in the USA.  The Aussies seemed to be more fixated on 'planking' which was their #1 while the French followed the seemingly sordid goings on of Dominic Strauss Khan with great gusto. 'Affaire DSK' was their top status trend.

Finally, Mashable reports that Twitter topped the  list of most-buzzed about social networks this year, replacing 2010′s most-buzzed network, YouTube.

"The annual rankings by digital marketing agency Zeta Interactive measure volume (number of mentions in more than 200 million blogs, social media outlets and online posts) and tone (comparing positive and negative buzz). The Zeta Buzz score is calculated by the volume ranking multiplied by the percent positive ranking divided by 10, using data pulled since January 2011."

Related articles

• #YearInReview: Tweets Per Second (twitter.com)
• Twitter reveals 2011 hot topics (bbc.co.uk)

The Egyptian Connection

This infographic shows the Egypt Influence Network.  Twitter uses are said to influence each other if they follow each other.

A larger view of this graphic shows this with the lines, as this close up demonstrates.

Users are placed near the other users that they influence and individual user size represents their influence across the entire network.

Given the dual languages used in most tweets, English is in blue and Arabic in red.

The analyst and designer is Kovas Boguta, the head of analytics at Weebly. According to the author the choice of language is a vital element. No doubt Arabic was used  more for on the ground mobilisation and English to spread the word beyond the country's boundaries.

"For me, the point is that the activists are cooperating with the west, on their own terms and in a constructive way...in fact that is a key element and what allows this much bigger exoskeleton to tightly interface to the core. This is in contrast to what happened in Iran 2009...where the connections between those in Iran and the rest of the world were very thin and easily severed."

" The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly grafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground" - Kovas Baguta

Here is another piece of research put online that relates to the very recent Egyptian revolution. It is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak's resignation.

Your username is possibly  in this network if you  re-tweeted someone, or have been re-tweeted.



The data were collected through the Twitter streaming and search APIs by André Panisson, and is part of a research project involving the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin , the Complex Networks and Systems Group of the ISI Foundation and the Informatics department of Indiana University.

Related articles

• The Egyptian Revolution Explosion on Twitter [Video] (thenextweb.com)
• Visualizing The New Arab Mind (kovasboguta.com)
• Egypt's New Military Rulers Launch Official Facebook Page, Attract 75,000 Fans in 24 Hours (fastcompany.com)

BRICS, CIVETS And Emerging Market Opportunities

Image via Wikipedia

The Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference revealed some interesting trends and oppportunities.  One presentation of particular interest was that given by Consumer Insights' Hany Mwafy and James Russo (video below).

The digital centre of gravity (as they expressed it) is moving more towards emerging economies and away from the traditional hubs of Europe and the USA.

Growth and profit will happen in  countries such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, often referred to as the BRIC grouping.  It is estimated that by 2014 growth in BRIC will be 61.3% from 2008 baseline.  This needs to be compared with the G7 (U.S., U.K, France, Italy, Germany, Canada and Japan) projected growth of just 12.8%.

Some trends to watch:

• By 2030, the developing world’s middle class will be larger than the total populations of Europe, Japan and the United States combined.
• The female economy.Women now control almost $12 trillion of the $18 trillion in global consumer spending.
• Mobile phones are bringing the Internet to previously unconnected consumers.
• Average daily TV viewing worldwide in 2009 was a record 192 minutes
• The Middle East, in particular, is experiencing phenomenal growth and Egypt’s middle class is growing and is increasingly connected
• Fifty-eight-million Egyptians are mobile subscribers

And while we are at it, let's not forget the CIVETS as other pundits are already predicting that Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa will take over as the new BRICs.

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• After BRICs, look to CIVETS for growth - HSBC CEO (reuters.com)
• Facebook COO Sandberg says e-mail may become obsolete (social.venturebeat.com)