Florida Governor’s Race on Twitter, March 2013

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March is in the history books.  How did Twitter treat our much talked about gubernatorial possibles? Here’s the frequency of Twitter mentions for each of them:

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Click to Enlarge

Rick Scott still dominates Twitter — as the sitting governor, you’d expect that.  Charlie Crist is doing pretty well in mentions.  Perhaps rumors of his announcing a run at the Kennedy King dinner in May will drive his mentions higher in April?

The rest of them … only Will Weatherford is doing well (spoiler: on 4/2 Adam Putnam’s tweet about Florida’s 500 got a lot of play — we’ll see if that gives him a bump that lasts). The rest of the rest, not so well…

One thing that’s amazing — Rick Scott has this weird regular pulse to his mentions.  Here’s a longer term view of Scott’s mentions on Twitter:

Rick Scott's Heartbeat? Click to enlarge

Rick Scott’s Heartbeat? Click to enlarge

I ran this through a FFT (Fast-Fourier Transform) which shows the dominant frequencies in the Twitter activity:

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What we see is that Twitter activity for Rick Scott tends to be clustered on a 4-day and a 7-day cycle.  Eyeballing the (previous) chart, you can see the weekly cycle at work.  One has to wonder if this isn’t some strange way governor’s office works — do they just send out news on Tuesdays and Fridays?  I’m not sure — I’ll dig into this next month if this keeps up!

 

The Twitter Passion of Touré

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If Esquire ever puts Touré on the cover of its magazine, it’s going to need to re-stage its iconic 1968 cover photo of Muhammad Ali.  Not in the ironic sense that they’ve done it lately, but in a sincere sense that it’s appropriate.  For there are few people who suffer the volume of unrelenting criticism, insult, and anger that is leveled at him on Twitter.   That activity tells us a great deal about social media’s nasty side, and is a cautionary tale for anyone who views social media as merely a sort of chatty email.

To get a sense of that nasty side, it’s interesting to do some statistical analysis on the Tweets he receives.  Using the last week’s activity on Twitter as a sample, I discovered some interesting things.  

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#UniteBlue continues strong on Twitter

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As I’ve written before, one of the interesting things to have happened on Twitter is the #UniteBlue website and its ability to amplify the voices of liberals.  By encouraging people of a like political mind to follow each other, it allows its members to gain in Twitter stature (or, Klout, if you must).

It’s hard to measure the impact its had (just because of the sheer number of members), but it is interesting to see how the conversation about #UniteBlue is doing on Twitter:

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We Don’t Got Ed (Schultz)

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The announcement over a week ago that Ed Schultz would be moving his show to weekends came as a bit of a shock, especially since he did one more show before departing the airwaves.  It seemed hasty and poorly planned, without a really good (or believable) explanation for what happened or an actual date of when the weekend show will start beyond “April” (for those of us in the software business, a mention of just a month for a target date instinctively produces the cynical response “of which year?”).

Needless to say, this news set off a shockwave on Twitter:

Click on image to make it as big as Ed's heart!

Click on image to make it as big as Ed’s heart!

On the day of the announcement, conversation to & about Ed reached levels not since since the fall election.  And while Michael Eric Dyson has been doing a good job keeping the Ed Show alive on MSNBC without Ed, its clear that enthusiasm has waned with Ed’s disappearance. It will be interesting to see how the next week plays out …

I wish Ed a speedy TV return in early April — of this year 🙂

 

Obama Twitter mentions, August-February ….

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There’s no real insightful analysis to this, I just thought it was interesting and worth sharing:

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Click to Enlarge

Some caveats: (1) during election night and a couple of the debates, Twitter’s API couldn’t keep up with the volume of tweets, and so my counts are too low.  (2) How you define your search affects the counts.  My search is somewhat narrow, and so that also will undercount tweets about the President.

During the inauguration, Obama got over a million mentions on Twitter.  That’s an amazing number of people who took the time to write their thoughts (positive or negative) about the event and the man.  Unless they were all about Michelle, of course…