Blog > March 2010

Last week I went to the i-com conference in Estoril. It was an interesting event and a big thanks goes out to Andreas Cohen for organising it.

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Of course, being CEO of a monitoring company, I decided to track the event using Brandwatch. Setting up i-com wasn’t that easy though as Brandwatch strips out punctuation as a default and i-com without the ‘-’ generates alot of irrelevant mentions of routers and stuff. So I had to use our new Raw operator which matches the raw text including capitals/non-capitals. So my query was

raw:i-com OR raw:#icom OR raw:I-com OR raw:#Icom OR raw:#ICOM.

But there were still some issues: there’s a SEO agency in Mancester called I-com and there were mentions of I-com meaning intercom on sites like www.aviationclassifieds.com. So the query ended up as

raw:i-com OR raw:#icom OR raw:I-com OR raw:#Icom OR raw:#ICOM -manchester -site:www.aviationclassifieds.com -site:www.goldwingowners.com.

[NB total time to create query, 4:27 minutes]

The results: one word TWITTER-TOWN

Over the last month, the mentions break down looks like this:

So >90% of all the volume is from Twitter – holy micro-blog Batman!

Although it’s interesting to see Google Buzz in there as the number 2. Facebook shows that it’s not really a business thing nor that public.

And these Tweets basically happened over the 3 days of the conference

Although Twitter is only 140 characters, Brandwatch managed to mine the 1000 odd Tweets for common phrases. Here’s a cloud of them. These have been generated automatically although I edited the Metric(s) one.

Microsoft and Unilever were presenting, and their presentations were good which is why there was more chat about them than any other company. Geoff Ramsey too was an excellent speaker although he did kick the conference off so there might have been an initial Twitter keenness going on in the audience which tailed off over the 3 days (I know that’s how I felt).

In fact a closer look at the most tonal topics shows this

Finally, here’s a really interesting visualisation that our labs team put together which shows the Twitterers on the right and the recurring phrases or topics on the left and the relationship between them. Click on one of the names to see.

So my take away from all this is that Twitter is ideally suited to conference commentary and some fantastic data processing and visualisations can reveal some interesting insights.