eMetrics Twitter Backchannel Analysis
Saturday, May 10th, 2008eMetrics wrapped up earlier this week after 4 days of fun - of which I was only there for one day. Knowing that I would only be there for one day I set up a Twitter backchannel on Twemes.com. I’d seen Twitter used quite effectively at Media Re:Public and, of course, heard about its use at SXSW. Of course, since we’re analysts can’t do something new without some gratuitous analysis!
This chart shows the incremental contribution - on a percentage basis - of each Twitterer who participated during eMetrics. Note that I have removed myself ("Omomyid") from the data as I was the host and my behavior could be considered to skew the data.
As you can see, Bob Page was the top TwIt 
with 25.6% (53) of all Tweets - way to go Bob!
There’s quite a large gap between Bob and the second rated TwIt - June Dershewitz who contributed 11.1% (23) of all Tweets. June was followed closely by Marshall Sponder at 10.1% (21).
There’s another small break in contribution and we get to Dave Rohrer and Eric T. Peterson who contributed 8.7 and 7.7% respectively.
Next, we have Vannesa Fox and Dean Burris adding 5.3% and 4.8%.
Finally, we have Rene Dechamps and Gradiva Couzin chipping in another 3.9% and 3.4% of Tweets and that gets us to 80.7% of all Tweets being driven by 9 individuals (36% of active #eMetrics twitterers.)
Here’s another take on the same data … basically just a chart of the raw counts. In this case it’s a little easier to see how more active Bob was than everyone else and the relative groups that were discussed above.
In addition a more striking grouping is visible in this chart:
1. Uber-Twitterers - From Bob Page to Eric T. Peterson, this group is responsible for 131 tweets covering 63.3% of all tweets. This group averaged 26 tweets per person, 17.9 per day and almost 3.3 tweets per person per day.
2. Engaged Twitterers - from Vanessa Fox to Jim Sterne, this group tweeted 43 times and contibuted 20.8% of the tweets. This group averaged 8.6 tweets per person 5.4 tweets per day and 1.1 per day
3. Casual Twitterers - this group, from Laura Forrest to Ian Thomas had 19 total tweets in 8 days. They averaged 3.8 per person, 2.4 tweets per day and 0.5 tweets per person per day. Casual Twitterers contributed 9.2% of tweets.
4. Sometime Twitterers - from u_m to Phil Sheard this group had a total of 8 tweets which works out to 2 per person and 1 per day. They contributed 3.9% to the twitter-stream.
5. One-Tweet Wonders - this is the largest group with 6 members each had just one tweet to #emetrics (2.9% of total) in the 8 days between May 1 and May 8, 2008.
So what’s all this telling us? Well, I’m not sure beyond the fact that there were discreet and obvious levels of engagement in the back channel.
I haven’t done a qualitative assessment of the tweets themselves - sure would to love to see that. But my general sense is that this backchannel was used more for status and social communication (e.g. ‘I’m at the lobby bar’) than as an idea space like I saw at Media Re:Public.
John Peltier (See Comments) gives us this Zipf test chart on the distribution of tweets:
