eMetrics 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:

I’ll be at eMetrics on Sunday and Monday next week and I think I’ll follow Jeremiah’s lead and not load up on gear. The iphone and a power cord should do it. I won’t live blog - I’ll live Tweet instead. I won’t be in the sessions but you can find me in the halls.

I’ve been on Twitter for quite a while but never found much value beyond the amusement and entertainment until I went to Media Re:Public where I and a bunch of others were tweeting tidbits from the sessions. Turned out to be a great and fun way to get a sense of all that was happening.

There are lots of tools that you can use to keep track of Twitter but my current favorite is Twemes.com - you can see their widget at the right with the emetrics tweme (Twitter-meme). Mostly because it’s using the same idea that I had back in November ‘07 - although I can’t take credit for the idea it is still cool.

So, IF you are going to be at eMetrics in San Francisco next week AND you’re on Twitter (if you’re not - why not?) then use #emetrics whenever you tweet about the event and you can keep track of it (live even) at twemes.com/emetrics or grab the RSS feed for your reader, whatever you want.

We can share ideas/thoughts/opinions of the event that way (the discussion can get pretty lively) and those not fortunate enough to be at Emetrics can read about what’s going on…

June Dershewitz saw my Tweet and has on-boarded the idea.

Also joining in so far are:

• Bob Page
• Jim Sterne (!)
• Julien Coquet
• René Dechamps

So what about it? Will you play the Tweme game too? Leave a comment or tweet me with your thoughts!

There’s an interesting conversation going on over at the Web Analytics Demystified blog around the utility of Twitter and it’s place in the Marketing mix. I started to respond in a comment but it was way too long and too disorganized so I’m trying to organize my thoughts here.

Essentially, one group - to a varying degree - are challenging Twitter’s utility to the marketing organization and others are defending said usefulness.

Jim Novo seems to be the most vocal of the former group and while his points are well taken I think that his POV is somewhat skewed. To wit:

Thanks for responding. I’m not saying Word of Mouth isn’t important, we get a ton of it for the Lab Store, and it’s everywhere - Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all of it. And, I’m happy to say, it’s very positive, because we take really good care of our customers, and they don’t hesitate one moment to contact Service if they have any issues.

Jim goes on to say,

So I guess my question is this: why in the world would a company create a relationship where customers “seek support or “service” from peers, whom they trust, rather than from the company”?

That’s insane, in my mind.

And

We love all the social commentary about the Lab Store but we don’t “do anything” about it, because it just is what it is, it’s a result of smart Marketing and great Service. This kind of chatter has (hopefully) always gone on about great companies. The only difference now is there exists a public, crunchable record of it.

In a perfect world, yes the customer service logs are going to have all the information you need and you can act on them instantaneously. The thing that gets me about Jim’s comments is that his company apparently enjoys the enviable position of being loved by most, if not all, its customers. Apparently, he can afford not to be involved in this channel - instead he can sit back and enjoy it. So why, indeed, track what’s going on out there and use it to your advantage? Why engage at all?

Beyond Jim’s colored perception (and kudos to Jim for having that luxury) most companies aren’t in the same position with their customers and I’m sure that most companies don’t go out and try to create a negative relationship with their customers. None the less, customer distrust is out there and while the customer is on the phone with Customer Service, they are also spreading the word … and increasingly doing it on Twitter, at least that’s where the influencers seem to be. Gone are the days when one disabused customer is telling 20 friends about her bad experience, now she’s sharing it with thousands or millions of people at a highly accelerated pace.

Remember "Dell Hell"? These kind of customer service nightmares are now playing out on Twitter and savvy companies are there trying to listen, engage and remedy. Two incidents recently with @davewiner and @techcrunch (Michael Arrington) stand as evidence and @comcastcares certainly seems to be having a mostly positive impact on perception as well as customer satisfaction.

I’m not sure that Twitter is usable as a quantitative tool yet but certainly the qualitative impact (positive or negative) shouldn’t be ignored. Arrington mentions Tweetscan as an easy way to keep track of buzz …

So, Jim, to summarize

• You may have a very rare or even unique POV based on your reputation among your customers
• Influentials are on Twitter and are tweeting their experience with your customer service team as it happens, so which do you pick - the call logs or twitter?
• Twitter is relatively opaque to J-I-T quantitative analysis but the qualitative impact of what is happening there shouldn’t be ignored
• In light of the examples above (just how many people listen to what Arrington says?) companies can’t afford to ignore Twitter or other social media channels, don’t believe me? Ask @jowyang (Jeremiah Owyang, Sr. Analyst - Social Computing at Forrester Research)

I use twitter more as an information source than a communication tool. That means that I am largely silent and let all my friends do the talking.
So I’m probably not fulfilling my twitter responsibilities - oh well.

Twitter has some interesting features, one of those being able to track conversations - for instance "track earthquake" will track all tweets on an earthquake. This is a great ‘personal’ meme-tracker but it would be even better if there was a public way to track memes.

It should be simple, just like how replying to tweets evolved on twitter. Twitterers started using @username to denote replies to specific people and the fine folks at twitter formalized it as funcionality so that whenever twitter sees @username the tweet goes into a ‘replies’ bucket - nice.

Now, I’m going to suggest that the fine folks at twitter institutionalize public memes. So that anyone could see the discussion on a particular topic.

Here’s what I propose, in addition to being able to do the whole ‘track’ thing for personal meme tracking. Allow ‘tagging’ of tweets via the pound/hash sign ( # ). Any tweets that are marked with #memename could then be aggregated in their own twitter page. Additionally, they could be individually trackable by track #memename.

Anyone out there who also uses twitter agree or disagree?

First I hoodwinked Mom into blogging - she now has two blogs and a Flickr Stream (she’s even using Twitter).

Now my sister Ali has started her own blog!

Here’s the list of links for family, friends and anyone else who is interested:

• Hays Travelogue
• The Date Book (It’s not what you think)
• Mom’s Flickr Stream
• Ali Marie’s S.I.N. (Service Industry Network)

I am totally looking forward to Ali’s anecdotes and insights from the front lines of the service industry!

Now if I can just get Nate (and Family), Dad (and Dee) and Grammie (and John) to join the game…