Twitter Use at #STC11 Summit

Last year, I kicked off this blog by posting about Twitter Use at the #STC10 Summit in Dallas. I thought it would be interesting to look at Twitter use at #STC11 as well.

Methodology

I’ve only analyzed results from May 13-21, 2011. However, use of the #STC11 hashtag occurred for months preceding this year’s Summit conference. (This is a departure from last year, when the use of tweets with the #STC10 hashtag started much later.) Because my Google RSS feed for #stc11 was unable to handle the volume of tweets this year, I relied on three sources for this post:

• Karen Mardahl’s Archive of #stc11
• Rick Sapir’s TwapperKeeper feeds from 5/16-5/18
• The CoveritLive feed at https://summit.stc.org

Graphical Portrayals of #STC11 Information

Here’s a Wordle of the tweets containing the hashtag #stc11 from 5/13 through 5/21/11. If you’re unfamiliar with Wordle, it produces a wordcloud where the frequency of word usage determines the size of the words in the graphic.

Karen Mardahl*(@kmdk) began curating the #STC11 tweets in late April. The two graphics and lists below are taken from her archive.

#STC11 Tweets by User (from Karen Mardahl)

Top Twelve Twitter Handles (% Total Tweets)

1. 9.55 % by torridence (Roger R.)
2. 8.23% by techcom (Tony Chung)
3. 7.88% by sushiblu (Jamie Gillenwater)
4. 7.77% by bwoelk (Ben Woelk)
5. 5.28% bytechcommdood (Bill Swallow)
6. 4.89% by mojoguzzi (Joe Sokohl)
7. 4.5% by rjhoughton (Rachel Houghton)
8. 4.47% by stc_rochester (STC Rochester)
9. 4.43% by RayGallon (Ray Gallon)
10. 4.31% by willsansbury (Will Sansbury)
11. 4.31% by afox98 (Alyssa Fox)
12. 3.42% by ninjawritermama (Sarah Baca)

Selected Keywords (Occurrences)

Most Commonly Used Words (from Karen Mardahl)

1. STCorg
2. Techcomm
3. STC11LD
4. STC
5. Summit
6. &
7. Session
8. Content
9. I’m
10. Thanks

Observations

Again, contrary to some expectations, “beer” was not the most commonly used word in the tweets appearing only 13 times. (This was the same number of occurences as #stc10, but a much lower frequency.)

I’m not sure if there’s any correlation, but “karaoke” also appeared 14 times. The last two years have seen almost equal occurrences of beer and karaoke. Coincidence? I don’t think so!

Conclusions

Just like last year, Twitter provided a sense of community and a “conference within a conference.” Most tweets were positive, implying that many of the Twitter users enjoyed the conference.

I spent much of the conference meeting F2F with Tweeps gained from #stc10. If you’re not using Twitter at conference, I urge you to do so. You’ll find that it will create a new sense of comraderie with other Tweeters, and besides, that’s where all of the really cool STC people hang out!

I’ve curated the tweets into a 341-page MSWord document. This “raw” data is available upon request.

What are your thoughts and observations?

Ben

Postscript (5/28/11)

Vanessa Wilburn put together a more detailed analysis of the Twitter usage at #STC10. Her work focuses on the subject matter of the tweets. She found that after removing the “chitchat,” the twitter streams paralleled the key topics of the conference and that many of the tweets relayed content from or observations about specific sessions.