With the both the right wing and conventional blogosphere on the attack against Melissa Harris-Perry about last week’s commentary about Mitt Romney’s Christmas card, it’s no surprise that her show got the most mentions on Twitter during the show and during the day as a whole. Mentions during the show ran about 3 times normal, while mentions during the day as were about 5 times normal. So far, Sunday looks to be a bit slower as she rotates out of the news, but the buzz has continued pretty much unabated since she made those comments a week ago.
Monthly Archives: January 2014
Crossfire wins its first Cable News Twitter Ratings for January 3, 2014
Nothing like a good debate about drug policy to bring in a crowd, and Crossfire and its hosts managed to pass the dutchie pon the left hand side, so to speak, and got more Twitter mentions than any other cable news show on Friday.
The Ed Show wins the opening 2014 Cable News Twitter Ratings – January 2, 2014
The cable networks are starting to shake off their holiday filler schedules and the big names are returning to air. And so Ed Schultz managed to capture the best hour of the day with his back-in-the-saddle start to 2014. Right behind Ed was E! News and Chris Hayes. And behind them … nobody, really.
Welcome back to the warm glow of the TV, Ed, from the arctic cold of Minnesota.
How Florida’s Gubernatorial Hopefuls Ended The Year On Twitter
Let’s just say The Grinch stole Cristmas …
Click to enlarge, although it doesn’t get better for Crist if you do…
After a huge spike for the announcement of his campaign, Charlie Crist has taken a seat in the back of the Twitter bus along with Senator Bill Nelson and fellow democratic hopeful Nan Rich. Meanwhile, up front, Rick Scott is clearly driving the bus…
A look at a detailed analysis of Charlie Crist’s recent Twitter activity shows us a couple of key things:
- He’s not tweeting every day (see the daily stats tab) or with any decent regularity
- Most of the mentions of Crist are not in response to his Twitter activity, but spontaneous comments from others
Compare this to Rick Scott’s Twitter statistics, and you can see the difference a consistent and constant use of social media makes — much more of the Twitter conversation about Rick Scott is driven by Scott’s social media team. About 12% of the mentions of Charlie Crist on Twitter are driven by Crist, while almost 40% of the discussion of Scott is driven by his tweets. Charlie Crist should be able to swamp the discussion on Twitter right now, given that the news about him is generated by him.
The difference a little effort makes is between being adrift in social media and controlling or at least shaping the conversation. Even Senator Nan Rich is able to drive 33% of the conversation about herself on Twitter.
Crist’s half-hearted use of Twitter even extends to his home page, which looks like he hired a 13-year old to do a knock-off of Nan Rich’s Twitter home page:
Where have I seen this before?
Compare that to Rich’s:
I knew it looked familiar!
Rich’s looks more professional all the way around. And I can’t help but noticing that in the photos block, Crist’s photos are basically all just of him, while Rich’s are of her and other people. Charlie’s managing to turn Twitter into an anti-social media, I’m afraid.
For the sake of completeness. I’ll note that Rick Scott’s page is a bit stark in its design:
But at least his photos aren’t all of himself.
What’s disturbing about Crist and Twitter aren’t the numbers or style themselves, per se. They can all be fixed long before the elections. Rather, it’s the lack of effort that the Crist campaign is putting into social media. Given the cost of a bare-bones social media effort is so small, the lack of investment here, where the ROI is so high, makes me wonder about whether the campaign is getting the big things right, too.
MSNBC Twitter Year in Review
With the start of the new year, I thought I’d take a look at how MSNBC’s year on Twitter has been. Not all of MSNBC, but the primetime (and weekend) shows that have been on the air for the bulk of the year: Hardball, The Ed show, Politics Nation, The Rachel Maddow Show, Last Word, All In, Up with (Chris/Steve), and the Melissa Harris-Perry Show.
Let’s start with the big chart — the mentions each show received, broken down by month:
Click to enlarge – it’s worth it
At a glance you can see some big trends — September saw a spike in conversation and then a drift back towards normal levels.
But inside the data are some interesting tidbits. Let’s start with The Ed Show, which was abruptly taken off the air, then put into a weekend purgatory slot before returning to prime time:
It’s a big chart for Big Ed, so click to see it all.
You can see clearly that April was a lost month for Ed, and then the next three months depressed his mentions while he was stuck in the weekend slot. But upon his return to prime-time, Ed picked up where he left off in terms of Twitter mentions — that’s pretty amazing given how his show was handled.
Of course, when Ed got moved out of the 8pm weekday slot, Chris Hayes moved in, recasting his Up with Chris Hayes show into All-In with Chris Hayes. “Up” was re-hosted with Steve Kornacki and continued without interruption.
But the fans of the show seemed to have moved over with Chris to week days, as the mentions chart show:
Click to enlarge. It’s like the large type edition.
The best of Steve is struggling to catch up to the worst of Chris, while Chris’s mentions look like they’ve continued unaffected by the move.
One last observation: there’s nothing like a whiff of scandal to drive the discussion on Twitter. And at the end of the year, Melissa Harris-Perry’s show held a discussion of the Romney family Christmas card that prompted Ms. Harris-Perry to issue an apology. That produced a huge year-in spike in Twitter mentions for the show:
You probably get the gist of it right here, but go ahead and click to see a bigger version if you like.
That was about a tripling her normal peak mentions, and the buzz blazed right through the end of the year. It will be interesting to see if it all dies down before everybody returns from their holiday haze…
Happy new year to MSNBC, its fans, and its viewers. I wish you all health, wealth, and prosperity. I’ll resume my daily ratings as the networks return to their normal schedules, and I hope you’ll check in from time to time to see how everyone is doing.