Category Archives: Cable Channels

Twitter’s Reaction to Marissa Alexander’s 20-year Sentence

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Yesterday, Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot to scare off an abusive husband.  Many people, myself included, feel this is a miscarriage of justice.  And many people took to Twitter to express their dismay:

# of tweets mentioning Marissa Alexander

It’s interesting to see what hashtags people are using in their Tweets:

Hashtag Total
#nerdland 246
#MarissaAlexander 230
#StandYourGround 89
#Marissa 59
#FreeMarissa 48
#FL 38
#JUSTICE 34
#syg 31
#TrayvonMartin 30
#Trayvon 30

The most frequent hashtag is #nerdland, which refers to the Melissa Harris-Perry show on the weekends and, in fact, the bulk of tweets using that tag occurred last weekend.  The Trayvon Martin tags come from the fact that the prosecutor in this case, Angela Corey, is also the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin.  Ms. Corey is no stranger to controversial cases: she is also currently prosecuting Cristian Fernandez as an adult for murder, even though he was 12 at the time the crime was committed.

Notes:

I see a lot of people asking what the hashtag #SYG means: Stand Your Ground, the law in Florida that did not help  Marissa Alexander and may or may not help George Zimmerman.

Hilary Rosen gets a Lesson in Social Media from Ann Romney

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You got to hand it to @AnnDRomney — she played Hilary Rosen masterfully with her use of social media.  At 10:17 pm EDT, she had not made a single tweet.  Then at 10:18, she wrote:

And then all heck broke loose.  Here’s a chart of the number of tweets that talked about Ann over the next 24 hours:

Click to enlarge chart

A huge spike over 3000 tweets per hour during the 11pm (EDT) hour of the day, only settling down around 2am before staring to climb back up again around 8am, making it back to over 2500 TPH by mid morning.

And what was everyone talking about? Here’s a list of the most frequently appearing words in those tweets:

Click on image to see larger version

You wouldn’t have to guess too hard what the topic was.  Of course, almost 10% of the tweets were a re-tweet of Ann’s first message.  Talk about Klout!

There weren’t any distinctive pattern of hash tags, and the people most mentioned in the tweets are the obvious ones — Hilary Rosen was mentioned in over 20% of the Tweets.

Of course Hilary got an amazing boost of popularity/notoriety as well:

Click on image to enlarge

Interestingly, there were just about as many tweets mentioning @hilaryr as @anndromney, even though each only appeared in about 20% of the tweets mentioning the other.

I don’t want to weigh in on the controversy, but I will say this.  From never having tweeted before, Ann Romney has done incredibly well to shape and define the debate using Twitter.  I saw both of them on TV yesterday, and Ann looked poised and in control while Hilary looked like the kid who was being dragged to the neighbor’s house to apologize for TPing the yard. My advice to Hilary: It’s good you said you’re sorry but stop trying to rephrase what you said in a way that you think will pass muster.  It just looks like you’re only sorry you got caught.

Personal bias disclaimer: I thought Hilary was trying to destroy the internet in the 90s by leading the RIAA in attacking everything that might pose a risk to the music industry. Schadenfreude ist die schönste Freude.

Twitter gets down with “Up with Chris Hayes”!

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[Note: Since this post was published, I’ve done a more recent analysis of Up with Chris Hayes’s Twitter engagement.  You can see it here]

Last week, I looked at twitter engagement for the  Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC.  This week, I have a request to do the same for Up with Chris Hayes.

Let’s start with the Twitter action:

Tweets per hour for Up With Chris Hayes

Click on image to enlarge

This is pretty much in keeping with what we saw with the MHP show — twitter activity really bursts during the show and falls off later on.  Chris’ # of tweets is lower than Melissa’s from a week ago, but comparing two different weeks isn’t totally fair.  If you compare the two shows, though, you’ll see that Melissa’s tweeple tended to retweet a lot more than the #uppers did. That alone accounts for pretty much all the difference in tweet volume.  Chris — toss out a few bon mots on twitter to get them going!

Still, there’s a lot of people (like, ahem, myself) who tend to sleep in a bit later than 8am on weekends… so maybe that’s the problem.  Some of us are more snoozers than uppers!

So who was Tweeting with Chris? Figuring out gender on Twitter is a bit rough (after all, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog), but here’s the estimated breakdown of the #uppers:

Gender breakdown of Chris Hayes' Tweeple

Click on image to enlarge

For some reason, it makes me want a Pepsi. I must not use Excel’s default colors. Anyways, continuing on …

Past studies (well, from 2009 so that’s kind of dated) have indicated that Twitter users are 55% female, 45% male (and 0% dog 😉 ) so it appears that Chris is pulling strongly male.  I’d be curious to know what the ratings say about the show watchers.  MHP’s tweeple from a week ago were about 59% female, so that’s almost a complete reversal but more in keeping with the estimated Twitter population.

There wasn’t a lot of consistent hashtag usage (except for #uppers):

Click to see larger version

Given that there were approximately 6000 tweets on Saturday and Sunday, nothing managed to make it past 5% of the tweets.  The few #nerdland ones are interesting, but I’d have to look at a minute by minute breakdown to see if its a segue thing.

So, what were the most popular (re-)tweets?  Well, popular is probably not the right word here.  There were a very few tweets that showed up repeatedly:

total text
36 RT @Uncucumbered: Note to Tim Carney: Why do you never ask “If the government can mandate a vaginal probe, what can’t they do?” #uppers #nerdland #waronwomen
33 RT @lizzwinstead: If reading bills in annoying to you, maybe being in congress isn’t your thing. #Uppers
31 RT @MHarrisPerry: Today’s @upwithchris is taking on Health Care for the entire show. Tune in. This is important TV. #uppers
28 RT @chrislhayes: Why the commerce clause is beautiful: http://t.co/7wWRSFs7
22 RT @YouGottaVote: Akhil Amar is my hero; argues on fact, precedent and the Constitution…how refreshing!!   #uppers #ACA
21 RT @Lawrence: @chrislhayes Just watched your religion show of last week. Simply brilliant. Rewound to hear a few bits twice. #bestofmsnbc
20 RT @chrislhayes: On the point about whether the costs of Obamacare have doubled: http://t.co/trl72rPz
16 RT @mmfa: RT @ZieberKR: @chrislhayes on the “character assassination” of #Trayvon Martin “racial backlash is now at full tilt” http://t.co/GNJSQXDS
15 RT @upwithchris: Charts & graphs from this morning’s show on the Affordable Care Act: http://t.co/n8uRjBLL #Uppers #aca #hcr
11 RT @blythe75: The greatest trick Conservatives ever did was making Americans forget the state-rights side lost the Civil War. #uppers

36 tweets is barely over a half of a percent…  So was there a consistent theme to the tweets? Even there, not really — a very diverse conversation in terms of retweets and use of words.  Here are the most popular words used in the tweets:

Word Total Usages
show 421
just 379
care 314
carney 286
health 270
like 264
good 260
morning 257
now 238
right 230
people 229
tim 204
will 202
know 201
congress 193
great 185
time 172
go 171
us 170
need 168

A few people contributed a hefty number of tweets:

# of Tweets User
118 kwright39
107 EverleighWay
75 jdvanlaningham
68 Noe_Colon
66 sjdorst
62 therealpriceman
57 dapdaddy
56 RonniRN
56 betsyrsmith
51 newblackrepubli

Chris Hayes himself was tied for 118th place with 11 tweets.  Get tweeting, Chris!

What did I learn from all this? Both Melissa Harris-Perry and Chris Hayes have a vibrant group of Twitter followers who chat during the shows, but don’t really continue to chat much outside of the shows.  Whether MSNBC wants to have that dialog continue is unknown to me, but if they do, I have a few suggestions…

  1. Chris is using mostly the web for his tweets.  This means that the moment he enters a tweet they go live. A tool like Hootsuite would allow Chris to enter a batch of tweets and spool them out during the day — this allows for a continual presence on Twitter even while asleep or otherwise occupied.
  2. Conduct twitter surveys or other things that allow you to interact with the audience but deal with them in an aggregate way.
  3. Delegate, if that’s not already being done.  Again, Hootsuite is great for that kind of thing.
  4. Watch your usage and engagement.  Every tweet is like an advert, you need to watch the reaction to it to see what works and doesn’t.
Regardless, good show, and keep it up! 🙂

Methodology:

I searched for all tweets from Saturday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59 EDT with one (or more) of #uppers, @chrislhayes, or @upwithchris in the text.  The gender of the sender was estimated via standard analytical techniques. Every tweet is labeled with the software that sent it, and so it allows me to analyze usage of various software clients (such as I did for what software the senators are using).

Watching Twitter Watch the Melissa Harris-Perry Show

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[Note: Since this post was published, I’ve done a more recent analysis of The Melissa Harris-Perry Show’s Twitter engagement.  You can see it here]

One of the great additions to MSNBC’s line up is the Melissa Harris-Perry Show on weekend mornings, airing from 10am to noon Saturday and Sunday.  And one thing that makes it great is the way the MHP show has engaged its audience via Twitter, even going so far as to invent their own hashtag, #nerdland (One day I’ll find out if this is a pun on Birdland).

So while everyone was watching MHP, I was watching twitter … and as you’d expect, there was a spike in activity as the show was underway:

Twitter Activity during the Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC

Click to see larger chart

New tweets are in blue, and re-tweets are in red; over the course of the 48 hours of Saturday and Sunday, about 38% of the tweets were retweets.

You can clearly see the activity building up right before the start of the show, but quickly dwindling afterwards.  Since I included @mharrisperry references in my count, the residual activity is a combination of show related tweets and tweets to/from Melissa herself.

Re-tweets are a great way to find topics that are starting to resonate with the audience — a retweet is a vote up, and as retweets become popular it gives us all a sense of what the community thinks is interesting or important.  Here are the top 10 retweets over the weekend (with the number of retweets for each):

108 RT @MHPshow: #TrayvonMartin’s mother is now on Twitter. You can follow her at @SybrinaFulton.
47 RT @keithboykin: @MHPshow made a compelling point about Obama’s birth certificate & #Trayvon’s shooting. As blacks, we always have to prove we belong here.
47 RT @majorzman: White men in multi-$1000 suits brought this country to its knees. And we are afraid of young men in hoodies? #nerdland @MHPshow
41 RT @chrislhayes: If you’re watching @MHPShow and enjoying it, take a second to send an email or text or FB message to someone else you know who would like it
39 RT @MHarrisPerry: This morning @MHPShow takes on serious issues of Affordable Care Act, GOP race & Trayvon Martin. On lighter side- Mad Men. #nerdland 10AM ET
36 RT @MHPshow: Melissa’s conversation today with three young men about what it’s like to grow up black in America right now: http://t.co/WNy9Dw64 #nerdland
33 RT @MHPshow: James Baldwin was just quoted on the show. Here is the author being interviewed in Miami about race in 1963: http://t.co/neH8KrnD #nerdland
30 RT @MHPshow: Now in #nerdland: Melissa talks to three black young men about growing up in today’s America. They’re joined by Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu.
29 RT @MHPshow: “White folks are sometimes looking for the slur; this is a pattern of institutional neglect,” said @timjacobwise. #TrayvonMartin #nerdland
29 RT @MHPshow: “It’s always on the side of people of color to fix something,” @AntheaButler said. #TrayvonMartin #nerdland

It’s interesting that so many of the retweets are from the show itself.  But it is also interesting that these tweets represent a small fraction of the roughly 2500 retweets that took place — so it’s clear that no avalanche took place (for an example of a retweet avalanche, see my article on when the Trayvon Martin story caught fire on Twitter).

Not surprisingly, the show was the most frequently mentioned twitter id in the tweets:

Viewers are clearly very engaged with what’s going on in the show.  Similarly for hashtag usage:

Hashtags used during the MHP show

Click for larger version

Almost everyone managed to include the #nerdland tag.

What I find most insightful, however, is the list of most frequently used words in the tweets (with stop words — the, and, etc. — removed).  This really gives you a flavor of the discussion going on:

I picked the top 30 words, but clearly the list goes on from there.  If you hadn’t seen any of the show, you could guess by looking at Twitter that the topics included something about “young black men”…

So what to make of all this? First, there’s a vibrant community of Twitter users who engage during the MHP Show, even if they disperse back to other Twitter communities when the show is not on.  Second, the community is carrying on an extended conversation about the topics being discussed.  Since the show itself is a discussion the majority of the time, it’s like an inner circle of conversation on the show and an outer circle of the same conversation on Twitter.  It would be an interesting dynamic to have a mixing of the conversations between those two circles as the show goes on….

I’ll try to come back to the MHP show in a few months and compare the Twitter communities to get a sense of the growth and change that has taken place.

Methology:

I used all Tweets from 00:00 am Saturday until 11:59 pm Sunday that had either @mhpshow, #nerdland, or @mharrisperry in the tweet. 

Tweetdown: The O’Reilly Factor vs. The Ed Show

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Bill O’Reilly and Ed Schultz go head to head at the 8pm time slot on Fox News and MSNBC.  Earlier, I covered the relative twitter activity of Maddow vs. Hannity, and we saw how Sean Hannity’s followers were much more active on Twitter than Rachel Maddow’s.

I thought it would interesting to take a quick look at Bill O’Reilly vs. Ed Schultz.  Ed implores his viewers to tweet him in a poll every day, and so I was curious if that produced a greater response.

During this week (ending 3/23/2012), you can see the relative activity of each show’s viewers:

Twitter Activity of followers of the O'Reilly Factor vs. The Ed Show

And we can see that Ed’s requests of his viewers is followed.  And that led me to my next question: outside of the time Ed’s show is playing, how active are his followers?  So I added up the number of tweets each received by the hour of the day:

Tweets by hour of day for O'Reilly and Schultz

Ed’s commanding lead in tweets comes purely from the engagement he generates from his audience during the show (the show is also on at 11pm ET, which generates a second spike towards the very end of the day).

So the winner in this Tweetdown is Ed Schultz!

Bill O’Reilly: Why not engage your viewers on twitter? Ask them to tweet you what they think of a topic each night and we’ll have a rematch!

Methodology: I looked at all tweets from 00:00 on Monday to 23:40 on Friday that had either @oreillyfactor for Bill or @edshow OR #edshow for Ed.