Category Archives: Media

Catching up with Melissa and Chris on Twitter

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There is a belief, widely accepted, that the Internet is drawing audiences away from television as people refocus their time to active engagement with social media. But for television shows with social media savvy, the best of both worlds can be theirs: top shelf video production with an audience that is engaged in the conversation via Twitter.

Two new(ish) shows on MSNBC have shot out of the starting gate with a strong social media component: the Melissa Harris-Perry Show and Up with Chris Hayes, which are broadcast Saturday and Sunday mornings.  I looked at their Twitter engagement shortly after their launches (here are the older posts on Melissa Harris-Perry Show and Up With Chris Hayes).  A few months have passed since I wrote those posts; in the interim, the shows have had a chance to hit their stride.  I thought now would be a good time to revisit them and see how they’re doing!

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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.

Did Senator Grassley Call the President Stupid? Or is his Twitter Account Hacked Again?

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Because that’s the charitable explanation of what’s happening.

Senator Grassley is no stranger to twitter, as he’s a consistent user.  Here’s a month by month level of tweeting he’s done over the past 12 months:

Senator Grassley's Twitter Usage

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You can ignore the last dip — it’s only the 7th of April, he has lots of days to go.

And he’s going to have a lot to say.  Because look at what’s happened to the number of mentions he’s getting on Twitter:

On 4/7, his average twitter mentions jumps from around 100 to over 3000

Click on chart to enlarge

Sadly for the Senator, most of those mentions are not favorable — they are all harshly critical of his Tweets from today (April 7th).  Just three little Tweets:

Senator Chuck Grassley disrespects the President

Most of the tweets are focused on the middle one, where he calls the President stupid, although a lot of people retweeted the last one.  Brevity is the soul of wit!

While I am no fan of the Senator, I will observe the following.  As far as I can tell, in his years and years of tweeting, he used the word “stupid” only once, and in reference to a law, not a person.  It seems out of character. So I hope he didn’t call the President stupid.  Because that would be a stupid thing to do.

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

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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).