Open The Dialogue

A few weeks ago, a coworker mentioned they had tried a new chat service where you can meet random people online using a webcam.  I didn’t give it much thought then because I couldn’t test it out as my webcam on my laptop was broken.  I did, however, give it a moment’s pause for what was about to be unleashed on the masses with this anonymous video chat service.  Those thoughts proved prophetic and Chatroulette has since exploded on to the scene.  This obviously didn’t happened on its own, and with the use of MWW Groups D.insight powered by Radian6, I take a look into how it came about in the last couple of weeks.

Total Mentions:  58,704

Media Channels

Based on the chart above, the conversation is really taking place mostly on micromedia websites like Twitter and Friendfeed.  However, the three next most popular channels suggest that there is a lot of conversation happening about Chatroulette based on the high volume of comments and forum replies.  However, to understand what is really driving the conversation over time, a more detailed view is required.

Daily Trends and Key Drivers

The following graph really captures the sudden rise in buzz about Chatroulette.

As the graph shows, starting on February 20th, there was clear rise in mention on blogs and comments.  The New York Times article “The Surreal World of Chatroulette” started off this rise in mentions on the 19th, which was later followed by CNN and a number of other news sites.  While these stories primed the public on the topic, they were not the source of the major spike in mention on the 23rd and 24th of February and again on March 4th.

It took Mashable’s post “Calling All Romantics: Chatroulette Now Has Its Own Missed Connections” to give it that boost that traditional news sites could not.  Also a major driver of mention was the short documentary about user behavior by Casey Neistat.

The second large spike on March 4th was due to a piece by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.  The video is available on the Daily Show website and should be viewed at your own risk.

Key Sentiment About the Site

While the service has received high increase in mentions in a very short time, a majority of the mentions are neutral.  However, this chart highlights the prevalence of some key words used to describe the site.  The website is definitely connecting with the public because of its entertainment value despite traditional media’s framing of it as the “dark side of the internet.”

Key Personalities

While Jon Stewart’s video was a major driver of conversation, there were a few other notable celebrities testing out the service.  Even Kermit the Frog was seen engaged in some questionable practices on the service and hope the Jonas Brothers will not need counselling from being exposed to the website.

Tomorrow the world’s most important tablet since Moses will descend unto the frothing masses from Apple. Yes, the long awaited iTablet is no longer a whispered about dream, it appears to be a reality. And it appears that the social media elite just can’t stop talking about it. Gizmodo and Mashable both have dedicated tags for the mythical beast and if it does launche tomorrow say goodbye to the front page of Techmeme. But for a true look at the enormity of the iTablet, we need to use D.Insight to track the iTablet.

To get a comprehensive look at the conversation over the last thirty days, I punched a few iTablet and Apple related keywords into D.Insight (as powered by Radian6).

Trends

While rumors of the iTablet have exsisted for years, it wasn’t until January 3rd that Apple got everyone’s attention, in the middle of CES 2010! Since then the rumor mills have slowly been turning, before going into overdrive yesteryday.

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On Monday, Mashable posted an interesting study done by sharing company, AddToAny.  AddToAny is in a unique position to exmaine at the resulting data gathered from people using its service while sharing things among their networks.  Some great insights came out of the study as well as some accompanying perspectives from around the web:

• Facebook leads the pack – this is in-line with the size and growth of Facebook.  It also signals a generational change of communication practices.  People are spending more time communicating on the web inside social networks more than e-mail, which is extremely important to note.

• Don’t ignore direct communication – while the news is about Facebook, e-mail still holds strong.  When developing content sharing strategies, never overlook the power of a direct and focused e-mail.  It’s valuable to think of the context surrounding people when they’re communicating – most people are at work in front of a computer throughout the day and priorities get shifted to Inboxes instead of News Feeds.

• What’s missing? – A few things.  Mashable doesn’t disclose the sample size and the report itself doesn’t take into account somet things that commentors point out:  huge properties like CNN and The NYT have native systems.

• Mike Hudack, CEO of blip.tv, starts a pretty healthy discussion on Tumblr about the merits of focusing your sharing options.  Instead of using a widget, what if you had highly customized Facebook-only or Twitter-only sharing options?

• Christine Beardsell counters:  how valuable in the sharing ecosystem is someone on Digg or Yahoo vs. Facebook?  Properly, she points out two huge strategic caveats – who is your audience and how are you measuring?

Late last week, Radian6 instituted a palate of new features designed to amplify its already robust social media monitoring services. The updates are outlined in detail on the Radian6 Power Shift blog, but since a large part of DialogueMedia’s D.Insight digital media monitoring suite is powered by Radian6 technology, I wanted to quickly highlight one of the most significant additions of the overhaul: comment monitoring.

By tracking comment threads across the Web, Radian6 now detects most major venues of conversation online — forums and micromedia have been available for some time. Comments are, in many cases, the most important part of a blog. They echo the sentiment of the market and are therefore more directly representative of the of public position that a blog post would be on its own.

The opportunity presented by this level of granularity is an unprecedented one for brands. Where once monitoring conversation online was only sure to be time consuming, we can now ensure relevant data in a timely fashion — which is to say, if you’re not following the conversation, it’s time to get started.