Is It Just Me, or Are There a Lot of #measure Tweets These Days?
<Standard “good golly I haven’t been blogging with my planned weekly frequency / been busy / try to get back on track in 2011” disclaimer omitted>
Update: This update almost warrants deleting this entire post…but I’m going to leave it up, anyway. See Michele Hinojosa’s link in the comment for a link to an Archivist archive of #measure tweets that goes back to May 2010 and doesn’t show anything like the spike the data below shows, and also shows an average monthly tweet volume of roughly 3X what the November spike below shows. Kevin Hillstrom also created a Twapper Keeper archive back in early November 2010, and the count of tweets in that archive to date looks to be in line with what the Archivist archive is showing. So…wholly invalid data and conclusion below!!!
Corry Prohens’s holiday e-greeting email included a list of hist “best of” for web analytics for 2010, and he really nailed it. That just further validates what all web analysts know: Corry is, indeed “Recruiter Man” for our profession. He’s planning to turn the email into a blog post, so, I’ll sit back and wait for that. But, I did suggest that the #measure hashtag probably deserved some sort of shout out (I actually dubbed #measure my “web analytics superhero-sans-cape” in my interview as part of Emer Kirrane‘s “silly series”).
That got me to thinking: how much, really, has the #measure community grown since it’s formal rollout in late July 2009 via an Eric Peterson blog post?
10 minutes in my handy-dandy online listening platform, and I had a nice plot of messages by month:
Yowza! My immediate speculation is that the jump that started in October was directly related to the Washington, D.C. eMetrics conference in the first week of October — the in-person discussions of social media, combined with the continuing adoption of smartphones, combined with the live tweeting that occurred at the conference itself (non-Twitter users at the conference picking up on how Twitter was being effectively used by their peers). That’s certainly a testable hypothesis…but it’s not one I’m going to test right now (add a comment if you’ve got a competing hypothesis or two — maybe I will dive a little deeper if we get some nice competing theories to try out; this will definitely — the horror! — fall in the “interesting but not actionable” category, so, shhhh!!!, don’t point your business users to this post!).
It’s also possible that the data is not totally valid — gotta love the messiness of social media! I’d love to have someone else do a quick “conversation volume” analysis of #measure tweets to see if similar results crop up. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t make that sort of historical data available, I shut off my #measure RSS feed archive a few months ago, and, apparently, no one (myself included) ever set up a TwapperKeeper archive for it. So, I can’t immediately think of an alternative source to use to check the data.
Thoughts? Observations? Harsh criticisms? Comment spammers (I know I can always count on you to chime in, you automated, Akismet-busting robots, you!)?
