Court of social media opinion: iPad vs. State of the Union Address

As the news of Apple iPad broke on Wednesday late morning, Twitter was abuzz with the news. So much so, that  a friend of mine asked in a tweet, prior to the announcement: “What will get more press: the Apple announcement or the State of the Union Address?”, to which I retorted “I bet it will be the iPad”. Was I right?

As a data junkie, I was fascinated on the spot, and recalled this question immediately when picking a topic for this week’s Biz360 trend report. So without much ado, I tracked social media mentions for the following topics: Apple iPad, State of the Union Address, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, which is another big world event going on currently (which seemed to be getting a little lost amongst all the iPad chatter). I analyzed two days: January 27th, the day of the iPad announcement and the State of the Union Address, as well as the following day. I tracked these topics across Twitter, blogs, forums / discussion boards, and online news, and this is what I found:

The iPad coverage did, in fact, far outweigh the coverage received by the State of the Union and Davos, resulting a crushing 58.8% share of voice. People talked about iPad more than twice as much as about the State of the Union (at 34.8%), and completely obliterating any Davos conversation (at 3.8%). The Apple iPad received a staggering 164,000+ mentions across various social media channels.

To an extent, I think this may be a function of the medium, as the lion’s share (86.6%) of the iPad conversations were happening on Twitter (see below), which in its early days tended to skew towards the “geeky and techie” contingent, with traditionally a high adoption rate of Apple products. Thus, it would make sense that the folks most interested in the iPad announcement, were tweeting up a storm about the announcement. However, since Twitter has gone more mainstream, this argument becomes a little flawed. Other than the possible Twitter medium explanation, your guess is as good as mine as far why the iPad received more coverage than Obama’s first State of the Union Address.

So how did the public feel about this very hotly debated new gadget? If you look at all social media sources (which is highly skewed towards Twitter, as we discussed above), sentiment is mostly neutral. Twitter is notoriously hard to measure because its character economy (maximum 140 characters per tweet) makes us forgo the grammar and correct spelling, making it difficult for a machine (heck, even a human!) to understand sentiment.

However, removing Twitter fetches quite a different result. Not counting Twitter, sentiment towards the iPad has been mostly positive (see below). In another post, I think I may dig into how we, the Social Media Republic, feel about the iPad name, which has been responsible for an avalanche of jokes about feminine products.

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Tags: Biz360, Community Insights, media measurement, social media, social media measurement, social media monitoring, social media research

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 12:58 pm and is filed under trend report. You can follow any coments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a coment, or trackback from your own site.