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Tag: zeitgeist

2010 in trends

As 2010 draws to a close we’re being bombarded with lists and Zeitgeists covering all the various trends from the past twelve months. From a news point of view global events such as the World Cup and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill really seemed to dominate our online behaviour, both topping out Twitter’s overall trends list and also featuring prominently in the annual Google Zeitgeist.

The overall trends do appear to paint a pretty decent picture of what grabbed our attention over the year, although seeing Justin Bieber in there at number 8 does make you question if we all had a little too much time on our hands in 2010! Facebook have produced a similar list (#6 Justin Bieber) from the year’s Status Updates and as such the list is distinctly different from those generated by Google and Twitter. For the full Facebook Memology check out the Facebook blog here.

However, it is not just the social networks making these lists.. the 2010 Zeta Buzz Awards measure the popularity of the Web’s major social media sites over the year. YouTube and Flickr come out as the big winners, gaining positive mentions 91% and 98% of the time respectively, but further illustrating how the once mighty have fallen both MySpace and Friendster dropped out of the Top 10, and I wouldn’t hold out much hope of them returning in 2011.

How do these findings strike you? Surprised? Will Biebermania prove even more popular in 2011? Let us know your thoughts below!

The rise of social media

Following Domino’s recent YouTube disaster (and Amazon`s trouble just days before), social media and the need for brands to monitor it truly hit the headlines. To illustrate that literally, here’s a graph of the phrase ‘social media’ as it appeared in the past year across ~30,000 mainstream news sites (excluding press releases).

In April ’08 there were around 400 mentions a week, now it’s over 3000.

(Does this represent a typical or required growth rate and volume for a new concept to turn mainstream?)

A search for “monitor social media” and “social media monitoring” as a proxy for tracking the concept returned the following chart. Not as dramatic but the trend is repeated.

mentions of social media monitoring over mainstream press

Unsurprisingly, social media’s poster darling Twitter steals the chart show, and went from from around 300 mentions a week a year ago, to almost 16,000 last week, a 50-fold increase.