Here’s a snippet of our recent infographic for Social Media Camp Victoria.

Since MediaMiser is all about everything to do with social and traditional media analytics, we collected and analyzed tweets about the event (in partnership with the organizers) and produced an infographic hopefully worthy of an event as influential as Social Media Camp.

While at Social Media Camp, many of us attended the great sessions held during the conference. One of the most powerful sessions I personally attended was Mark Smiciklas‘ presentation on the potential of infographics (he has also published a book that provides great insights in this regard).

Hopefully in our own attempt at compelling graphics MediaMiser has lived up to Mark’s standards and, as always, we’ve even included an embed code (as per some of his best practices outlined in the presentation).

Congratulations to Sam Fiorella, CC Chapman, Mari Smith, Jaime Stein, Amy Porterfield, along with SMCamp organizers Paul Holmes and Chris Burdge, and everyone who attended Social Media Camp.

Let us know what you think of our infographic and what you would like to see next year.

It is said everyone is innocent until proven guilty – which, under the Canadian justice system at least, is true.

But when you’re a public figure that has been entrusted with the keys to Canada’s largest city and are faced with such a salacious (and as yet unproven) allegation of smoking crack cocaine, it’s in the interest of the greater good of all your constituents to address the allegations quickly and head-on.

Last night, it was reported by the Toronto Star that the news reporting website, Gawker, had reportedly seen a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine. Toronto Star reporters Kevin Donovan and Robyn Doolittle confirmed seeing the video and have described it in a video.

According to the Toronto Star, Ford ally and Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday says he doesn’t feel the video is genuine. In fact, Holyday made reference to a video by students at Centre NAD in Montreal that seemed to show an eagle snatching a toddler in a Montreal park. The viral video turned out to be a wonderful hoax.

In reference to the video, Holyday was reported to say, “I saw a video of a bird picking up a baby on television and it turned out that it wasn’t accurate.”

Here’s a screen cap of that fake eagle video from Montreal.

This is a fair statement. But Toronto is the largest city in Canada and the fourth largest on the continent. Toronto, and even the country, can’t afford to be dealing with these allegations and Ford needs to categorically refute them if they’re not true.

In fact, a Globe and Mail editorial has said the exact same thing. 

A city as important as Toronto can’t afford to have this hanging over its head. It’s distracting to the business of government and the economic health of the city – especially since the story has now gone international.

A story also appeared this morning on a Washington Post blog, by Will Sommer, titled “Crack-Smoking Mayors: Not Just for D.C. Anymore”. The terms ”Ford” AND “crack” are now trending on Twitter, and a quick scan using MediaMiser software indicated around 150 U.S.-based articles (so far), powered in large part by a Rob Gillies AP story and a Reuters story penned by Julie Gordon.

Toronto and the country can’t afford to take this hit and the only way to stop the distraction, the media noise, and the hit to Toronto’s brand is for Mayor Ford hold a press conference immediately to clear the air.

We’ll be tracking the media coverage of the scandal and it will be interesting to see if clear and honest communications helps to stem the media tide in both traditional and social coverage.

With the smell of spring in the air, MediaMiser took to the Twitterverse to see how the Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa, Ont., fared this year on social media.

According to MediaMiser’s Twitter analysis, which collected around 4,000 tweets mentioning the Canadian Tulip Festival from the beginning of May until early this week, the majority of tweets occurred on opening weekend and declined steadily since then. Tweets peaked on Saturday May 3, with 1,365, and the festival’s handle, @CdnTulipFest, was mentioned in around 18 per cent of all tweets mentioning the festival.

Around 8% of tweets came from Toronto-based users, while around 4% came from New York-based users.

Not surprisingly, most tweeters that publicly displayed their geolocation on Twitter hailed from Ottawa, but 18 per cent of Tweeters came from elsewhere. There were some visitors tweeting from the west coast of Canada, the U.S. and even as far away as Japan, according to our geotagging analysis.

And while I was in the area, I also met a couple that were in town from upstate New York who said they make the trip every year to see the tulips and enjoy the national capital.

While there were plenty of photos of tulips shared on Twitter, the top mentioned link in tweets featured a photo of the statue “Man with Two Hats” in Commissioner’s Park, which welcomed tourists to the Tulip Festival.

The festival has numerous activities and concerts with the top events mentioned being the free concerts at Tulip Plaza (at 45 per cent of mentions), followed by Tulip Cycle (a Tulip Fest-related bike tour, at 23 per cent) and the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (nine per cent) which took place on Mother’s Day. 

And of all the bands that played at this year’s festival, Ottawa’s Juno-nominated Hollerado was the most anticipated band on Twitter with 62 per cent of all band mentions.

Ottawa-based Hollerado was the most-mentioned band on Twitter that played the Canadian Tulip Festival.

The Canadian Tulip Festival runs May 3 to 20 in various locations throughout Ottawa. The festival boasts displays of over one million tulips and annually attracts more than half a million visitors. Currently, the festival’s website shows the tulip meter is at four out of five tulips, meaning that the flowers are almost at their best.

Along with collecting tweets specifically mentioning the festival, MediaMiser also monitored Twitter for  generic mentions of #tulip and #tulips – the Canadian Tulip Festival garnered an impressive 47 per cent of all those tweets. 

That’s even more impressive when one realizes there are plenty other tulip festivals going on right now. MediaMiser also collected tweets mentioning tulips or tulip festivals in the Netherlands (of course), New York, Michigan, Great Britain and Singapore.

Former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker is credited with saying that “dogs know what to do with polls.”    

And that came from an era in the late 50s and early 60s when polls were considered fairly accurate – unlike today. We now live in a less homogenized society that’s not only extremely segmented along cultural lines, it’s even heavily segmented by technology.

No longer can a pollster easily target a land line-based sample and get an accurate result reflecting the feelings of the general electorate.

Many people, especially young people, are switching from landlines to cell phones. Many people are on do-not-call lists or refuse to pick up when they don’t recognize the number on call display, along with the fact that some people these days choose to forego phone calls altogether and communicate via email and social media.

Furthermore, people aren’t getting their information and news from a single source. We live in the age of social media where, according to IBM, 80 per cent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. 

B.C. New Democrat Adrian Dix went into yesterday’s provincial election with a 20-point lead over Liberal Leader and Premier Christy Clark. But when the dust settled, the only numbers that really mattered showed something radically different: The Liberals went on to win at least 50 seats to the NDP’s 32. Christy Clark ironically though lost her own seat.

How could the pollsters get it so wrong? Again?

On the eve of the 2011 Federal Election, MediaMiser also predicted the pollsters would get it wrong. 

The ground underneath traditional pollsters is moving too fast. To regain their accuracy, they’re going to have to learn to combine sources from social media along with traditional polling techniques, as well as developing new methodologies.

If they do it right, they won’t only improve their accuracy but they’ll also save money in the end.

After all, when you’re doing analysis, the more data points you have the more accurate your results will be.   

Until then, the polls seem to have truly gone to the dogs.

As you can see in last night’s game chart Phaneuf and Kessel’s goals created massive volume spikes followed by the post-game celebration which caused a series high spike of 2619 tweets. Boston fans remained subdued throughout, even after Lucic’s goal. Seems like they knew the writing was on the wall for this one.

We fully expect to see Toronto fans tweet up a storm for tonight’s series final in Beantown. Join in by tweeting with the hashtags #goleafsgo or #leafs.  

Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to check out our ongoing NHL Playoffs Twitter analysis at HockeyTrashTweet.com, which is tracking tweets about all 16 teams in the first round.

But if you’ve been following our page for a few days now, you might be wondering which hashtags, teams or @ mentions are the most popular overall. 

For those of you out west, you’re about to be disappointed – only two of the top 10 most popular hashtags or @ mentions (#Canucks and #Blackhawks) are from the Western Conference. The rest are from the East (all numbers listed are daily averages):

1. #habs 9,725
2. #bruins 9,251
3. #leafs 8,870
4. #Canucks 8,851
5. @MapleLeafs 7,949
6. #sens 7,522
7. #pens 7,397
8. @Penguins 6,826
9. #Blackhawks 6,372
10. #Isles 4,697

It’s worth noting that the #habs hashtag received a large boost (perhaps ironically) in mentions after the Montreal Canadiens were eliminated by the Ottawa Senators last night.

But what about the most popular teams overall, when all search terms are taken into consideration? Again, all numbers are daily averages of the number of tweets of each team’s Twitter handle plus most popular two hashtags (in this case the West fares a little better, with four teams in the top 10):

1. Toronto Maple Leafs 21,446
2. Pittsburgh Penguins 17,565
3. Montreal Canadiens 14,628
4. Ottawa Senators 13,153
5. Vancouver Canucks 12,162
6. Chicago Blackhawks 11,517
7. Boston Bruins 11,586
8. Detroit Red Wings 8,062
9. L.A. Kings 6,444
10. Washington Capitals 6,587

Last night was tough for fans at the Air Canada Center. David Krejci’s shot squeaked past James Reimer on the short side in OT giving Boston a three games to one lead in the series. 

Boston fans erupted on twitter celebrating the win (and Krejci’s hat trick) with a series high of 1800 tweets. (See the spike below or view the interactive version at HockeyTrashTweet.com) 

However, not all of those tweets were focused on the drama on the ice. Approximately 2,000 tweets since last night mentioned the eye roll seen across the hockey world between Leafs’ captain Dion Phaneuf’s fiancee Elisha Cuthbert (whom you may remember from Popular Mechanics for Kids and The Girl Next Door) and Leafs’ goalie James Reimer’s wife April. 

Cuthbert and Reimer later tweeted a photo of themselves smiling together and saying the ‘death stare’ was a result of a nearby fan saying something negative and not a catfight between the two.

For those who were thinkin @happyelishas and I were rolling our eyes @ eachother. Was the jerk beside us #rudecomment twitter.com/april_reimer/s…

— April Reimer (@april_reimer) May 9, 2013

Well, glad that was cleared up at least….

The series moves back to Boston tomorrow where it’ll be up to the Leafs to determine whether or not some of Friday’s Leafs tweets will include the hashtag #golf. 

Yesterday at Social Media Camp, speakers were focused on getting attendees up-to-speed with the different social media  platforms and their basic usages. However, today’s speakers seem geared towards content marketing, influencing consumers, and generally leveraging social media to generate ROI.

Today’s keynote was kicked off by Sam Fiorella (@samfiorella), co-author of ‘Influnce Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media‘ and a partner at Sensei Marketing.

Sam’s presentation was focused on creating ROI by influencing customers through social media and his keynote was obviously selected to set the tone of today’s sessions. With references and quotes from David Ogilvy and Daniel Edelman, Sam’s goal was to get social media practitioners thinking about the bottom-line.

Sam also touched upon linguistic mapping, which MediaMiser has incorporated into its social media monitoring and analytics platforms along with other technology like textual content extraction.

After such a great start we’re excited for the rest of day two’s sessions (including our own Chris Morrison speaking at the Social Showcase).

And a reminder to Social Media Camp attendees who are also hockey fans to check out HockeyTrashTweet.com to see how your NHL team fared last night on Twitter. We know Vancouver and Montreal fans aren’t too happy with last night’s scores and refereeing. HockeyTrashTweet.com will give you a chance to see how fans reacted to key plays and calls. Canucks and Habs fans will also be able to compare their fans’ tweet volume to Ottawa Senators and San Jose Sharks fans. 

This is MediaMiser’s second year at Social Media Camp in Victoria. Last year was such a great experience, we had to do it again.

Last night, the conference kicked off with a party at the Strathcona Hotel in Victoria’s city centre. It was a great start to the event – food, beer, networking and live music.

Tuesday’s keynote speaker at Victoria’s Social Media Camp, Mari Smith.

Flying in from Ottawa yesterday and being from a time zone that’s three hours ahead, getting up early for the official start of the conference this morning was not much of an issue for us. This afforded the team plenty of time to set up our booth, go for a morning run, or even show up for a brisk yoga session if so inclined – I personally was not, and just stuck to my run through B.C.’s capital city.

Victoria is such a beautiful city. The picture-perfect morning made it easy to get motivated for the day’s activities.

Further motivation was also provided by the successful launch of our NHL playoff Twitter tracking page, which is powered by our newest social media and digital news product, MediaMiser SNAP. The traffic to MediaMiser’s Hockeytrashtweet.com has gone through the roof since yesterday’s launch and is great timing for Social Media Camp, since the majority of attendees love hockey and social media – a perfect combination, if you ask me.

(L-R) Martin, Chris and Tara at the MediaMiser booth at Social Media Camp. Come and say hi!

Today’s keynote, Mari Smith, has just finished her address and MediaMiser looks forward to the rest of the conference. This year’s version of #SMCamp already looks bigger than last year’s and I wasn’t surprised to hear from the Mayor of Victoria, Dean Fortin, that Victoria’s version is the largest Social Media Camp in Canada. Mayor Fortin even refers to Victoria as the #YYJ community, exemplifying why Social Media Camp and Victoria are a perfect match.

If you’re at Social Media Camp, please visit the MediaMiser booth and let us know if you’ve checked our page, read our blog or if you have any other questions. We would be happy to answer them.

Helpful Social Media Camp Facts:

• Official hashtag: #SMCamp
• Wifi Network: vcc
• Hashtags for Victoria: #YYJ and #Victoria
• Victoria’s Social Media Camp is the largest in Canada.
• If you want to buy me a beer, I like the West Coast IPA.

Well, esteemed Senators and Habs fans, I bet you didn’t expect to see that last night.

And if the number of Twitter mentions about the now-infamous dustup at the Bank is any indication, extracurricular activities on the ice seem to get people tweeting!

But don’t take my word for it – have a look yourself on our new webpage, HockeyTrashTweet.com, which is tracking tweets about every team in the NHL Playoffs on a game-by-game basis. The page shows Twitter graphs for the last game played of all eight current series, plus there are clickable archives if you’re interested in scrolling through data generated from past games. The page is now live, so check it out.

And in the meantime, a few notes about yesterday’s games:

OT brilliance on Long Island

- Pittsburgh looked to be the team on the losing end after letting a two-goal lead get away from them in the third period (see the spikes beginning at around 14:30). But Chris Kunitz’ OT goal then caused a gigantic spike in Penguins tweets around 15:15 (as well as causing the end of the game, of course). Check out the spike.

Violence in O-town

- Look at that spike at the end of the game, right around the same time everyone on both teams started fighting. It dwarfs activity from the rest of the game. ‘Nuff said.

Getting Wild in Minnesota

Chicago fans thought they might have caused the biggest spike of the game just before 6 p.m., when their team tied the match and sent it to overtime. But the biggest jump was reserved for Wild fans, who went ballistic after Jason Zucker won it in overtime (see the spike just before 18:15).

Vancouver Can-nots?

There wasn’t a whole lot of chatter from either Canucks or Sharks fans until the end of last night’s game, after Vancouver goalie Corey Schneider fell apart and allowed multiple goals in the third period. San Jose eventually won 5-2, with most of the chatter coming in the third period (see the chart).