I know you wouldn't care less for a Royal Wedding, but any event that is bound to attract international attention is an interesting playground for social media watchers. So, here is what is going on.
The official social media web is well...woven already, and it features an
official website, a
charity fund, a
facebook page (under the low-profile name "The British Monarchy"), a
Twitter account (which you would have difficulty finding under the name "ClarenceHouse") and of course a
YouTube channel (named "The Royal Channel"). So, not a very successful branding exercise in terms of consistency.
I will update this post with other info and tidbits from the social media coverage of the event as we reach the event date...Stay tuned!
[UPDATE]
So, they kissed (they would, wouldn't they?)
Anyway, now that is all over, here is what I cherry-picked so far.
- paidContent reports that the BBC experienced some "technical issues" from the surge of traffic to its live coverage webpage. Apparently, YouTube (streaming BBC's channel) did not have any problems. Various sources claim that Twitter held very well. It seems the days of the failwhale are behind now.
- According to Mashable, the event has broken the record of concurrent viewers on Livestream channel, topping 300.000 viewers, while Akamai reports that it has broken wider livestreaming records, surpassing the World Cup 2010 peak.
- A Telegraph post mentions that 1mill people were updating on Facebook producing 74 mentions per second, while Twitter witnessed 67 mentions of "royal wedding' per second. By the way, the Telegraph partnered with Color app to allow realtime sharing of eye-witness photos of the event. The best of them will be showcased in the newspaper.
- The #royalwedding hashtag was probably more popular than the official #rw2011, maybe because few people knew there was an official hashtag.
- Probably not up to the minute numbers crunched by Webtrends, mentioned in USA Today, show that the US has shown an intense interest in the event, being responsible for 65% of all the social media buzz around the wedding during the past month, while the UK was responsible for 20% only. Obviously, a population weight is in order here. Read the Webtrends blogpost here with more numbers (posted before the wedding) and an infographic here.
- A Guardian interactive visualization of Twitter made by data specialists Infomous looks very impressive.
Posting whatever makes me click.