Bieber vs Gadaffi – who wins?

Mar 3, 2011 by Dirk Singer

According to influence measurement system Klout, Justin Bieber is more influential in social media than Barack Obama.   Here are some stats from Canadian research company Sysomos that might give an indication why:

March 1st was Bieber’s 17th birthday.   I didn’t actually know this, but turns out plenty of people did.   In fact over a three day period, Sysomos tells us that there were 3,000 blog posts, 760 online media articles and 75,266 tweets all about the Canadian’s birthday.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Sysomos says that 57% of tweets came from people 20 or younger (though if 3.5% came from the over 50s that still translates into 2600 odd Happy Birthday messages from older fans) and 79% were from females.

I was interested to carry out a little experiment though – what was more popular, the Libyan uprisings happening at the same time, or Bieber’s birthday.    The answer shows that social media might not be as celebrity focused or (depending on your POV) ‘dumbed down’ as people think.

Here are the Trendistic charts showing that Libya hit a high of 0.9% of tweets, and Bieber 0.6%

ScoutLabs (a paid for sentiment monitoring system) however has Bieber gaining on Gadaffi as the birthday approached.  Note I set ScoutLabs to search for Libyan revolution tweets in the broadest sense, but I guess this shows a problem of sentiment analysis and monitoring as a whole.  Consult two different systems and come up with two different answers!

Related articles

• Justin Bieber Middle Finger Photo 2011: Justin Bieber 17 Birthday (nowpublic.com)
• Happy Birthday Justin Bieber! (ksfm.radio.com)