(I know, …what a terrible blog post title. I must be a little grumpy about the long weekend being over so quickly.)
I thought Sex In the City 2 was a lock to blow the box office away this weekend.
This prediction was, of course, was based on some rigorous research tactics consisting of me mentally tabulating the number of times I heard my wife as well as several women in my office chattering about going to the movie and doing a girls night. The chatter usually included some form of group girly squeal-cheer (..woo hoo, yay!) + numerous references to martinis and cute shoes.
Apparently my predictions were off a bit. Sex In the City 2 got handily beat by a cartoon (Shrek). Shrek raked in $43.3 Million and Sex In the City 2 had $32.1 Million.
Not that $32 Million is a bad box office or anything, but I am thinking it could have been much higher if they had picked a better weekend. One would think Memorial Day weekend would be a great choice, but apparently it is a great choice for doing things with the family …and not going out with the girls to get tipsy and regret saying too much the next day.
Maybe the ladies will recover by cleaning up next weekend.
There is an impressive new site called Social Mention that you should check out. It offers a good analytic report of the real time buzz associated with a keyword(s) submission. It is a very simple 1-step keyword submit to get the result of a set of buzz metrics such as Strength, Sentiment, Reach, and Passion. It has some other key metrics as well as an aggregation of blog posts and articles that match the keyword.
I think the interface for the input as well as for the analysis/report is top notch and it is a site worth your time if you need some basic reporting tool for WOM or Social Media.
Bottom line — it is not an analytics tool that is going to blow you away with concrete ROI data about WOM or Social Media, but let’s be honest that level of concrete ROI analysis does not really exist for WOM and Social yet because nobody has really figured it out (…and it is FREE so please no whining from the data nerd herd).
Recently AddToAny, makers of one of the most popular sharing widgets, published a report on the status of sharing on the Internet today. Some of the results are pretty interesting — not a shocker that Facebook leads the pack with 24%, but I was a little surprised to see that Twitter was only at 10.8% & that Digg and Reddit were under 5%. See the full graph below.
These are definitely interesting stats, but another stat that I would have liked to have seen is how much sharing has grown over the past 1 – 2 years. In addition, I would like to see a stat that isolates the AddToAny widget and compares the amount of sharing from pages/sites that have the widget vs. those that only have the “share via email” feature. I think you would see a massive drop in sharing activity (probably a massive drop in the growth rate of Facebook and Twitter too).
Let’s face it, if it takes more than 1-click to complete an action online the conversion rate for that action drops significantly. In other words, we are very very very lazy.
So, let’s give some credit where it is due. Little widgets like AddToAny are a HUGE part of the reason we are sharing so much these days. I think Mark Zuckerberg should send the AddToAny creators a few million bucks (wunderkind chump change) in thank you money.
