This month:
- The top 20 UK councils for online reputation
- The Media Mix – News v Blogs v Twitter etc
- Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council: Strikes & Royal Weddings!
The Top 20
The top 20 councils ranked by social media sentiment (subject to them attaining a minimum number of references during the month – Districts = 100 mentions, Counties and Unitaries = 300) for this month are:
Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council: Strikes & Royal Weddings!
Our top performing council this month has achieved a high number of mentions along with the highest score of all councils on social media. Looking at the month in more detail, we see two clear spikes in mentions.
The first peak covers a strike at a school in Darwen. This made national news and hence received a high volume of social media attention as the news filtered through online. It received a number of comments, particularly with the topic of discipline within schools being so emotive.
The other peak in mentions came from Prince William and Kate Middleton’s official engagement to Lancashire. This was the last before the Royal Wedding – one of the biggest social media events we have seen! Along with discussions on dresses, hats and carriages came a lot of focus on the role of social media in this event, and the way that the Royal Family have embraced social media. The Royal Family have their own YouTube channel, a Royal Wedding website and @ClarenceHouse kept all Twitter followers updated on royal happenings. This looks like a good indication of all types of organisations opening themselves up to the benefits of social media.
Buzz and Media Mix
Next, this month’s total references to ‘Councils’ online is:
The dip we see can be explained when we look into the media mix below …
The Media mix is:
By segmenting the total buzz into media categories we can see that whilst mentions on other forms of media remain fairly steady, news mentions have fallen sharply. This can be explained by a change in social media reporting. In June last year reporting methods were adjusted to account for the syndication of news across online newspapers that share content. This syndication has been removed from reporting over the last few months. This can be seen by the sharp increase in news mentions in June 2010 and by the drop that we have seen recently.
Notes.
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Monthly Buzz Index methodology – Details can be found here
About CouncilMonitor – CouncilMonitor trawls the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, searching through news, blogs, forums and social media sites. It reads through all of this information and summarises what’s being said about UK councils, and can even tell you whether the sentiment is positive or negative (similar to the election worm we have seen at #leadersdebate). The service was launched in December 2009 so is still quite early on, but by measuring a benchmark group of councils on a consistent basis we hope to be able to provide some national trend information relating to what people are saying about their councils – and how they choose to say it.