May 2, Osama bin Laden, and Another Defining Moment in the Maturation of Social Media

Today’s events in Pakistan and the US President’s address to the nation are another example of how core social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere are maturing and becoming trusted, “you heard it here first” sources of news and information.

As someone who’s a keen proponent, student, and thinker around social media, days like today are ideal to sit back and observe how social media is main-streaming and impacting on the world. I’m not seeking to comment on the political aspects of the mission in Pakistan against Osama bin Laden – but I did take the opportunity as news broke to focus social media monitoring technology from one of our business partners on what is surely the years biggest story (well, year to date at least!)

I was actually getting ready for a CEO presentation tomorrow to a group of TEC members aimed at helping them, as business leaders understand social media – what was interesting was the emergence of Osama bin Laden as a trending topic on Twitter – I had logged into Twitter at lunch time in Brisbane half expecting the usual top global topics to be around another celebrity being a tard, or the late East Coast US sports results.

Call me crazy but #osama and #obl were just too damn interesting not to be distracted.Given Obama’s address to the nation went out so late on Sunday night (ET) I was curious as to how quickly this would grow. This first screen capture shows what we’ve picked up just 7 hours after the critical White House announcement – this shows a track on Osama bin Laden with a number of obvious variations:

Is Osama trending? Absolutely. Now if we drill into this, we can start to examine the breakout of how this content is being generated and distributed:

Ignore the numbers for the moment – this data is changing by the minute, particularly as we head towards Monday morning on the East Coast. What has stood out for me already is just how quickly and comprehensively the social sphere has overtaken mainstream media.

One key point I’ve seen emerge already is around sentiment distribution – this is something I’ll be keeping an eye on over the next 24 hours. I’ll be posting updates as we start to see more data captured and analysed.