churnbar venturefest report

© Churnbar 2011

http://churnbar.com [email protected]

Period: 1/10/2011 - 6/11/2011

The posts collected were divided into the following Tech classes:

• Web • News • Blog • Microblogs • Media

Summary

Posts by time for “VentureFest Bristol” OR “vfbristol” OR “vfbris”

Commentary

As expected, the majority of the posts on social media about VentureFest Bristol occurred on

the day, with a few smaller peaks in the few days before the event.

Social Media Monitor Report for VentureFest

Bristol 2011

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VentureFest Bristol Posts, separated to Web, Blog, and Microblogs.

Commentary

There were, surprisingly, no posts in the News category, in spite of the number of press releases sent out by the organisers and participants. The pie chart demonstrates that the majority of posts found were microblogs (Twitter and Friendfeed), while there were many more posts in the web category (labelled WWW above) than the blog category; these would primarily have been from blogs on company websites or on their own domains, rather than hosted on posterous, wordpress.com, or blogger.com.

Venturefest Bristol sentiment over time: Positive, Neutral, and Negative.

Commentary

The chart shows that sentiment about VentureFest, as demonstrated in the social media feed, was largely neutral. There were very few negative posts. This could have been a result of having a public twitter feed in the Forum, making people less likely to post negative tweets with

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the hashtags; negative posts may have been made without identifying the event directly for other reasons, and thus not have been returned by the search. Many of the neutral posts were similar to the one below:

“RT @BusinessZone: RT @Dan_Martin: Paul Magelli: Entrepreneurs have got to

be good at convincing people - your bank, investors, staff, spouse! #vfbris Others were along the lines of “at Venturefest”, though there are surprisingly few foursquare check-ins. Positive posts tended to discuss the show in general, and to congratulate the organisers:

“RT @Science_Bristol: Thank you to all involved at Venturefest Bristol 2011 this

week. We hope to see you again next year. #vfbris

Of the two posts that came out negative, neither appears to have been definitively negative (neither was classified with more than 75% probability).1 Note that we measure sentiment through the creation of a training set which is used by the classifier to learn which features of tweets and other posts make them positive or negative. The training set is created by people reading a subset of posts, and thus takes into account irony, sarcasm, and the context of words found.

1 The classifier we use produces probabilities that the post will take each of the possible classifications. All the possible

probabilities add up to one. In the case of the two negative posts found about Venturefest Bristol, there was a probability

greater than 25% that they were not negative.

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Venturefest Bristol average sentiment by tech class over time

Commentary

The three point sentiment scale used has resulted in the chart shown above. This shows again that sentiment, as classified by our system, is generally positive for the three major tech classes in the dataset, Blog, Microblog, and WWW. Note that on some days the chart shows an average of greater than one; this is a result of the smoothing algorithm used when creating the charts.

Timing As already noted, the majority of the posts about VentureFest were posted on the day of the event. The minor peaks prior to the event correlate to announcements of the participants in the Innovation Showcase and the Pitch event, as well as general attendees discussing the event prior to going. We would suggest that this highly skewed distribution of social media posts, and low level of overall posts, represents a missed opportunity for Science City Bristol, Bristol & Bath Science Park, and the participants in the Innovation Showcase and the Pitch to gather followings and promote the event, both before and after, through social media and other channels. Consideration should be given, when planning next year’s event (assuming it will be repeated), to actively engaging all participant companies – and potential participant companies – early on through online competition, discussion, and debate. Creating awards, preferably voted on by the public online, would encourage engagement by prospective participants, and increase awareness of the event.