Many of us will remember these days for the rest of our lives. Some will remember exactly what they were doing at the exact moment that they heard the news. Others casually passed the information around without a second thought. While each person may have taken the news of Osama Bin Laden being found and killed at the command of President Barack Obama, one thing is clear: the news spread like wildfire via social media.
Sheldon Levine of Sysomos talks about what he found using their social media monitoring and analytics platform:
In less than 12 hours since the tweeting began we saw almost 40,000 blog post and news articles and an astounding 2.2 million tweets all talking about Osama Bin Laden. As well, while no surprise that people in the US were talking the most about this event a look at our geo-location map shows us that people all over the world were tweeting about the news.
Not only did the news itself spread quickly, but even jokes about the event caught on and spread rapidly. Many people began checking into Foursquare at the place where Osama was killed while others began checking into a “Post Osama Bin Laden World.” By this morning, Levine found 11,570 tweets that made reference to Foursquare and Bin Laden or were check-in’s related to Bin Laden.
Important to note here is that, while services like Twitter were instrumental in spreading the news, social media doesn’t seem to replace the news. As TechCrunch points out, Twitter was used to amplify the news, but the source could usually be traced back to a traditional news source. Of course, there are always the rare cases where someone beats traditional channels, like the guy who unwittingly live-tweeted the raid on Bin Laden.
Personally, I was deep in an MMO when the news broke. I had just upgraded the wife’s NOOK Color and she was checking out the new apps available. Then, after checking her Facebook, she said everyone was posting about Osama Bin Laden being killed. The next thing I knew, my show was being interrupted for a Special Report.
What were you doing when it all went down?
via Sysomos Blog