Digithoughts

What more is there to say about Steve Jobs? Everyone has been talking about his death last Wednesday and, still—one week later—tributes are being featured on the front page of major newspapers and his name is filling social media and news feeds. Most everyone has paying tribute to his visionary leadership and a few ‘bad apples’ discussing picketing his funeral (note this hilariously hypocritical tweet posted via Twitter for iPhone).

The volume of public morning for a CEO is unprecedented. Individuals and companies around the world have paid unbelievable tributes to Steve Jobs from iPad vigils to a Google homepage tribute.

It’s clear from these public dedications that Steve Jobs had an immeasurable impact on the world. But as an analytics expert, my tendency will always be to go to the numbers. One social analytics tool Digitaria uses, Radian6, helps monitor online chatter around celebrities, brands, topics and trends. Since the news of his death last Wednesday, there have been over 7.6 million mentions of Steve Jobs in social media within the channels that are publicly accessible. The true reach is unknown, with hundreds of millions of Facebook and Twitter users that protect their status updates using privacy settings.

Like so many others, I first learned of the news through Twitter. On the day of his death, there were nearly 4 million posts in micromedia about Steve Jobs. Mentions of Steve Jobs on Twitter dwarf all other social mediums; still, the news had a monumental impact within each of these social channels.

In an effort to measure the impact of Steve Jobs, here are the total mentions of "Steve Jobs" on Wednesday, October 5th by media type:
·      Micromedia (Twitter and FriendFeed) 3,834,301
·      Blogs 47,215
·      Forum Replies 65,630
·      Facebook 28,160
·      Comments 27,802
·      Aggregators 12,485
·      Mainstream News 9,221
·      Forums 6,528
·      Images 1,361
·      Videos 1,719  

The charts below represent how influential Steve Jobs has been to the world. In short, he is a true visionary that will be missed for generations.

Rachelle Maisner Web Analyst

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