The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has just finished providing evidence at the Iraq Inquiry. While the event was highly anticipated, on Twitter, Blair’s and Campbell’s testimonies both generated a far greater volume of tweets, as this graph shows, topping trending topics in the UK. To put this into context, there were more tweets about Jon Venables, Carol Vorderman and the campaign to save BBC Radio 6 today than there were about the Iraq Inquiry.

Tweetminster ran a little experiment during today’s testimony: we tracked the conversations around the tweets of @glenoglaza (Sky News), @bbclaurak (BBC News) and @iraqinquiryblog (Channel4) during Brown’s testimony.

Here’s some of data that emerged, and that we found most interesting:

Number of mentions and retweets (the number of replies and tweets containing the analysed accounts plus the number of retweets. The figure excludes the number of tweets posted by the three users):

@glenoglaza: 122
@bbclaurak: 75
@iraqinquiryblog: 82

Number of these to originate from “top-influencers” (politicians, journalists, news sources and commentators):

@glenoglaza: 22
@bbclaurak: 8
@iraqinquiryblog: 21

This figure can be better understood by adding that @mirandasky and @tom_rayner were central to sharing and distributing @glenoglaza’s tweets, as were @channel4news @krishgm @frasere @alfieconn with @iraqinquirys’.

Sentiment score of tweets from, and conversations (e.x. replies) around, the three analysed accounts (measured on a scale of -100 to +100, where the latter is all positive. 0 is neutral):

@glenoglaza: -2
@bbclaurak: 0
@iraqinquiryblog: -18

Number of  tweets (across Twitter) containing the url of each broadcasters’ live coverage of the inquiry:

Sky: 26
BBC: 64
Channel4: 53

Notes: All tweets were dynamically compiled and analysed during the duration of the testimony. Sources: Twitter, Tweetminster Search.

Posted at Fri, Mar 5th 2010, 16:33
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