It’s estimated that SXSW draws a week-long crowd of roughly 150k people and maybe 3x that many people are following it around the world (or commenting about it online). So you’re looking at an audience of around 500k people paying attention to the festival in some way. That’s a big number.

Now it’s safe to assume a significant number of SXSW goers are tech-savy and have Twitter accounts, so we’ll just stick with saying there are at least 250k active Twitter accounts  and are tweeting about SXSW.

Of these 250k SXSW related Twitter accounts, in order for SXSW to become a trending topic, we have two basic requirements:

1. The tweet must be Public.
2. The tweet must contain “SXSW”

Based on the fact that SXSW is a huge event, and with hundreds of mini-events happening simultaneously across the city, we’re more likely to see a smattering of sxsw ‘related’ tweets, that don’t actually contain the SXSW letters.

Example: (”OMG, Bill Murray is bar-tending at Shangri-La! This week is crazy!”)  — that did happen.

Yes, adding the hashtag #sxsw would have included it in our Trending Topic mission. But the reality is, not every Twitter user is thinking like an SEO expert and making sure their tweets are being indexed by Twitter for popular search terms. We have to accept the fact that there’s a lot more tweets flying through the system related to SXSW, but they won’t actually be tagged as such.

Now let’s consider that the festival is a week long, and event’s are happening from dawn til … the next dawn. This gives our 250k Twitter users a giant window to publish their SXSW tweets. They aren’t all happening within a short time frame. (say, the few minutes just after a season finale of some big TV show).

Ok, but big stuff does happen at SXSW

Sure, there might be 5k people packed into a venue to catch a “secret” Kanye West or Metallica show. But even if the entire audience picked up their phone and gave the perfectly crafted ‘SXSW tweet’ at once, it’s only 5k people. And they would have to have a huge follower base that’s interested in retweeting the info for the ball to start rolling towards Trending.

If we take our 250k SXSW Twitter accounts and consider a few things:

• Not every tweet will contain ‘SXSW’
• They tweet at various times throughout the week
• The tweets aren’t about the same subject, because so much is happening.
• Even the most popular events of the festival only have 5-10k people attending.

Twitter has slowly been adding different cities to the Local Trends list over the last year. And it’s not surprising Austin isn’t on the list yet (we are a city of only a million people, after all.) There was hope Austin would get some early exposure because of it’s ties to making Twitter popular, and the size of the tech / social media savvy crowd. And maybe Austin isn’t far down the list of receiving ‘the local trends.’

The local trends can be somewhat helpful, and I’d expect SXSW or ACL to show up on a Local Trends list without a problem.

Of course, an easy solution if you’re trying to find out what’s happening in your area is to get nerdy with Advanced Twitter Search. Just set your location and a small radius and then start checking various search terms around the subject you’re interested in. I do this all the time.

ex: Search: “fire” near:78701 within:1mile

It’s a quick way to get an idea of what’s happening in an area. I’d expect this would be a great tool for journalist to start scooping stories. But this is spilling into another blog post idea.

The bottom line is that with the major Trending Topics millions of people are quickly talking about one subject at one specific moment. That’s a lot to compete with, when you consider the fragmented and comparatively tiny audience of SXSW, ACL, Coachella, Sasquatch, Lollapalooza, or whatever other festival you fancy.

In trying to grow the amount of people “following” me, I’ve often struggled with trying not to narrow what I post online into one specific niche; while at the same time recognizing that targeting a very specific audience is exactly what builds followers. It’s my blogging paradox, if you will.

The most ‘followed’ people online have a very targeted message and their audiences know what type of content they will find by returning to a specific blog. Just like everyone else, I have many interests (aka passions) and have no specific drive to in dilute these interests down to one specific niche.

This really came to my attention in the last few weeks as I’ve frequently been getting and losing Twitter followers.

I can absolutely understand why it’s happening too and here’s why… 

One of my tweets will be about search marketing, and within a few hours I’ll get a new follower (or two!) that’s clearly monitoring Twitter for mentions of Search Marketing keywords. However, I might not make another tweet about search marketing for a few days; choosing instead to discuss music or social events.

True to form, after a few too many “non-SEM” tweets, I’ll lose those specific followers. Though I may gain a few followers interested in music and local Austin events.

The struggle, I suppose, is trying to decide whether I’m capable of finding an online audience that’s just. like. me.

You know, the average analytical online marketer / graphic designer / indie music nerd / who rides motorcycles / fixed gear bikes.

Sure, I could just jump on one of the previously mentioned topics and choose to only cover that in my blog.

That would make a lot of damned sense, but it wouldn’t be me. It would be a fraction of me, and thus only deserving of a fraction of my attention.

So I guess we’ll see what happens. If you’ve got thoughts on this, or want to share your approach to growing an online audience, please share.

Let me describe the swirl of thoughts that run through my head whenever I mention a brand name…

The second before I type the company name, I start to consider whether that company is doing any ORM (Online Reputation Managment) and if they’ll ever see my mention of their name.

It’s always my hope that the company I’m mentioning is savvy enough to be actively measuring their brand in social media. After all, I’m making the effort to mention them, so whether they’re listening or not it’s possible my comment will have some affect on their business. (Yes I recognize that this blog is brand new and gets very little attention; but if a tree falls in the forest… it can still be heard.) 

This whole post was spawned from noticing “zoom zoom” show up in a ‘trending topics’ cloud the other day. It got me thinking about how many businesses put their feelers out to monitor more than just the mention of their name and expand it to include slogans, products, ad campaigns or even their brand image.

Imagine you’re running errands all day and in the midst of it you fire-off the Tweet: “Dog park > Coffee w/ @yourmom > oil change > cleaners > groceries > daycare! Zoom Zoom!”

and right there at the end of your tweet you’ve done something for Mazda. You’ve shown them how the Zoom Zoom campaign slogan is reaching far enough to be transformed to an idea rather than just a tag line in a commercial. Success! 

Of course, if they aren’t listening to social media with keen ears, they’ll have to rely on other methods for measuring their reach. 

Ok, maybe that’s not a great example. I just wanted to illustrate that these are the things I think about during the day. Hopefully I’m not alone.

As more big names keep showing up on Twitter (Southwest, Comcast, MSNBC) people are get more excited about using Twitter as a means for connecting with real people inside these companies. Obviously everyone wants to be heard and right now Twitter is a great spot for the little guy to actually be heard by the corporate giants.

And for a while this will actually be possible. However, as more people jump on the Twitter bandwagon, the ability for these corporations to keep up with all the @ replies and name mentions will suffer.

Think of it in the same way 800 numbers can occasionally be released as ‘getting you straight to a real person.” For example, if someone finds an easy way to get ‘a live body’ via a stealthy 800 number, they’ll give the number to their friends; who in-turn give it to their friends. Before long everyone has the ’stealth 800 number’ and… everyone is sitting on hold, not getting any attention. That… or the number changes.

And that’s exactly my point. For now Twitter’s signal : noise ratio is benefiting both the companies PR department and the little guys. We feel connected to an otherwise unscalable barrier of communication to the corporate giants.

The question is how long will Twitter remain the ’stealthy 800 number’ and what happens next? 

Aside: Yes there are some major companies doing some very unique things with Twitter. Jennifer Laycock over at SearchEngineGuide has an article citing some examples.