Crazy isn’t it!

Nathan Bush has some analysis here…

And here’s what we sent the press:

Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s reunion show steamrolled the debut of Celebrity Masterchef Australia in an online ratings whitewash last night, reaching a peak of almost 7,000 Twitter conversations an hour versus 1,600 for Masterchef.

The data, collected by Brisbane-based social media monitoring company Dialogix (http://www.dialogix.com.au) showed that Twitter users mentioned the words “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” and tagged conversations with the hashtag #HeyHey more than 22,000 times while the show screened.

Celebrity Masterchef Australia generated 2,740 Twitter conversations, or less than 15% of Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s total.

The influx of tweets made Hey Hey it’s Saturday the number one trending topic on Twitter, which attracted global attention from the social network’s 19 million followers*.

The #HeyHey tag then became popular with American users throughout the night who noticed the trend and began using the words #HeyHey in unrelated conversations.

Dialogix Director Matt Granfield said Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s Twitter success was given a boost early on in the day when host Daryl Sommers (http://twitter.com/darylsomers) joined the network. His first tweet was “make sure you tweet about Hey Hey tonight, using the hashtag #heyhey”.

“Traditional TV ratings give you the number of people who watched a program, but if you measure people who spoke about a show on Twitter you get a better analysis of who actually ENGAGED with the show,” Mr Granfield Said.

“The show had more than 200,000 Facebook fans on the day it went to air and messages were posted on that network alerting people to the fact that host Daryl Somers had just joined Twitter. Within 24 hours Daryl had 1,383 followers.”

Twitter is the fastest-growing social network in Australia with around 800,000 unique Australian users each month.

I just made this for a pitch presentation and thought I’d share. It’s staggering.

Monday 31 August 2009: Virgin Blue Airlines is celebrating turning nine years old with $9 seats on sale across a range of routes in the first of what the airline says will be regular ‘Twitter’ sales. The $9 ‘Tweet seats’, priced deliberately at less than a bottle of birthday champagne, will only be available on the Virgin Blue Twitter website – www.twitter.com/virginblue.

blah blah blah blah…

Virgin Blue Group Chief Executive Officer, Brett Godfrey, said, “This is a bit of fun and also a bit of an experiment trialling distribution through one of the latest forms of social media.

“Our marketing team has been closely watching worldwide consumer trends in markets where travellers are already social media savvy and we see Australians fast developing a following for Twitter as a source of the latest information regarding a wide range of products and services including airline news.

“With the current trend in real time news and information we expect the fares will be snapped up quickly,” Brett Godfrey finished.

To follow Virgin Blue on Twitter and take advantage of the “tweet seats”, check out www.twitter.com/virginblue.

This Twitter thing is really catching on…

I just published a quick post on Twitter’s new ‘Twitter 101 for Business Guide‘ but I thought I’d make special mention of their measuring advice - this is straight from the website in the best practices section. It’s quite good:

Before you set up measurement tools, focus on the quality of your engagement, and use your gut to check how things are going. How’s the feedback and interaction with your followers? Are you responding to most or your @messages? Are most tweets about you positive? Or if they started out largely negative, are they coming around? Are more people beginning to engage with you and mention your company?

Next, think about quantifying your experience. Although it can be tricky to add up the value of relationships, Twitter does lend itself to measurement in a few ways—especially if you’ve already defined what you hope will be different for your company in three months, six months or a year if you succeed on Twitter. Tactics like these can then help you assess your progress in meeting that goal:

• Keep a tally of questions answered, customer problems resolved and positive exchanges held on Twitter. Do the percentages change over time?
• When you offer deals via Twitter, use a unique coupon code so that you can tell how many people take you up on that Twitter-based promotion. If you have an online presence, you can also set up a landing page for a promotion, to track not only click-throughs but further behavior and conversions.
• Use third-party tools to figure out how much traffic your websites are receiving from Twitter.
• Track click-throughs on any link you post in a tweet. Some URL shortening services let you track click-throughs.

I’ve been writing posts along these lines for the last year and every day it seems another entrepreneurial web design/marketing/social media/pr/advertising/research firm is holding a seminar/webinar/conference/hoedown/stadium tour on how to use Twitter for business, but at last, the Twitts themselves have released their own version. Twitter 101 for Business has just been launched on the Twitter website and by golly gosh, it’s handy. Topics include:

• What is Twitter?
• Getting Started
• Learn the Lingo
• Best Practices
• Case Studies
• Other Resources

There’s even a series of slides you can download to show your boss. Neato!

It’s the best thing since Google released their expanded webmaster guidelines a couple of years ago (a must read if you haven’t brushed up in a while).