This Labor Day weekend, as thousands of North Carolinians made a trek to the beach, others headed inland to Charlotte in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention and the preliminary festivities. On Monday, the excitement was palpable in Uptown as “CarolinaFest” served to get audiences pumped up for the opening day of the DNC. The streets were overflowing with vendors, street performers, temporary exhibits and thousands of chanting supporters, who all came together in celebration of North Carolina’s first-ever national convention.
After experiencing the fervor first-hand, it was hard to imagine that (as right-leaning media suggested) the Democrats would have problems filling seats at either venue where the speeches were originally scheduled to be given. Convention officials were unfazed by this possibility and rightly so; enthusiasm at the event and via social media was at an all-time high for the first night of speeches. Signs were hung from various booths in the heart of the DNC activities to “keep calm and Tweet #DNC2012” and on the first night of speeches, viewers all over the country did just that.
In the opening night of DNC speeches alone; the continuously trending topics #DNC2012 and comparable terms received almost 3 million tweets…roughly 3/4ths of the final tweet count (taken over the entire three-day period) of the Republican National Convention. While all of the openers were well received (the numbers don’t lie!), the most prominent twitter conversations took place during the speeches of the Mayor Julian Castro (of San Antonio, TX.) and our First Lady, Michelle Obama.
Mayor Castro’s speech peaked at 11,503 tweets per minute (TPM) which was higher than all of the GOP speakers excluding Mitt Romney himself. However, the “magic” really happened when Michelle Obama took the stage to officially open the convention. Peaking at 28,003 TPM, Mrs. Obama’s speech received twice the amount of “Twitter action” than Mitt Romney’s GOP acceptance speech, which saw 14,289 TPM at its peak. It is truly remarkable that one 25 minute speech could garner so much attention and foster a virtual discussion of mammoth proportions. While the content of the tweets in question undoubtedly varies, the important thing is that it got people talking.
The use of twitter as a forum for political discussion and debate among average Americans and major media entities alike continues to grow and evolve as we near the 2012 election season. Will this explosion of Democratic enthusiasm continue all the way to the polls? Only time will tell. One thing is for certain: Democrats are using all of their available media to ensure that their voices are heard.
(The twitter stats listed above were taken from the Twitter Blog (http://blog.twitter.com/) additional information regarding the DNC can be found at http://www.demconvention.com/ )
–Lauren Habig , Gene Lee, Hannah Eure, Erin Kiffmeyer, Ally Walton
IMC Hawks Blog 
Very well written post here! I was curious myself as to how successful this event was going to turn out but the fact that the First Lady’s speech was yielding 28k TPM is unbelievable. Great use of statistics in this posting! Keep up the good work!
I really enjoy that this post was written about this topic. I have been very fascinated in the use of Twitter in this election. That fact that the president himself has a twitter, and a very popular one is so interesting to me. To see these numbers really sends it home how much people rely on social media. We don’t know if these tweet statistics will indeed reflect the outcome of the election, but it does reflect a way to get voters attention. Social media is now even in our politics, and very much integrated into our politics apparently.
I was one of the thousands who tweeted during Michelle Obama’s speech, so to see the statistics and think about how her speech made this much buzz on this particular social media cite shows how this election will differ from our past presidential elections- Democrats are using it to their full advantage too. Michelle Obama’s speech hit home for me and was so inspirational that it’s no surprise the TPM were so high. I am interested to see how the social media cites impact the election and with so many young Americans using them, hopefully we’ll get more people to the polls this year.