Swine flu madness took hold of the U.S. last week as reports of the illness trickled from Mexico into the states. It was virtually impossible to avoid hearing, reading and listening about it, and the Internet was definitely not immune to this sweeping topic.
According to figures released earlier this week by Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the online conversation about the virus had already risen to levels nearly 10 times that of the salmonella and peanut butter panic from a few months ago.
Or, “to put it in another cultural perspective, the chatter about swine flu even dwarfs that of recent viral media star Susan Boyle,” the company noted in its press release.
According to Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse, which tracks trends on blogs, nearly 1.0 percent of all blog posts late last week were about the swine flu outbreak. This dwarfs the 0.35 percent share of all blog posts about Susan Boyle’s sweeping performance on “Britain’s Got Talent” during its peak about two weeks ago, and the 0.15 percent share of all blog posts about the salmonella scare in the middle of January.
On Twitter, swine flu was discussed in nearly 2.0 percent of all tweets by Monday.
Nielsen also notes that the Wikipedia page for the swine flu was updated 60 times between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Monday, and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responded in fast fashion.
The organization unveiled a special section dedicated to providing updates and information about the swine flu that includes “key facts, related items and the ability to share/post the page to social bookmarking and social networking sites,” the Nielsen press release noted.
The CDC garnered increased mentions in the blogosphere thanks to the swine flu outbreak. According to BlogPulse, more than 0.200 percent of all blog posts mentioned “CDC,” “Center for Disease Control” or “Centers for Disease Control” last week.
During the salmonella/peanut butter scare, the CDC was mentioned in almost 0.125 percent of all blog posts during the peak of the buzz about the topic.
According to Google Trends as of Monday, “swine flu” attracted search traffic of 20.0 on the search volume index scale.
Sources:
http://www.nielsen-online.com/pr/pr_090427.pdf
http://www.google.com/trends?q=swine+flu&ctab=0&geo=us&date=2009-4&sort=0
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