About 8,000 people officially attended the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, the biotech-investment marked by crowded hallways, expensive drinks and general excess. But a much larger audience, including me, watched the meeting from afar via new media, from a hundreds of webcasts to thousands of tweets.
I wanted to capture what the meeting looked like for those viewing it through the lens of social media, and four charts tell the story.
Two years ago, when online discussion of J.P. Morgan hit the mainstream, there were a few hundred tweets. A blog post at the time said the #JPM10 hashtag was “widely used.” A year later, the number of tweets had almost doubled. And we’ll nearly quadruple last year’s number. The online aspect of the meeting has exploded.
But it’s not fair to say that the in-person aspects of the meeting took a back seat to Twitter. A look at tweets in the two weeks leading up to the meeting shows that those on Twitter were interested in connecting in real life, not cyberspace. The most often-used word? RSVP.
So what companies garnered the buzz on Twitter? If you were a newsmaking biotech, that helped. So did presenting earlier in the week. And having Adam Feuerstein of The Street take a special interest in a company helped boost tweets. On this map (complete map also available), bigger circles mean more tweets and retweets including the ticker symbol. And thicker lines means more attention from a given tweeter.
Of course, for those of us in the communication game, it’s always interesting to see who managed to generate the most retweets. This sprawling map (complete PDF copy also available) shows every RT or mention about #JPM12 over the past three weeks — all 2,000 of them. As ever, the big drivers were journalists, with Adam Feuerstein — again — coming up as far-and-away the most-engaged guyon Twitter.
If you’d like more information on the flow of social information at a future meeting, please let me — or your WCG contact — know.
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