BrandsEye monitored online conversations about Net Prophet, a South African event featuring innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs, to assess its success and brand longevity. They tracked over 6,000 mentions of Net Prophet across social media and websites in 3 months. On the event day, there were over 3,500 tweets using the event hashtag. This extensive reach had an estimated media value of over R900,000 and exposed the event brand to nearly 7 million people. Speakers like Richard Mulholland and Diana Blake generated the most discussion, while positive sentiment and engagement continued after the event.

1. Net Prophet: 12th May 2011
contact@brandseye.com

2. The Brief
• The Brief:
To harness the stories, ideas and future predictions of the
most innovative/successful/creative/ambitious thinkers
and entrepreneurs in the internet space in a fresh,
relevant and engaging format.
• The result:
www.netprophet.org.za

3. BrandsEye’s Role
• BrandsEye monitored and measured the online conversation
about Net Prophet in order to assess the success of the
event and longevity of the brand online.
• Our intention is to provide you with simple, accessible
information about the event itself and of the lasting impact of
the Net Prophet message.
• In this way we aim to assist the organisers and participants of
both current and future events to create increased and lasting
value for our greater online community.

4. What did BrandsEye track?
• Any online conversation about this year’s event since
February, relating to the theme, the speakers, the sponsors
and the attendees themselves!
• Any mentions of Net Prophet across over 35 billion
open-content websites within:
– Social media networks, blogs
– Online news, forums
– Company websites

5. In just over 3 months, this year’s Net Prophet event received
6 093
online mentions by consumers, companies and members of
the press.

6. On the actual day of the event, there were an incredible
3 530
Tweets that either engaged with @NetProphetLive or who used
the “NetProphet” hash tag - a similar volume of conversation
associated with this year’s State of the Nation Address.

7. Volume
• The greatest spikes in conversation occurred on March 16th
when registration opened (110 mentions) and on the day of
the event itself (3 583 mentions).
These volumes were
obtained with relatively
minimal pushing of the
Net Prophet brand with
only 2% and 1% being
driven by the
organisers and press-
based sources
respectively.

8. How many people were reached
by the Net Prophet brand?

9. The potential reach of Net Prophet’s Twitter-based
conversation amounted to
3 708 895
people on that day alone – implying a 53.0% share of the
total conversation across the last 3 months.

10. With such extensive reach, conversation from just that day,
yielded approximately,
R 923 044
in earned media value (the cost saved in paid advertising in
order to reach the same size population online).

11. However, during the last three months, more than
6 994 025
people had the opportunity-to-see and share in the
Net Prophet story.

12. These figures represent a lot of
people! How did we get there?

13. Credibility
The more
people you Are you a
can reach credible
online, source?
the more How many
credible followers
your do you
conversation have?
is.
Most people who talked about Net Prophet had online audiences of
300 - 1000 people (credibility 3 - 4). However, there were also a
higher percentage of respected authors (credibility 5≤), resulting in a
greater overall reach.

14. And reaching credible numbers like that, implies a very valuable
conversation! This yielded approximately,
R 1 619 173
in earned media value (the cost saved in paid advertising media
in order to reach the same size population online).

15. The Net Prophets

16. The speaker who generated the most conversation was
Richard Mulholland, who accounted for
298
mentions alone, of which 88% thereof engaged with
his Twitter presence.

17. However, the audience engaged the most with Diana Blake’s
content, with the Joule concept vehicle receiving
208
direct mentions solely on the day of the event.

18. The Net Prophets
• Gustav Praekelt and Jason Xenopoulos received 137 and
113 mentions respectively, with a large share thereof also
coming from interactions on Twitter.
• Permjot Valia and Rapelang Rabana also generated
considerable volumes of conversation, with 93 and 90
mentions respectively.
• Conversation for these speakers, also focused more on their
content rather than their individual public presences.

19. What was our community saying?

20. Top Themes
1 490
Retweets
on the
day!

21. Top Themes
107
Tweets
pledging
support for
the Net
Prophet
bursary.

22. Visual Support
The conversation trended with overwhelmingly positive
sentiment overall, with only a limited volume of downplaying
mentions relating to small organisational bottlenecks.

23. Visual Support
Great engagement
with speakers’
content

24. Visual Support
Great engagement
even after the
event!

25. Where was this conversation
coming from?

26. Across the last three months as well as on the day of the event,
consumers accounted for a
97%
share of the total conversation. Moreover, considering only 2%
of this conversation was driven by the organisers – this
represents a very successfully enacted engagement campaign.

27. Top Domains
Online engagement with Net Prophet throughout the reporting period
took place predominantly on Twitter, in addition to some press
coverage by Memeburn and Afrinnovator as well as some
conversation happening on blogs like shesthegeek.co.za and
donpackett.posterous.com.

28. There were 851 unique
authors tweeting on the day.

29. With an average of 2.4 tweets
per person.

30. But who spoke the loudest?

31. Top Influencers Twitter
Net Prophet also saw some organic citizen journalism at the event,
with the likes of Clinton Liederman (49 Tweets!), Brett Commaille,
Altesh Baijoo, Dirk Tolken, Ashley Shaw and Cameron Oliver
reporting consistently throughout the event!

32. Key Take Away
The success of next year’s Net Prophet event is dependent
on two things – both the quantity of people reached by this
this year’s event and overall public perception of this year’s
event.
As people reflect about the event to their friends and
networks, offline conversations will become critical in
promoting attendance next year.
With this year’s Net Prophet content now banked within the
online space, going forward, the message of overwhelming
positivity shared by the community will have a much more
lasting impact and sets up a great legacy for future events.

34. Thank you.

35. For more information contact:
Net Prophet: www.netprophet.org.za
@NetProphetLive
BrandsEye: +27 21 467 5979
www.brandseye.com
contact@brandseye.com
@BrandsEye