LJWorld.com

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It's no secret that Wednesday was unofficially "Sherron Collins Day" on KUSports.com. Videos, photos and stories of Collins' four years as a Jayhawk were shared over the Web by fans across the country as we all prepared for Senior Night at Allen Fieldhouse.

Members of the Twitter community took it upon themselves to celebrate Collins in their own way by attempting to make his name a trending topic. As of last count (at 8:55 a.m.) the effort had generated 2,262 shout outs to No. 4.

The first tweet using #sherroncollins came at 7:57 a.m. from 610 Sports, followed by the idea to make the hashtag a trending topic at 8:48 a.m. The graph below shows how the hashtag's use skyrocketed throughout the day, peaking in the 9 p.m. hour with 449 tweets. The image above is from trendsmap.com (a fun Web site for checking local trending topics). The screenshot was taken at 3:45 p.m. on Wednesday, long before #sherroncollins saw its heaviest use.

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The hashtag grew so popular, it rivaled the use of #kubball and crushed #rcjhgku. The graph below shows the use of #kubball, #rcjhgku and #sherroncollins in the past 24 hours.

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It's also worth noting that Twitter activity related to KU basketball is growing fast. Last night we saw thousands more tweets than we have seen the entire season. The graph below (showing only the last 30 days) proves this.

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Are fans starting to rally because March Madness is nearly here, or are more people using Twitter? Our data shows that individual accounts tweeting about KU basketball have increased 270% since Saturday's game against Oklahoma State.

Throughout the Big 12 and NCAA Tournaments, we'll be looking for more ways to get fans involved with our Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well has posting fan photos on KUSports.com. Don't hesitate to @reply us with links to photos/videos and to post content on our Facebook wall throughout the tournaments. We're looking for them, and we'd love to share them. Look for more details on these projects in the next few days!

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Did you see the panda? It appeared in the student section in the first half, and ended the evening creepin' on B. Knight. Watch out, Bobby! (Photo from @wibwBlake)

The panda in the Texas A&M student section was one of the most popular topics among KU fans on twitter last night. Its fame peaked just after 10 p.m. and it was mentioned in 4.5% of all #kubball tweets in the past 24 hours. Considering the amount of specific topics tweeted about during a game (fouls, players, coaches, scores, commentators) that's a pretty big chunk of panda tweeting action. Definitely more than any other single topic received (even more than tweeters hating on the Big East/ESPN for waiting to switch games).

This graph shows the rise and fall of panda mentions on Monday.

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What does this mean for social media? Nothing groundbreaking, but it proves that fans are paying attention. Texas A&M could embrace the panda and turn it into a "Where's WaldoPanda?" feature at sporting events (which could obviously be sponsored for ca$h if Panda becomes really popular).

Schools should never underestimate the creativity of their student body. Students are usually the most passionate and loyal fans a university has. Those are two qualities that breed great social media content.

Since the Mark Mangino investigation broke on KUSports.com on Tuesday, we've been monitoring the story's progress across the Web. It's definitely generating some pageviews for local news organizations - online content published about KU football is up 184% in comparison to the week before.

The graph below shows what categories this online content falls into. Social networks are a dominant force, providing 42.12% of the pie, but I'm interested in the amount of blogs vs. news organizations. Nearly just as many blogs have been written about the topic as news articles. Hmmmm.... let's delve further.

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When I checked to see which organizations had published the most content on the topic since Tuesday, this was the list:

Twitter (230)
KUSports/LJWorld (21)
KansasCity.com (12)
Kansan.com (11)
BleacherReport.com (6)
Deadspin.com (5)
Kansas.com (5)
ESPN.com (5)
FOX4KC.com (5)

Two major sports blogs (BleacherReport and Deadspin) sit comfortably in the top 10. Obviously bloggers would have a lot to say on this topic, but determining their influence over a national audience is trickier.

One of the systems we use to analyze online data has an influence ranking system. It factors in elements like page views (hits) and inbound links to the page itself to determine how important a single article or blog post is on any given topic - in this case, I used our KU Football data and applied a date filter from Tuesday through Thursday.

The most popular articles on the controversy thus far have been Jason Whitlock's columns (Mangino is an abusive bully and Weight issues are root of Mangino's problems), the Kansas City Star's "nuts and bolts" article on the investigation and ESPN's first article on the story (Internal review of Mangino underway).

What's interesting is that the remainder of the top 10 most influential pages are blogs from Deadpsin, Bleacher Report and SportsByBrooks. That means 60 percent of the most influential content about the Mangino controversy (NOT including today) is on blogs.

So while these influential blogs make up a fraction of the volume, they're dominating in influence.

Innnnnteresting.

Depressed. Fail. Sad. Terrible. Hate.

Those were some of the most popular words used to describe Kansas University football on the Web last weekend. There was one other four-letter f-word that was fairly popular as well...

How do I know that? The World Company subscribes to a few software tools that allow us to monitor specific topics on the Web. Because we cover it so often, we run continuous research on KU football. This means we can see all of the Web pages published that mention KU football and see various statistics about them, too.

The 31-17 home loss to Nebraska - on Senior Day - was the good guys' fifth in a row, and fans went to the Web to vent. This weekend saw the most online conversation about KU football than any other game in the 2009 season.

The pie chart below breaks down the specific types of URLs collected on Saturday (11/14) and Sunday (11/15) that mention KU football. A whopping 71 percent of all of the online content about the KU vs. NU game was user-generated. Over 51 percent of that chunk was on public social networks like Twitter.

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The only other game that compares with that percentage is KU's homecoming win over Iowa State at 59 percent, with 48.42 percent on social networks.

Compare this to the overall breakdown of online content since September 1, 2009. News coverage is the dominant single category, while user-generated content makes up nearly 52 percent. Only 23.53 percent of that is on social networks.

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Now I can hear you saying, "Wow, Whitney. That's cute and all, but why does that matter?" Well, this data tells us a few valuable things.

First, the amount of online Kansas fans looking to connect on game day is growing. At the beginning of the season, only 17 percent of online game day content was on social networks. That's a 34 percent increase!

Local businesses (bars, apparel shops, news organizations, etc.) can take advantage of that visibility. Try offering a game day special and advertise it on Twitter, Facebook or your blog. You'll be able to track the amount of sales generated from that special by having customers mention the discount when they purchase.

Second, you can use the #kufball hashtag to share anything with us at the Journal-World. From tailgate photos to parking problems, if you use that hashtag, we'll see it. We can use this content to look for anything newsworthy and follow live fan reaction to the game.

Third, it proves that KU fans (locally and nationally) are gaining a better understanding of sharing their fanaticism through social media. If you're a lonely Jayhawk in a non-KU community, you can get a piece of the action by logging on every game day.

Did I fry your brain? Leave me any questions or comments below.

Happy Monday!

~ Whitney