Wednesday, June 17, 2009

NTT's Share of Voice increase caused by Iran's communication censorship

On June 15th, 2009 Twitter was due for maintenance during a time in Iran where Twitter was the main form of communication to the outside world when the government shut down other social networking sites to the country. As Mashable stated, "...the maintenance would be scheduled for Tuesday morning Tehran time, when activity on the ground is likely to be intense. "

A few thousand tweets later and thousands of more people complaining that traditional media couldn't offer the coverage, Twitter wins again. And for those that didn't know that NTT was their network partner, they do now.

Mashable and Twitter (word of mouth) once again proved that the voices of conversation can make a difference.

Take a look at the statistics of NTT's "Share of Voice" since June 1st, 2009. Normally, one would see small spikes as a press release hit the newswire, but on June 15th, NTT's share of voice almost tripled on June 15th and 16th. The below information was pulled from Techrigy's Social Media Monitoring warehouse.

NTT made the right decision to reschedule their network maintenance for the benefit of one nation, Iran, which has a smaller Twitter population than in the United States. I recommend reading the Mashable Article to see how many people retweeted and comments on the story for a greater visual aspect of the power of voice.

Do you have any similar case studies where you found out something about a brand that you never knew about until it was posted on Twitter?