SocialPipeline 04/11/2012 (p.m.)

• The Internet Didn't Make Trayvon National News, But It Did Sustain the Story | MIT Center for Civic Media

  tags: Sharism

  • The Change.org petition was not responsible for attracting national media attention to the case, but I might argue that it helped sustain the story online. The petition gave news consumers a place to act on the sense of injustice the story stoked within them. It also gave celebrities a reason to tweet about the story. Almost half of the 5 million visits to the Change.org petition over this time period were referred by social media.

     

    Given the scale of social media traffic, it's entirely possible that having an action to link to actually increased the rates of people sharing the story online. It's hard to measure the conversation independent of mainstream media coverage, but Pew's Research Center for Excellence in Journalism has found that, as Trayvon Martin became the number one topic discussed on Twitter between March 26-30, "calls for justice (21% of the conversation) and sympathy for the victim (19%) were the top themes on Twitter," both sentiments that lend themselves to including a link to take action.

     

    We can measure conversion rate. Thirty-seven percent of the peop

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