The Daily Express might have accused the Chelsea Flower Show of previously having a reputation for being ‘stuffy’, and when you think ‘gardening’, your next thought perhaps isn’t necessarily ‘Twitter’. However, celebrating its 100^th anniversary this year, the Royal Horticulture Society seems to be modernising its reputation, and here at Gorkana, we’ve been looking at how the world-famous flower show has been using social media to promote itself in advance of the festival.

We started tracking mentions of the event two weeks ago, and you’ll see a huge spike of interest over the weekend just gone:

Specifically, we were able to see how many tweets had been tweeted (blue line) and how many were positive or negative in tone (green and red respectively). Clearly there was a huge spike over the weekend, thanks to the event being on television, with favourable coverage increasing at a greater rate than negative coverage.

What could possibly drive negative mentions at a flower festival? Well, this year The Royal Horticultural Society, organisers of the festival, decided to lift their 100 year ban on gnomes. This decision generated 81 tweets over the fortnight, ranging from wonderfully facetious to downright aggrieved. Some of these tweets included the news that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have had gnomes made of them: one @Telegraph link announcing this was re-tweeted 63 times over the fortnight, and, on the basis of ‘who follows who’, we reckon that nearly 600,000 people saw that single tweet. Just in case you were thinking of sleeping easy tonight, here are those gnomes close-up:

However, Wills and Kate weren’t the only royals to set Twitter on fire. Prince Harry was mentioned in 625 tweets. In fact, we drew a word cloud of everything that happened on Twitter over the last fortnight. Where the size of the text corresponds to the number of mentions of the phrase (more mentions = bigger text), we’ve been able to deduce that Harry is hot for Chelsea (and vice-versa).

But wait! Is that Liam Gallagher appearing on that word cloud too? Oasis? NME? Your eyes are not deceiving you! It would seem that Rock Royalty Liam is a huge fan of the show – nearly 500 tweets mentioned his name. In fact, the single most re-tweeted tweet from the fortnight came from @NME (529k followers) announcing his presence at the festival, and was re-tweeted 71 times, not least by DJ Rob da Bank (@RobdaBank, 60k followers). The news of Liam’s love of lilies, lilacs and laburnums made news around the world, with it even featuring in a link posted by the Times of India.

In fact, the Chelsea Flower Show has serious international acclaim. Able to track mentions of the festival globally, by looking at the domains on links, we put together this mentions map:

The US accounted for nearly half of all mentions (tweeting about the event 3794 times) while as far away as Australia, the Crown’s official Twitter feed plugged the event:

Like many people, I had always assumed that the Chelsea Flower Show was the sort of event that would have a very small Twitter presence. But having been able to track the event over the last fortnight, I’ve been proved very wrong. I’ve been able to see how a celebrity can really drive Twitter coverage, and how, when, why, and who makes things happen on social.

This is one of my favourite images of the Chelsea Flower Show. This might hark back to an earlier stage of the event’s pre-Twitter history, but with 237 likes and 226 shares, it certainly resonates still in the social era.

We used Gorkana Radar, our real-time Social Media Monitoring and Analysis tool, to track mentions of Chelsea Flower Show on Twitter.

Jones was joined by Thomas Messett, Head of Digital Marketing & Advocacy at Nokia; Lisa Moretti, Senior Social Strategist at Fleishman-Hillard; and Nicholas Chabot, VP EMEA at Traackr.

Image from oursocialtimes.com

The conversation piqued my interest when a debate began to form around which works better – finding influencers with tools and analytics such as Radar and Traackr, or increasing the influence of advocates already waiting at your front door. Messett made a compelling argument for the latter, discussing Nokia’s advocate engager program. Advocates, he asserted, make themselves known on places like forums and your Facebook page. These people are most likely to say good things about you again and again and again and as they do, you can begin to build their profile as an influencer.

Chabot took a different approach, arguing that an understanding of that tangled mass of tweets, followers, friends and hashtags called “The Network” is key. A sucker for theory, I found Chabot’s argument intriguing and reminiscent of Manuel Castells (bringing back warm memories of memorising media theory for my master’s degree). He explained that analytics and algorithms can give us crucial insight into how information flows among people – namely where and how important these connections are. Unlocking and understanding these networks brings light to entire spheres of influence.

So once you’ve chosen your first method and unearthed a dossier of bright-eyed candidates, the next logical question becomes “what do we do with them?” This was something panellists seemed to agree upon.

First, don’t pay your influencers. It invites a sea of scepticism to surround your brand, when you should be focusing on creating an enhanced identity. Second, when looking for potential influencers, there are two essential ingredients:

• Authority: according to Chabot, authority comes from creating original content on specific topics.
• A good story to tell: why are people going to want to listen to this person?

Most likely, you are going to find your brand advocates by identifying influencers through a myriad of methods – or you should do. If you rely entirely on analytical tools and neglect the desk research, you’ll miss some gems. Conversely, spending bug-eyed afternoons tracing Twitter chains and blog rolls will leave you with a meagre list of options and poor eyesight. Don’t you think it’s got to be a bit of both?

Do you run an influencer program? What are your thoughts on the issue – how do you identify and connect with potential influencers? We would love to hear.

This week’s top PR and social media picks:

• This Twitter ‘Hate Map’ of the US shows where racist, homophobic and offensive tweets originate.
• Why Facebook Home is the social network with no social skills.
• A forensics firm says it knows how to restore those Snapchat photos.
• One man has taken it upon himself to rebrand Abercrombie & Fitch.

Can’t see the video? Click here

• Who’s #Colin? What’s a Colin?
• The art of data visualisation:

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• 25 startups in unlikely places.
• Put down the stamps, Grandad! This week The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine.
• Perhaps the funniest Kickstarter campaign yet:

Philip Sheldrake likes to say social media are the eggs in the social business cake. What he means by this is that he is saying that the two aren’t synonyms… that being on Facebook, Twitter and G+ etc., and operating an enterprise social network, does not of itself constitute social business.

Having spent the occasional evening or two with Philip chewing the fat on all things social, I find we’re both optimistic about how today’s mobile and social technologies will improve many aspects of business and government.  However,  whereas the commentary about all things social last decade was tech+tech+tech+people, now we find that the emphasis has changed and it’s increasingly people+people+people+tech.

I’m sure Philip won’t mind me saying that his 2011 book ‘The Business of Influence‘, whilst often quoted as one of the key reference points for what exactly constitutes genuine influence on social networks, cannot be easily described as a light beach-style read.  And perhaps that was his motivation for bringing out today his new ebook ‘Attenzi – a social business story‘.  This is a far more accessible and digestible text, it’s designed to be read in a couple of hours.  What’s more, it’s free and available in HTML, PDF, EPUB, Kindle and iBooks.

I asked him why he self-published this one, and it seems he doesn’t think the publishing industry generally ‘gets’ social business. It seemed at odds with his objectives for this book. For example, all the ebook formats have links in each chapter back to the same section on the website to allow all readers to coalesce, to make comments, to ask and answer questions.  This is often tricky under normal publishing copyright terms.

I also asked why he’d chosen a narrative format, something you don’t come across often in the saturated market for books with the word “social” in the title. Philip pointed out that storytelling is the oldest and most instinctive way to communicate ideas, and to have the ideas passed around. Very social.

Adam Pisoni, Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, provides the foreword. And a small disclosure, I was one of the proof readers and provided initial feedback to Philip on some of the text. Go ahead and give it a try, I think you’ll like it.

www.attenzi.com

This week’s top PR and social media picks:

• Out with Max Clifford! PR needs a new voice!
• A new survey revealed only 5% of companies are highly satisfied with their social media campaigns.
• Fullscreen BEAM launches its first YouTube app for Google Glass.
• According to The Guardian, the battle for control of cyberspace is turning nasty.
• The world’s first 3D printed gun.
• Adobe launches cloud-only Creative Suite.
• Why Apple’s Lightning Connector is a big problem.
• Who really runs Wikipedia?
• What is Facebook EdgeRank and why does it matter?
• Viber launched its desktop app, with 200 million users under its belt. So what’s Viber?

Daft Punk viral of the week:

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