Bigger Than Obama? Jackson Spectacle Sets Social Media Records

If you’d been watching early MJ funeral coverage yesterday on the networks you’d be forgiven for mistaking the event for a presidential funeral. Of course you’d be wrong – this was bigger? In an age where we can immediately track how much people are talking about an event via social media, know this:  Facebook users were at times firing off 6,000 comments per minute during the memorial. Said Facebook marketing directory Randi Zuckerberg:

“The 6,000 is just for CNN Live…It is significantly higher than that when you factor in E! Online, ABC, and MTV which each have their own Facebook Connect implementations.”

During Barack Obama‘s inauguration comments apparently peaked at 8,000 per minute. Zuckerberg says she “expects the Jackson tally to eclipse that record.”

So it’s official now! Welcome to the age of the chattering classes, where by 2012 we may actually be fan paging our President to the Oval Office 140 characters at a time!

Meanwhile, Michael Jackson’s death has been good to CNN who tells us they also saw record traffic online clocking in 81 million page views, 11.8 million, unique Visitors, and 9.7 million Live Video Streams. In fact, news sites in general were seeing heavy traffic, “receiving close to four million viewers per minute, and an average of 3.3 million visitors per minute over the course of the day.” And yet the internet survived to blog another day…about Michael Jackson.

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