So, in the last 48 hours [beginning 11/23/2011] there has been a Bollywood song that has caught fancy on the net and has seen 2.2 million downloads on YouTube. It is called Kolaveri Di - a very catchy tune, you may like it too :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR12Z8f1Dh8
YouTube numbers at 11.30AM PST on 11/23/11
I wanted to do a research on the genesis of this going viral.
I started by going into Trackur (a free account) got some numbers. The below results were for Nov 15-Nov 22. There were NO mentions of Kolaveri on 15th Nov or prior. But Trackur returned 25 results for Nov 16 - Nov 22.
But check this out: Today alone (11/23 - 12 Noon)
SocialMention
I then moved on to checking data in www.socialmention.com and this is what I found:
1. In the Last Month there have been a total of 389 mentions and average 1 minute per mention.
Most of the mentions have happened in the last day (269)
The above results were at 10AM today (11/23/11)
The above results were 12 Noon today (11/23). Note how quickly the numbers have changed in the last 2 hours. The mentions are now happening at a rate of 11 seconds down from 52 seconds (5 times faster)
This is a free tool and can be used to track the current state of "mentions" about the keyword.