Is Justin Bieber’s fame in cyberspace as big as in real life?

Ali Wylam, one of the students enrolled in my Com 435 class (Emerging Communication Technologies) found that teen sensation Justin Bieber has a gigantic stature in cyberspace. He is right up there with the big corporations. He garnered over 30 million monthly searches in the last 4 weeks. Other members of the class looked at keywords such as ATT (131 million) and  Twitter (83 million), which indicates that Bieber is a gigantic media personality. He overpasses foggies like fashion designer John Galliano, who has been caught up in a media storm after being accused of an antisemitic public outburst at a restaurant in Paris. He “only” garnered 26 million searches, and behind the “The Strokes”. Ali believes that Bieber’s fame is justified by his gigantic Twitter following:

“Bieber Fever,” as Justin Bieber’s 8,316,230 followers on Twitter affectionately call their obsession, has been a force to reckon with ever since the 16-year-old released his first album back in 2008. With the release of his new album, Never Say Never, Bieber and his obsessive gaggle of fans have been making headlines steadily. Both Bieber’s website, and his name as a keyword alone garner 37,200,000 hits per month globally according to Google’s Keywords.

While Justin Bieber’s buzz status peaked during his 16th birthday and the release of his 3-Dimensional movie documenting his life’s journey through music, Bieber is still creating a buzz through social media and loyal fans. Most of the buzz stems from Bieber’s aforementioned 8,316,230 followers, or “Beliebers,” via tweets on Twitter containing trends dealing with the teenage pop star.

Ali (and her colleagues) also used Social Mention, a new social media monitoring tool, for investigating the amount of Internet buzz generated by topics as varied as “The Real Housewives of Orange County, Nook or Vera Bradley. Social mention measures on a scale of 0-100 the amount of passion social media writers put in their posts, the strength of the coverage, the positive or negative feelings associated with the topics, and the reach of each topic (for methodology see the Social Mention FAQ). The strength of Bieber’s social media presence is amazing, being right up there with the big corporations and just under the search term “earthquakes”. Interestingly (or not) Galliano’s reach is the greatest…