Originally posted on Forbes.

For three days in early December, tech CEOs, bloggers, and start-up entrepreneurs descended into Paris to attend the world-renowned LeWeb conference. Attendees blanketed the “Twitter waves” with breaking news from just about every major platform, which in turn dominated tech news outlets for the entire duration of the conference.

As conferences become increasingly optimized for the social web, it provides ample opportunity for data-analysis firms to mine Twitter’s APIs and publish trends with key insights into the conference’s zeitgeist. Here at JESS3 we were thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with the LeWeb team and social media monitoring company Radian6, which closely monitored the social media discussion on LeWeb and published a daily trends report on SlideShare.

For our part, my team and I at JESS3 set out to visualize this data. Developed in real time, our LeWeb graphics aimed to capture newsworthy information. We had teams in the U.S. (research) and live at the conference in France (design) who worked on the infographics; our research team watched all the panels, curating the most newsworthy quotes to then feed back to our designers, who then interpreted the information in visual form. We never shy away from a good challenge. Take a look at our visualization of LeWeb.

LeWeb11 vs LeWeb10

• LeWeb11 saw 36% more web mentions than LeWeb10
• 50,655 mentions for LeWeb10
• 68,912 mentions for LeWeb11
• LeWeb11’s speakers were mentioned 17,993 times
• LeWeb11’s most-mentioned speaker was Google Chairman Eric Schmidt
• LeWeb10’s speakers were mentioned 4,571 times
• LeWeb10’s most-mentioned speaker was Gary Vaynerchuk

LeWeb Day 1

• Social demographics for LeWeb11: 73% male vs 27% female
• 37% from the US
• 30% from France
• Babelverse was the most-mentioned startup, with 130+ social media mentions
• The largest spike in social media mentions was between 10 am. and 11 a.m.

LeWeb Day 2

• The largest spike in social media mentions was between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. when Phil Libin announced Evernote Food and Evernote Hello
• 20,932 social mentions on second day
• Most-mentioned speaker: Marissa Mayer with 458 mentions

LeWeb Day 3

• LeWeb11’s third day saw its highest social media spike between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. when Daniel Ek and Shervin  Pishevar spoke
• The third day’s second highest social media spike occurred between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. when Sean Parker spoke
• 17,614 conversations on day three
• Most @ messaged panelist: Sean Parker, with 400+ mentions
• #leweb hashtag outperformed #leweb11 by almost a 5 to 1 margin
• Most-mentioned startup: Beintoo, with 340 mentions

Taking the information from all three days, we created two additional graphics: a traditional vertical style infographic illustrating the conference’s most talked about news and events, and a “maniac” style mega poster dense with illustrations of the content of the panels and biggest online buzz.

It’s clear to us that Paris’ LeWeb has carved out a unique space for itself in the world of tech conferences and has grown to attract the biggest names in innovation from a multitude of countries. We were honored to participate this year and look forward to find out what’s in store for LeWeb and the tech universe next year. And on a final note, I implore you: It’s a must attend for anyone and everyone — from brands, to members of the media, to technologists, to startups, to business people, to designers and everyone in between. Attend next year or miss out in a big way!

Tags: Data Visualization, jesse thomas, leweb, live sketching, radian6