#IdleNoMore Twitter activity graph taken at 11am on December 11, 2012 (hence the drop on the right). The peak on the 10th reached 14,682 tweets.

The #IdleNoMore movement really broke ground yesterday. If you’re unfamiliar, Canadian First Nations youth launched an online movement to raise awareness of issues affecting their communities.

The campaign began four weeks ago as tensions flared due to proposed changes to the Indian Act by the Conservative government. The rallies in 13 cities including Edmonton, Calgary. Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Ottawa were given online support. Yesterday over 2,800 participants issued over 14,600 tweets.

There are a few very interesting facts to note about the movement which I determined through analysis using Marketwire/Sysomos Heartbeat and MAP (analysis period covers December 5 through 11amET December 11):

Participation skews female – While most Canadian political issues struggle to get 30% female participation, 59% of the #IdleNoMore tweets over the last seven days have been issued by women. Yesterday’s gender breakdown puts female participation at 62%.

Twitter dominates – Twitter is low-hanging fruit for all social media newcomers. To read tweets you need a web browser. To publish tweets you need a web browser and a free account. Twitter is accessible by computer, tablet and smartphone making it one of the most accessible channels and most power Internet amplifier. And the media love to cite it and quote tweets. Love it or hate it, Twitter is where the action is happening. Statistically, 99.4% of all #IdleNoMore traffic happened on Twitter. Comparitively, 0.4% of the online mentions happened on online news sites, and 0.2% on blogs.

Getting Canadian attention – Where most issues in the political and public affairs space tend to prefer one or two provinces, #IdleNoMore is getting a fairly good mix of cross-provincial attention. This is probably helped by the ‘ground war’… the cross-Canada protests attended not only by people, but by smartphones.

Twitter goes to ’11′ (with apologies and thanks to Spinal Tap) – Twitter, as mentioned a moment ago, is perhaps the Internet’s most powerful amplifier. I tend to measure Twitter’s ‘wattage’ in retweets, the simple rebroadcast of someone else’s tweet. In the case of #IdleNoMore, a full 69% of the Twitter signal is retweet. Only 26% is original, fresh content. Conversation, measured in @replies, is a dull 5%.

#IdleNoMore isn’t sticky – As much participation as the movement is attracting online, a majority of participants (59%) are generally not committed for the long haul — online, anyway. This confirms Twitter is serving as a formidable amplifier even if the online world isn’t providing many assurrances people are going to get out of their chairs and do something. Organizers might be concerned this is a pile-on rather than movement that will grow widespread roots.

A U.S.-based sketch comedy group issued the most-popular #IdleNoMore tweet – With 274 retweets and 34 ‘favorites’ as of 11am today, the most-popular tweet of this movement was issued by @1491s, a sketch comedy group ‘based in the wooded ghettos of Minnesota and buffalo grass of Oklahoma.’ Second up was a tweet by First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo. His rallying cry attracted 201 retweets and 30 ‘favorites’. The third most-popular issued by @DeeJayNDN asked why the Ikea Monkey managed national media and #IdleNoMore didn’t.

Global attention – As the last point suggests, #IdleNoMore has reached beyond the geographical boundaries of Canada. Tweets associated with the movement have come from the US (6.9%), UK (2.5%) and an international mix of South America, Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe. The whole globe.

The top 12 participants account for 5.5% of all Tweets – The most engaged participants are helping to drive the issue. They’ve combined to issue 1,435 tweets.

I’ll perform some additional analysis on this movement in my digital public affairs newsletter later this week. You can subscribe for free.

Analysis performed using Marketwire/Sysomos Heartbeat and MAP.

Truly #IdleNoMore: analysis of what could become #NativeWinter is a post from Mark Blevis. Sign up for my free digital public affairs newsletter.