Howard Stern may style himself the King of All Media, but it turns out that mainstream media is the King of All Trending Topics. At least that’s the result of an analysis by HP’s Social Computing Research Group and reported by Ben Parr on Mashable. The study analyzed more than 16 million tweets on 3,361 different trending topics in the fall of 2010. The highlights:

• 31% of trending topics are retweets.
• 72% of those retweets come from mainstream media, like The Huffington Post, ESPN, etc.
• Trending topics were more likely to originate from mainstream news outlets than from influencers.

So does the key to a brand’s retweet-worthiness lie in fresh and compelling content?