Just before the Grammys last month, the Meltwater Group sent us an infographic showing Grammy nominees in three categories and the amount of online social buzz each nominee was getting in the weeks leading up to the awards.
My headline on that post was Tracking Social Interaction Informs Grammy Projections.
It was stretching it a bit to call them "projections" though it was hard to keep from hypothesizing that the most talked-about nominees would be the winners.
Meltwater's accompanying description of their information gathering process went as follows:
Meltwater used its social media monitoring tool Meltwater Buzz to track social media conversations around the top three Grammy Award categories (Best Album, Song and New Artist) since nominees were officially announced on Dec. 1. They determined the 'winners' based on the volume of mentions and sentiment of the social media community across blogs, microblogs, social networks, comments, message boards, videos and Wikipedia. It's interesting to see who's leading in the eyes of the public prior to the show!
Alas, none of the winners of chatter and sentiment won a Grammy. One of our SMT writers, Tom Webster, wrote indignantly, a week later:
According to the folks at Meltwater Buzz (see the chart, below), your social media conversations indicated that you thought Eminem would get Album of the Year, the Bieber would be Best New Artist, and the Record of the Year would be "F*** You," by Cee Lo Green (this is a family blog, now.)
In fact, not only did you get this one wrong, you got it really wrong. Bieber over Esperanza Spalding?
Sure, it would have been cool if the conversational dominance matched the actual award winners, but it was interesting nonetheless to explore the theory that there was a strong relationship and to see a sample of social media monitoring through software.
Now Meltwater has put together a similar infographic for the Academy Awards, showing this coming Sunday. Take a look and don't even think about whether the Buzz results mean anything. Well at least try not to think about it. Well, whatever.