I’m not sure if you heard, as they did a pretty good job of keeping it low-key, the Academy Awards took place on Sunday. Full of the usual pomp and circumstance, coupled with the quirky pairing of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, it was an entertaining night of laughs, a few predictable wins, and a few significant surprises. A little while back I took a look at the Best Picture category to see who social media users were getting behind for a win. There were three films that stuck out from the rest of the pack, and while District 9 was at the top of that small pack, the difference between the three films was statistically insignificant. It is, then, gratifying and reassuring to see that one of the three did in fact win.

While I’ll leave explanation of the methodology I employed for the previous post to that post, suffice it to say that I looked at the enthusiasm generated by a film’s nomination and the overall volume of conversation about that film. Avatar easily won purely based on volume, District 9 won purely based on enthusiasm. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, achieved its place on the list through a strong combination of the two. If I’d had my wits about me, and I didn’t, I’d have called it for that film, and I would have been right. Hindsight, as they say…

While we’re on the subject of Oscar winners, several people around here took an interesting look at things from another perspective the other day. Outside of the big prize on Sunday, we wanted to know who won the social media victory. Who generated the most buzz and brought about the strongest change in desire to see it?

To figure this out, we used what we call our Intersection Analytics combined with, of course, sheer volume increase pre- to post-Oscar. What are Intersection Analytics? It is a part of our approach to research that allows us to see how terms interact and how perception shifts across different topics. In this case, we used it to intersect the nominated films with terms people use to express their desire to see a film (ie, “want to see”, “gonna check out”, et al). Using this methodology, we can measure how much the desire to see a film has increased relative to the overall volume of conversation.

What did we find? The Hurt Locker, of course, did very well by these measures. The real winner in social media, though? Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Its daily volume of conversation increased 351% over the week prior to the Oscars, and the number of people in social media expressing interest in seeing it increased an astounding 439%. This means that they didn’t just manage to stimulate conversation, they managed to win over new viewers through their nominations and wins on Sunday, and were more successful in doing so than any other Best Picture nominee, save Hurt Locker. Precious may not have won the golden statue, but it did win interest, and that’s at least as important.

After allowing reactions to marinate in the world wide web for a few days, we ran an Intersection Analysis (a Collective Intellect proprietary technology) to determine who you, in social media land, had crowned the best and worst dressed at the 2010 Academy Awards.

Not only did Sandra Bullock win best actress of the year, Bullock, wearing a classic, full-length gown, was the runaway winner as the best dressed woman as well. Miley Cyrus came in 2^nd, with Penelope Cruz finishing a close 3^rd.

There was much less discussion around the best dressed man, but Jeff Bridges followed in Bullocks shoes by winning the award for best actor, as well as winning the prestige of being the best dressed man at the Academy Awards. Morgan Freeman came in second.

Charlize Theron was the clear winner as the worst dressed celebrity at the Oscar’s. Apparently the people don’t look kindly upon purple-flowery-outside-the-dress-bra-things. Tina Fey, America’s favorite funny girl, apparently doesn’t have the same taste in clothes as she does in jokes seeing as she was your second worst dressed celeb of the night.

It seems that if this year’s Oscar’s prove anything, it’s that great acting goes hand-in-hand with great taste in clothes.  A big thank you to my mom and of course, I’d like to thank the academy…

Looking back over the past 6 months, Collective Intellect uncovered roughly 92,000 and 41,000 conversations revolving around 90210 and Melrose Place, respectively. Ok, that stat really surprised me. 90210 has over twice the amount of conversations happening than Melrose Place? That’s a lot. But again, on September 8^th, 2009, 90210 began season two and Melrose Place premiered the new series. Both of these shows air on Tuesday’s: 90210 at 8/7c and Melrose Place at 9/8c. The daily breakout of conversations is as follows:

So that makes sense. The day the episode airs, the most conversations occur and with each passing day that number gets progressively smaller. However, this is 2010 and with the advent of TIVO and on-demand (whether through your cable provider, a network website or Hulu) you would think these percentages should be more spread out.

Take a look at a 5 month activity timeline covering 1 month prior to the premieres through the 2010 New Year:

Melrose Place comes out of the gate strong and beats 90210. This is most likely due to the hype of the series premiere. Moving forward 90210 generates more conversations except for one day, September 22^nd, when it was announced that Heather Locklear would be joining the cast later in the season. Roughly 12% of 90210 and 25% of Melrose Place conversations occur within the first month of the premiere. Melrose Place generated a lot of conversations from the get-go, however it didn’t sustain them for the next 5 months.

Does The CW, or any network nowadays, factor the amount of internet chatter into the show’s success rating? They should, because online discussion levels can serve as indicators of a show’s resonance with viewers, as well as help determine future ratings changes, so it will become more and more important for networks to truly understand how to interpret what people are naturally saying about TV shows.

]]> http://www.collectiveintellect.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1983 http://www.collectiveintellect.com/blog/?p=1975 http://www.collectiveintellect.com/blog/?p=1975#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:26:01 +0000 Vicky Czarniecki http://www.collectiveintellect.com/blog/?p=1975 It’s great feedback to hear when clients are able to take insight from our collaboration with them and mold it into action that benefits their brand.

We’ve worked closely with Western Union over the last year. During recent work with the company, a specific point of analysis found that a sore spot for consumers was the level of possible fraud surrounding usage of Western Union money wiring services. As discussed at a recent Red Door Interactive social media panel, Western Union has been able to use this finding to shape strategy to re-position their brand.

To keep an eye on how conversation changes as a result of their work, Western Union remains on our client roster by utilizing our Listen platform. Our self-service product enables them to track activity about their company and react quickly to any issues that may arise. We look forward to continued partnership with Western Union and hope that our services will offer guidance and inspiration well into the future.

I’m feeling a bit feisty today, so I think I’ll make this a prediction, because what the hey, I hear those are hip. In spite of this new-found spirit of inclusion that the Academy has taken to this year, for the sake of more visually appealing charts, I’m only going to include analysis the top five nominees and their performance in social media; District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Avatar, and Up in the Air.

A word on how I’m determining the best performing of the nominees… Historically, the Best Picture winner has not necessarily been one that received high box office figures. Going purely off of the volume of conversation happening around the nominations of particular films, a popularity contest in other words, is probably not the best course of action. That works wonderfully for anticipating box office success, but this is a different game we’re playing here. So what have I done? First, I do necessarily look at the volumes of Oscar-related buzz in the week prior to the announcement of nominations and the week after, not including the day of.

Fig. 1 – Comparing pre-announce and post-announce volumes

Unsurprisingly, Avatar has by far the largest volume of the five. And what of the day the nominees were announced? Let’s have a look at a pie chart.

Fig. 2 – Announcement day volume

The numbers look similar to their counterparts above. But again, this isn’t a popularity contest, this is something more than that.

While Avatar may indeed be the favorite to walk away with the win, we need something that’ll help level the playing field. In order to do that, looking at how enthusiastic social media users are, not only about the movie itself but about its nomination for an Academy Award, should show us something a little more interesting. So how does one go about calculating enthusiasm in this context? It’s human nature to talk most about that which you find most exciting or surprising, both strong indicators of enthusiasm. I took, then, the percent change from the pre-announcement volume to the post-announcement volume, assuming that the largest increases in volume would be for those films that people were most enthusiastic to see included in the nominees.

With these numbers in hand, I assigned a 1-5 ranking and weighted that with a ranking of each volume number (popularity does matter some after all), assigning the final outcome about a 50/50 split between volume and our rudimentary assessment of enthusiasm.

Fig. 3 – Side-by-side probability of winning

Now we’re seeing something interesting. All of a sudden we have what appears to be a three-way tie for the frontrunner. We have to take a look at decimal points to see who really holds the lead. District 9, the innovative sci-fi film, comes out in front with a very slight lead, beating out Avatar by tenths of a percent, and The Hurt Locker comes out only very slightly below that.

What does this mean? If it were up to social media users, District 9 would pull out a surprising win. Bear in mind, though, that social media users are younger, and more inclined toward action and science fiction films, than the average movie-goer, and presumably than the average Academy member. So will District 9 win? Probably not, but if it does, expect a party on the internet.

From our real-time analysis of Super Bowl XLIV advertising, we found that the beverage category lead online buzz with 24% of the conversations occurring during this year’s game. Advertisers such as Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper had success generating activity for their brands through mediums such as Twitter, blogs, and message boards.

Anheuser-Busch lead the beverage category with 63% of the conversations during the game. While Anheuser-Busch was most discussed among Super Bowl advertisers, Pepsi received substantial buzz from their alternative initiative - the “Pepsi Refresh Project.” The campaign seeks to spread its message through social media and spend the sum of the Super Bowl advertising budget on grants for community outreach projects.

We will be releasing a more detailed report the week of February 15^th examining the top advertisers’ online impact before, during and after the game as well as comparing Pepsi’s social media dynamics to that of the Super Bowl advertisers. Additionally, we will include an analysis of consumer favorites and highlight the companies that received the highest return on their Super Bowl advertising investment.

If you are interested in receiving our follow up report, please contact Mark Shavers (mark.shavers@collectiveintellect.com) to request a copy.

This confluence of traditional and social media also impacts our assessment of the larger market dynamics we are addressing. It is no secret print publications such as newspapers and magazines are being adversely impacted by the move to digital. Now, instead of 10 influential publications with an audience that could be relatively easily defined and measured, social mediums such as blogs, Twitter and message boards have shifted the power to the civilian journalist. A few books have addressed this phenomenon, including Scott Gant’s We’re All Journalists Now. Following this trend, we believe that with a few small modifications we will be able to substitute the terms reviewer, pundit, columnist and critic with a lone term: Journalist.

We see this as a key reason for why we are continuing to gain clients in the Media & Entertainment industry. Consumer generated media matters and traditional research/content discovery do not appear to work well when dealing with thousands of voices. Collective Intellect delivers value in this arena because we are able to harness thousands of independent voices and generate high level conclusions from these voices. And we do it 24/7, 365.

Considering our emergence in the Media & Entertainment arena, we noted with interest the recent announcement that Nielsen is selling several of its Media & Entertainment print publications, including The Hollywood Report, Backstage, Film Journal International and Billboard, (Here is a link to the Nielsen news release.) Because we are a nascent competitor to Nielsen in general and a direct competitor to Nielson Online which includes BuzzMetrics, we see the transfer of these assets to e5 Global Media LLC, a new company formed by Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners under the leadership of James Finkelstein, as a possible opportunity to collaborate to make these properties even more dynamic by adding real-time insights that can be gathered with our technology. We know the industry values these publications, and we hope they thrive under new ownership. However, in our view new ownership and new capital structures don’t magically improve the economics of traditional publications. Instead, Collective Intellect believes, as the real-time media age continues to unfold, that dynamic information, not just data, will be an important component of the success of leading publications. Time will tell and perhaps Collective Intellect’s real-time processing capability will play an even larger role in this.

Consumers who shop at these grocers are downright passionate about them. They’re not just going grocery shopping….they’re going to check out seasonal, exotic foods, sample new cheeses and buy those special one-of-a-kind grocery items in a friendly environment. They’re tweeting and blogging about it, too. Using CI’s semantic categorization technology to help us hone in on grocer conversations, we’ve evaluated roughly 44,600 and 12,300 conversations about Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, respectively, occurring over the past 6 months.

Do those numbers surprise you compared to the number of stores in each grocery chain? Let’s look at it this way:

Wow. Whole Foods is generating A LOT more conversations than Trader Joe’s, even though there are only 45 stores that separate the two. You could say each Whole Foods store generates 159 conversations while each Trader Joe’s generates only 38.

What’s just as interesting are the places consumers are talking. 53% of Whole Foods conversations happen on Twitter while only 29% of Trader Joe’s conversations occur on the popular microblog. Compare that with 38% of the Trader Joe’s conversations occurring on blogs while only 28% of Whole Foods conversations happen here. So why are consumers talking more about Whole Foods on Twitter and more about Trader Joe’s on blogs? And what are they talking about? Well, we can answer the second question right now utilizing the Collective Intellect proprietary auto discovery thematic artificial intelligence capbilities…

OK, there’s a lot going on here. No surprise consumers from both camps are talking about recipes, dieting and organic products. A couple bubbles that caught my eye were the Whole Foods chatter about the CEO’s healthcare comments and the friends and dinner bubbles on Trader Joe’s side.

Whole Foods CEO’s personal thoughts about healthcare really hit a nerve with consumers, and not in the warm and fuzzy way. Regarding the Trader Joe’s friends and dinner bubbles, there is interesting discussion of customers experiencing a wonderful evening with friends and family over a dinner from Trader Joe’s.

Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s: When it comes to specialty food shopping there’s a lot to listen to, a lot to garner insights from and a ton both companies can learn from their consumers. Let the shopping begin.

Twitterville is less a business manual than it is a collection of short success stories. The book is so effective because of the personal, one-on-one style with which it is written. It is both entertaining and informative, and while reading it you can’t help but feel good about social media and about the future of the world we live in as a whole. Perhaps that was why the insuppressible cynic in me kept rearing its ugly head and wondering: “is this all too good to be true?”

Allow me to explain. Very few impartial “business” books that I have read are written with as much earnestness as this one, and with such an unflappable belief in the goodness and value of the idea or goods being extolled. Throughout the book questions kept recurring in my head: “what about Twitter’s inherent ability to allow others to behave badly?”, “if Twitter becomes a platform for large companies to promote their business, why would people like me and you continue sharing personal opinions on Twitter?”, “does Twitter really represent a ‘Ville’, or are large swathes of the town’s population conspicuously absent?” Many of my questions were answered as I continued reading (one of the last chapters discusses bots, spam and other malevolent twitter techniques), but a few were not. Anyone looking for a “fair and balanced” (to steal a term from a different medium) representation of Twitter may want to consider these questions as well.

Perhaps my favorite section in the book is about IBM. On pg 132, Israel describes how thousands of IBM employees are involved in numerous conversations with analysts, customers, vendors, and media via Twitter daily, and that none of these conversations involve the selling of any goods. What is surprising is that these interactions are completely unmonitored by any of the higher-ups at IBM. Israel explains that “at IBM, employees are not just trusted to make decisions; they are directed to do so without consulting headquarters.” This struck me as somewhat miraculous: a gargantuan company allows its employees to communicate with the world freely, without fear of retribution for embarrassing the company’s name. This is all well and good and IBM certainly is to be credited for taking such an enlightened approach to business, but realistically, how many companies can and will take the same approach?

Twitter is simply a tool that allows people to communicate. It is much like Facebook and Myspace before it, and the hundreds of microblogging sites that will attempt to dethrone Twitter from the top of the Social Media sphere in the future. Twitter is as much or as little as people put into it, it can be as positive a force as people wish to make it, but can be equally as negative in the hands of anonymous wrong doers.

Seemingly, that is where Israel has fallen in love with the new medium, its ability to start communities from scratch, to give people the ability to share anything and everything from their office desk or their living room bean bag. How this is different than either Facebook or phone texting, however, I am as of yet uncertain. Twitterville is a great glimpse at the success stories (and a few words of warning about the possible failures) of the business world’s soirée into the realm of personalized social media as well as a guide into the wonders personal branding can have on ones business. It is entertaining reading and should certainly be read by anyone considering Twitter as a means to promote their company. Just keep in mind that Twitterville is not a Utopia. It is a complex, modern town just like yours or mine.

“Simply put, makers of TV programs are learning that seeding the show among fans must take place months, not just weeks, in advance. The hope is that by using new strains of social-media, TV producers will create new momentum among hard-core fans, which can then spill over to others – generating new excitement for even the most buttoned-down video properties.”

These changes are in part a reaction to declining viewership. To that end, it is clear to see the effect that viewer participation early on in the awards process has had on viewer ratings. The program, which typically generated 15 million participants, expected more than 60 million people to take part in 2010. Those are promising numbers leading into a broadcast, and they resulted in a ratings victory for the night.

Demonstrating social media savvyness, Ashton Kutcher (who was awarded Favorite Web Celeb) ustreamed his award experience online - bringing the fans that much closer to the action. By doing this, he enabled social media to help close the gap between the glamorous celebrity life and the Ordinary Joe, something that the upcoming Golden Globes are attempting to do in their own way. Their take on web integration involves a partnership with digg to provide a daily digest of coverage leading up to the broadcast. It will be interesting to see how they weave that coverage into the actual event, and how awards shows will evolve in the coming years.