Interactive Marketing from an Engineer

As a principal engineer for ExactTarget's Social Media Lab I live and breathe social data. Earlier this month I watched the Super Bowl without seeing or hearing a single second of the actual game. I was busy watching Twitter watch the Super Bowl. Recently, we did the same thing for the Academy Awards and sought to answer a pretty simple question - What best actor nominee was the most popular on Twitter during the Oscars?

Our info-graphic picked Brad Pitt. Most reports were flagging George Clooney and any search today is going to be dominated by Jean Dujardin. Our Oscar tweet count was within 1% of other analysts (amazing when none of us share algorithms). Every other fact and figure was confirmed through other outlets. If everyone agreed on everything else, why was the best actor so different?

Our first numbers declared Brad Pitt the winner. Chad, our real-time data wizard, was certain it was going to be George Clooney, he'd been watching Clooney's numbers climb all day. Early reports pegged Clooney as well. So why were we getting Pitt? I knew those reports were using a smaller pool of tweets and decided to double check our results. We ran the numbers using only the officially sanctioned Oscar channels, #oscars, #bestdressed etc. And the winner: Jean Dujardin.

But... there was obviously a huge spike for Dujardin after he won best actor, a big late shift in his favor. Most of the Clooney reports were focused on pre-award buzz and stopped tracking earlier than we did. I refocused on the same channels as Jean Dujardin but only before the best actor award. And the winner: George Clooney.

How close was the race?  It depends on how you define winning. In overall tweets, Brad Pitt 'beat' George Clooney by an astonishingly small 1/10th of 1%. They differed by only 62 mentions out of roughly 60,000 each. In a list of 13 million tracked phrases sorted by frequency, Pitt and Clooney actually ended up next to each other. Jean Dujardin was only 1500 mentions down, about a 2% difference. Any sensible person knows this is actually an almost perfect three way tie.

If you count all tweets, Brad Pitt won.

If you count only official #oscars tweets, Jean Dujardin is the winner, dominating the late traffic and after show chatter.

If you count #oscars tweets during the run-up to the best actor award, the oscar 'buzz', you'll find that George Clooney won.

I'm calling it a three way tie. Possibly the closest I've ever seen. Our info-graphic ended up with Brad Pitt. Why? Because ultimately its all about buzz, whatever the context, and Brad simply got talked about more. By 1/10th of 1%.