We then wanted to uncover who the fans wanted to see. Rather than doing a global search we looked at three different audiences – Moms, Film Buffs, and Millenials – to see what host recommendations each audience had in common to find the optimal host for the 85th Academy Awards.

No matter who the Oscars choose to host the event this year we know social media engagement will be greater than it’s ever been.

Updated

Billy Crystal has been brought back to host the Oscars. I’m for one am happy to have the funnyman back in a tux.

Social Media more and more is becoming a data source to help brands understand consumer behaviors and interests. For this year’s Oscars the social chatter revealed some stimulating data-points that we’re interesting, but not necessarily actionable for brands and advertisers. Using a proprietary Topic Discovery Engine, Networked Insights dove into the social conversations to uncover information brands could leverage.

While there is conflicting reports on the number or total tweets generated by the Academy Awards, what has become evident is the changing behavior of viewers. Unlike ever before, participants are embracing a multi-screen environment, transforming The Oscar experience from a broadcast into a real-time, digital conversation amongst friends and likeminded people through blogs, micro-blogs and social networks.

A lot of attention from companies monitoring social media leading up to The Oscars was around what films and actors were discussed the most. What The Trend analyzed data from the Twitter Worldwide Trending Topics and developed a ranking of most discussed films. The Meltwater Group and Webtrends, while cautioning their data was more a reflection of popularity rather than predictive of Oscar winners, developed reports purporting winners and losers or rankings from the social media mentions surrounding The Oscars.

This information is surely interesting as it reveals what consumers are talking about, but it probably aides the studios and agents representing the films and actors most as they look to develop pricing models for products and celebrity endorsements. Networked Insights wanted to dig deeper into the data surround The Oscars to see what they could learn from the incredible volume of conversations.

Networked Insight’s research, which clustered conversations through a proprietary technology tool known as a Topical Discovery Engine, exposed two themes that have tangible implications for brands and advertisers. First, by isolating social media data from web properties that had specific demographic profiles, Networked Insights discovered who the most discussed actors for various product categories were.

Celebrity endorsement is on the rise with 24% of ads during The Oscars featuring a celebrity endorsement, a 500% increase from 2010 according to GreenLight. While it’s clear the clout of an Oscar win can impact an actor’s income for the balance of their career, what is less clear is how The Oscar losers fair. Networked Insights’ data allows brands and advertisers to uncover real value when evaluating celebrity endorsement possibilities.  This can be done by looking at social media conversations and comparing the “social lift” an actor has over his peers.

By examining social data with tools developed exclusively for the purpose of gathering marketing insights, Networked Insights is able to uncover trends that increase the efficiency of marketing and advertising programs.  Networked Insights has helped Fortune 500 clients use this capability to identify an optimal celebrity spokesperson and to validate decisions around existing endorsement agreements.

It’s an exciting time for consumers, brands, and marketers. Technological advances in communications and publishing are changing the frequency and speed in which people communicate with each other and brands. Social data provides a window into the digital conversations consumers are having and leading marketing organizations are learning how to leverage this information to make smarter decisions. As brands experience with social media increase so does their need for improved understanding of the interactions customers are having with their brand. Networked Insights helps brands and advertisers harness social data to discover meaningful insights that impact performance.

Click here to get a copy of this years report on How to find the right Celebrity Endorser for your brand

But outside of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, winners are decided by thousands of movie buffs posting their opinions online. That online buzz doesn’t necessarily predict the Academy’s winners. But we’ll be eager to see how the Oscars land compared to the Networked Insights list.

We searched for and focused on the sites with the most discussion of Oscar nominated movies: sites like IMBD, Awards Daily Forums, and AwardsDaily. In our work with agencies and brands, we strive to find relevant content discussed by relevant audiences. In this case, we chose people engaged and passionate about movies.  The data was gathered from February 2, when the nominations were announced, through March 3.

The drama between behemoth Avatar and upstart The Hurt Locker plays out with high tension. In categories where the films square off, each finishes in first or second place in share of conversation. And each gets a social win three times: Avatar wins for Best Director, Best Picture, and Sound Editing, while The Hurt Locker has the edge in Cinematography, Film Editing, and Sound Mixing.

Christoph Waltz (Inglorious Basterds) is the leading social favorite in an individual category. Engagement around Waltz is 21% higher than any other leading actor. He accounts for 39% of the share in conversation.

Categories that were short on engagement included: Live Action Short, Documentary Short, and Animated Short. Engagement in these categories is 10-15% of the average. Who says attention spans are growing short?

And now, the rest of the Social Media Winners…

We would like to thank all the people who tirelessly posted their opinions on social media sites for the great gift of their collected wisdom (and we thank our mothers, drama coaches, and husbands and wives). We couldn’t have done this “Measuring the Social” report without you.

For a comprehensive report on share of conversation for all categories and nominees, email Jonathan Zarov.

Many will gather around the TV Sunday night to watch stars come down the red carpet and to see who walks away with an Academy Award. But millions have already been online reading, blogging, sharing, linking and rating stories that feature the Oscar nominees they support. And according to our ability to measure across the entire social universe, these people are the true predictor of who’s cheering for who when Hugh Jackman steps on stage to kick things off this Sunday.

Our report released today titled Oscars: Measuring the Social, captures all the online buzz of the Oscars to predict which movie the public will be cheering for on Oscar night.

The entire concept of the Oscars is to build hype in order to sell movie tickets during a generally slow season. Bringing that buzz online through word of mouth is a huge benefit to the movie industry. Networked Insights has the ability to quantify that buzz whereby you can correlate the ROI of online interactions to ticket sales.

We ranked the top Oscar social winners in the most popular categories. And the ‘true’ winners are:

To gather data for this Measuring the Social Report, we tapped more than 17,000 social media and social networking sites, which included 3.5 million conversations per day and over 120 million unique users.

While the highlights from the Oscars: Measuring the Social report may not appear to reveal too many surprises, the interesting thing is how close, or not so close, the level of engagement is among fans. For instance, Heath Ledger, who many predictors are calling a ‘clear favorite to win best supporting actor,’ is only up three percentage points over Robert Downey Jr., based on total online engagement.

And while many are predicting Kate Winslett to be the winner in the best actress category, total online engagement shows Meryl Streep as the fan favorite.

What’s always surprising to people about our social media measurement approach is how different the results often are versus traditional monitoring and measurement. That’s because traditional approaches to measurement, even social media, lack relevance. For instance, other social media measurement only accounts for posts while ours factors in content that is posted, read, linked to, shared and rated. When you consider that conversations are happening online today, it only makes sense that ‘true’ online engagement is captured and utilized.