The oscars and nominated directors, actresses, actors and everybody else generate quiet a bit of buzz online. What about each of The Oscars’ nominated Best Pictures? Can Internet Sentiment Analysis predict the winners? Although just emerging, the explosion of consumer generated media makes online buzz monitoring an increasingly viable tool to take the pulse of attitudes in social media towards pretty much anything, brands, products, ideas, people and more. Internet sentiment analysis draws on information retrieval, data mining, machine learning, statistics, and computational linguistics to transform unstructured online dialog (blogs, chats, boards, …) into marketing and social media insights. Search is the Internet OS!
The following charts present blog coverage, good, neutral, bad, authoritative and not, planted and spontaneous conversations. The first two charts come from BuzzMetrics’ Blogpulse.
The data is as good as what you’re looking for, so for transparency purpose, here are the exact queries I used: The Queen >> the queen movies, Little Miss Sunshine >> little miss sunshine movies, The Departed >> the departed movies, Babel >> babel movies, Letters from Iwo Jima >> letters from iwo jima movies. I added the “movies” filter to reduce the noise around generic titles like The Queen or Babel.
The next two charts come from IceRocket. Over the past 3 months, IceRocket reports that The Queen received about 14,578 posts, an average of 162 posts a day. Then comes Little Miss Sunshine with 9,008 posts, 100 a day. The Departed follows with about 8,021 posts, 89 a day and Babel received about 5,545 posts, 62 a day. Letters from Iwo Jima follows with 3,159 posts, 35 a day.
Beside the general public’s attitude, Internet sentiment analysis also informs on how effective the studios have been at executing online marketing and viral word-of-mouth campaigns. With marketing budgets getting bigger than production budgets, the studios are no stranger to online marketing.
The next charts come from Technorati, querying their index for “any blog” in “all languages” for the past 360 days, using the same queries.
Posts that contain The Queen per day for the last 30 days.
Posts that contain Little Miss Sunshine per day for the last 30 days.
Posts that contain The Departed per day for the last 30 days.
Posts that contain Babel per day for the last 30 days.
Posts that contain Letters from Iwo Jima per day for the last 30 days.
Mining user generated media is one way to look at it. The number of searches for each of these movies is another way to look at it. The following chart comes from Google Trends, representing the search volume for each movie title. If you start digging into the coverage, you’ll see that there is a lot of noise, not all of these searches actually reflect the buzz specific to these movies.
This is really all for fun and entertainment – like The Oscars – because i) subtle changes in the query formulation can dramatically change the counts, ii) there is a lot of “linguistic-related noise” out there that has nothing to do with the movies, iii) this is just coverage, who knows, maybe it’s all negative coverage … not 🙂 The serious analysis comes in when you start looking at the tone, positive, neutral, negative, comment categories, authority level, momentum, conversational threads, correlation to marketing spend and a whole lot more. And who knows, maybe the wisdom of blog crowds will be right tonight.
