I decided to put our proprietary influence-ranking system to the test this week by looking at the now-legendary Old Spice campaign, which produced over 180 short video responses on YouTube in just two days and was spread all over the Internet.

These conditions are factored into our influence algorithm and then measured against the other results in the study.

Inbound links – This is the number-one ingredient in Spiral16′s influence ranking. The more inbound links, the more influential a URL is deemed.

Domain influence –  We measure the number of times specific domains appear in your relevant results.

Age and Persistence – Newer posts will generally have more recent links, however, an older URL that continues to be linked is more influential.

Search source abundance – Even though duplicate URLs will be rejected, this relates to how many internal sources returned the URL as a result. The more search sources that find the URL, the higher influence it has because its more likely to be seen by someone searching for the topic.

Position – This is based on a URL’s average position in search rankings and also takes into consideration any change in position.

1. The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

This is the Super Bowl commercial that introduced the character back in February. As of this writing, it has almost 14 million YouTube views. 2% of all the URLs relevant to this campaign link to this YouTube video. This video was a good jumping off point for people to talk about this character.
Comments: 18,318
Favorites: 113,121
Likes: 57,855
Dislikes: 923

This is a 3D visual map of the URLs relevant to the Old Spice Man campaign. The YouTube channel is in the center of the screen. Click to enlarge.

2. Questions

At over 7 million views since June 29 when it debuted on YouTube, this video is just plain funny, and it was strategically designed to get people talking about the Old Spice Man again before they launched their social media campaign. 1.93% of all URLs link to this video. Considering its been up for less than 3 weeks, that’s pretty impressive.
Comments: 9,300
Favorites: 33,930
Likes: 34,697
Dislikes: 440

3. @jsbeals, The Marriage Proposal

A Twitter user asked the Old Spice Man to ask his girlfriend to marry him and the writers jumped on it–smart move. It’s at 460,000 views, was linked to by 1.01% of all relevant URLs, and is the most influential response video of the bunch, just barely beating out …
Comments: 639
Favorites: 1,397
Likes: 2,954
Dislikes: 28

4. Re: Anonymous

This is the infamous and perfectly calibrated 4Chan response. It has over 600,00 views and speaks to a very specific audience. Many users may not completely understand the cranky and anonymous group, but they are powerful influencers and this video plays to their absurdist sense of humor. It may have been watched and commented on more times than the marriage proposal, but only .094% of URLs in the study link to this video.
Comments: 3,276
Favorites: 5,297
Likes: 6,738
Dislikes: 137

5.@kevinrose

At nearly 450,000 views, this video is widely considered to be the video that kicked off the social media explosion. The founder of Digg wasn’t feeling good so he tweeted the Old Spice Man, who responded with this video. Rose’s response to his personalized message immediately went out to the over 1 million people who follow him on Twitter: “”Holy sh*t, best get well video EVER from Old Spice.” .06% of all URLs in the study link to this video.
Comments: 486
Favorites: 800
Likes: 2,066
Dislikes: 39

6. Re: @Isaiahmustafa

A very clever meta video with 140,000 views where the Old Spice Man talks directly to a tired Isaiah Mustafa, the actor who plays him, and tells him to stay on target.
Comments: 136
Favorites: 317
Likes: 743
Dislikes: 2

7. Re: pandarr
A guy on Reddit asked for an answering machine message, so Old Spice Man responds with everything he thinks “pandarr” would need to edit into a great message. 360,000 views so far.
Comments: 722
Favorites: 4,287
Likes: 4907
Dislikes: 26

8. Re: Alyssa_Milano 4
As a back and forth flirtation, Old Spice Man asks where to take the relationship from here. Alyssa Milano famously responded that he should donate $100,000 to a New Orleans oil spill relief fund. That is being referenced, and therefore linked. 395,000 views.
Comments: 210
Favorites: 480
Likes: 990
Dislikes: 8

This weekend we rolled out some new features to our clients. I wrote about the expanded export options last week, and we also made enhancements to Spark’s proprietary influence algorithm to combat common SEO practices.

I’ve been watching the Deepwater Horizon oil spill story in the Gulf of Mexico using our Internet monitoring platform since May 2, so using some of the data gathered from that study, I’d like to illustrate another (seemingly minor) feature we rolled out this past weekend. This can be extremely useful when narrowing results for effective reporting.

New Display Count calculation: Number/Percentage of Results Out of Total

This feature immediately calculates and displays the total number and percentage that any word, URL, or filtering parameter makes up of the whole. I usually start by looking at the Semantic Cloud, but this function will enable you to go beyond that to search any term that you’d like and get the results in one click.

Here’s are some word examples, broken up into categories:

The government is inextricably linked to the oil spill

Obama – 10,783 URLs (42%) out of 25,579 URLs contain the word “Obama.”
government – 8,610 URLs (34%) out of 25,579 URLs contain the word “government.”
federal – 6,163 URLs (24%) out of 25,579 URLs contain the word “federal.”
administration – 5,237 URLs (20%) out of 25,579 URLs contain the word “administration.”
Washington – 5,003 URLs (20%) out of 25,579 URLs contain the word “Washington.”

Sectors affected by the oil spill

environment – 7,059 (28%) out of 25579 URLs
energy – 7,036 (28%) out of 25,579 URLs
wildlife – 4,634 (18%) out of 25579 URLs
economy – 4,147 (16%) out of 25579 URLs
financial – 3,820 (15%) out of 25,579 URLs
fishing – 3,698 (14%) out of 25,579 URLs
beach – 3,693 (14%) out of 25,579 URLs

States most often mentioned in oil spill posts

Louisiana – 8,723 (34%) out of 25579 URLs
Florida – 5,928 (23%) out of 25,579 URLs
Mississippi – 3,249 (13%) out of 25,579 URLs

Everyone is talking about Trey Hillman, but not so much about his replacement.

Trey Hillman’s record during his three seasons as Kansas City Royals‘ manager was was 152-207. Last night after his star pitcher Zack Greinke earned his first win of the season (6-4 over the Cleveland Indians), it was announced that he had been fired.

Former Milwaukee Brewers manager Ned Yost, who joined the Royals’ front office in January, takes over as manager immediately, but the Internet community seems to be way more focused on Hillman than they are on Yost.

Out of all the relevant results returned on the subject, Hillman was mentioned almost twice as much as Yost.

Relevant data was spread pretty evenly across site-type categories with social media sites like Twitter accounting for 28.77%. With news like this, there is bound to be a lot of traditional news coverage and blog coverage as well, and those results are almost even with the social media sites.

• Social – 28.77%
• General – 23.58%
• Blogs – 23.47%
• News – 22.17%
• Video – 2% (This number will increase as time goes on because video content takes more time to produce.)

General manager Dayton Moore obviously has respect for Hillman, since he had a tough time not getting too emotional when he made the announcement, but his win/loss record spoke for itself.

Here are excerpts with overt sentiment from sites other than Twitter:

“Even with the bad hand he was dealt in KC, Hillman didn’t do himself any favors. Perhaps it was his lack of prior Major League experience. Perhaps it was a bad attitude. Perhaps it was his poor relationships with his players.” – Fack Youk

“…with Moore having signed a contract extension, one has to wonder whether he’ll make a change if things get off poorly for the Royals again.” – Prince of New York Baseball Blog

“Veteran catcher Jason Kendall offers a strong endorsement for new Royals manager Ned Yost from their time together in 2008 at Milwaukee. “Ned is a great manager, a great baseball person,” Kendall said.” – Kansas.com (Wichita Eagle)

“The Royals fired manager Trey Hillman and replaced him with another mediocre non-entity Ned Yost.” – The Big Lead

“No one will ever mistake Trey Hillman for Casey Stengel, but at the same time no one will ever mistake the Kansas City Royals of his tenure for the 1950′s Yankee teams Stengel managed.” – Fanspeak

“In two-plus seasons as Royals’ manager, Hillman was 152-207. This is a garbage firing in my opinion. It’s not Hillman’s fault that he had zero talent to work with.” – Bleacher Report

Data visualization is all about communication. You can interpret large data sets and communicate those ideas to others quicker with visualizations than you can with a big list and a bunch of columns.

(Not convinced? Check out our slideshow about The Value of 3D Data Visualization.)

Ever since Betty White was picked by the denizens of the Internet to host “Saturday Night Live” (which is happening this Saturday night, by the way), we thought it would be fun to track the meme of Betty White visually and see what it looked like with each URL representing a data point.

Everybody knows the story by now:

A Facebook page was launched in Dec. 2009 by a fan to convince Lorne Michaels to let the 88-year old actress host SNL. By March 11, 2010, after a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild, a Super Bowl Snickers commercial, and an ensuing Internet frenzy, the show relented.

This is what it looks like on the Web.

Overall View

The full view is too huge to even put in a blog post. That, and it is full of tons of disconnected URLs just floating all by themselves at the edges of a virtual space.

What we see to the right is a high-level view of most of the URLs that make up the connected portion of the “Betty White Saturday Night Live SNL” universe.

(Click on the picture for a bigger version.)

To help make sense of it all, let’s drilldown and highlight some of the key findings.

Each sphere represents a relevant URL and is scored for average sentiment (green for positive, red for negative, gray for neutral).

A green connecting line between two spheres is interlinked. A red end of a line represents an inbound link, while a blue one represents an outbound link.

Incestuous Cluster

Looking at this closely clustered visualization below, you intuitively get the idea that these URLs are all by themselves, save for one exception. And you’d be right. Each URL in the main cluster is part of the domain http://livefromnewyorkitssaturdaynightlive.blogspot.com/.

What’s happened here is that many of the posts on this SNL fansite link to each other by way of a list of archived posts. Also, a sidebar list of “Upcoming Shows” lists Betty White as the host of the May 8 episode.

The only link outside of the blog is one from New York magazine’s Vulture blog that was referred to in another small post. That’s the neutral URL out on its own with just one inbound link.

So from a linkage standpoint, you could determine that, while there is a lot of content on the “Live From New York, It’s Saturday Night” blog, it doesn’t really get spread outside of its own little grouping.

Lots of Inbound Links

Below, however, is an example of a healthy and influential URL. This is the number-one most influential URL in the “Betty White SNL” insight. It’s the one smack dab in the middle, highlighted green, and it’s the USA Today story from March 11, 2010 that confirmed the fact that White would indeed host the show.

(Click on the image for a bigger version.)

There are 74 sites linking into that URL and many of those sites are gateways that were also linked to by other URLs. That’s why the spider web continues to grow and live outside of this particular URL.

The number of people that could find their way back to the USA Today page is staggering, considering how many sites that link to it also have second-order and third-order connections.

Gateway URL

The last visualization (below–click to enlarge) is what I like to call a gateway URL. The URL, highlighted green and off to the right a little, has 16 inbound links and one outbound link and is this story from the NY Daily News.

It also appears to be off in its own little cluster, but it is positioned in a way where you can clearly see that it is the gateway to all of these other URLs, each with their own significance. In fact, only two of the URLs that link to this URL even lead back to the main hub in any way.

This kind of visual influence mapping can be invaluable to a business, giving you the ability to visually track and measure the reach of a particular message, I hope this post has helped illuminate the value one can get from this tool.

And, by the way, are you looking forward to watching Betty White host SNL as much as we are?

Well, last night saw one of the most unpredictable NCAA tournaments ever come to a close with Duke beating underdog Butler by just two points in the championship game. For the NCAA organization, it is now time to get back to addressing the idea of whether expanding March Madness to a 96-team bracket is a good idea or not.

We started a research project back in February to follow the growth of NCAA expansion chatter online. The goals were simple. See how the tournament itself affected the conversation about expansion and monitor sentiment surrounding the proposal.

As you may have read here in the past, I always stress finding the right terms. Starting with five different search queries with variations on “NCAA,” “tournament,” “March Madness,” and four variants of “expansion,” we scoured the Web for the most relevant URLs.

Site Type Breakdown

It turns out that blogs and news sites make up almost 71% of the relevant URLs, with blogs ahead of news by just 6.77%. The total breakdown of site categories is as follows:

• Blogs – 38.86%
• News – 32.09%
• Social – 13.7%
• General – 13.67%
• Video – 1.68%

Volume

Now here’s where it gets interesting. There had been a lot of talk about expansion, but little official word from the NCAA itself before March 9. In a shrewd strategic move, the NCAA acknowledged that it was considering expansion just 9 days before the tournament began.

Looking at volume growth chart to the left, you can see that expansion chatter slowly grew in the month of March, reaching a peak in the days immediately following Media Day on March 9, where NCAA execs discussed the expansion.

On March 16, two days before tournament play began, there is another spike as expansion talk enjoys its highest numbers of the month: 460 URLs across the Web. Two days after the beginning of March Madness, the amount of expansion-relevant URLs plunged to 214.

From there, most of the talk about expanding to 96 teams continues to diminish as people got caught up in the big upsets and all the other tournament hype.

Even when the conversation experiences another spike in popularity on March 31/April 1 after the Final Four press conference where prospective models were discussed, it was only as high as the March 16 total.

What will be really interesting to see is how the volume of expansion posts increase now that the tournament is over.

Sentiment

Now we get into a lesson on how to interpret data correctly. Virtually every social media monitoring platform has sentiment measurement, and all will more than likely agree that machine logic can only do so much.

A computer cannot interpret sarcasm, words with multiple meanings, slang, or words whose intended meanings are defined by the context of their sentence or paragraph with 100% accuracy.

That is why humans are still the most accurate interpreters of data.

A quick look at the data shows that sentiment trends mostly positive, with 53.99% of overt URLs having positive sentiment.

Analysis from the Spiral16 analytics team, however, reveals that sentiment about the tournament in general cannot be automatically separated from sentiment regarding the expansion. The subjects are simply too closely and inter-related, sometime appearing in the same sentence. Even though the keywords in the study mention expansion, sentiment within each URL could refer to any number of March Madness-related topics.

Above is an example. Click on the image above for a larger version, or read the text of the quote below:

“Rather than expand the NCAA Tournament field to 96 teams, the NCAA should satisfy its corporate sponsors and television partners by making its elite teams play more often in the tournament. Before I go further, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I’m against changing the NCAA Tournament.”

Conclusions

The tournament effectively swallowed up most of the expansion talk, and the fact that sentiment was hard to gauge also speaks to the timing of the acknowledgement.

At the end of the day, your social media monitoring tool should be there to point you in the right direction. It won’t hand you analysis on a silver platter.

The value of a social media monitoring platform doesn’t come from simply looking at a few charts and graphs. It comes from the ability to drilldown into that data in a way that is meaningful to you.

As convenient and helpful as automatic charting is, the information contained therein still has to be digested by people. The value is in the data, not merely in the graph itself.

Last week we spent some time discussing and tracking the 82nd Academy Awards. Now that the winners have their Oscars, and the smoke has cleared, we can stand back and look at our own study in social media discussion.

Let’s do a quick recap – Last Tuesday we asked “Can online monitoring predict the Oscars?“, a question we set out to answer by tracking the top three contenders for Best Picture: box office powerhouse Avatar, fan-favorite Inglourious Basterds, and critical darling The Hurt Locker (which just so happened to be this humble author’s favorite film of the year).

Specifically we wanted to see if online discussion could in any way act as a predictor towards who would walk away with that oh-so-coveted little gold man.

Throughout the week, a consistent trend occurred with Avatar leading, The Hurt Locker usually about 11-15% behind, and Inglourious Basterds typically another 3% behind The Hurt Locker.

Was there was a direct correlation between online chatter about three Best Picture candidates and those movies’ chances of winning the big prize at the Oscars Sunday night?

The short answer: not exactly.

In February, I predicted on my own that The Hurt Locker would win Best Picture in a YouTube video for my movie site. It was kind of a no-brainer. But I was curious to see what overall volume would show us.

Avatar had 42% of all online Best Picture discussion among the top three contenders (not surprising since its the highest grossing movie of all time), but it came up short Sunday night.

The Academy is a closed voting body and clearly online buzz didn’t affect their voting to the point of predicting the correct winner. That said, Avatar‘s loss Sunday night does illustrate the need to look at social media from the perspective of how it fits with outside datasets, and not merely as a stand-alone source.

In this case, maybe combining picks from industry analysts and movie critics (who championed underdog winner The Hurt Locker since its release last July) with the online data could have bolstered The Hurt Locker‘s position. Among those groups, The Hurt Locker was the clear favorite.

Some other takeaways:

Semantically, The Hurt Locker had a very solid presence, even beating out Avatar in the Inglourious Basterds insight.

To wrap-up: This recent Twitter study from NMS also bears out the notion that Avatar was clearly the most discussed film online. In that respect, our study was a success.

While online samplings didn’t predict the Best Picture winner, they are certainly valuable in finding out all kinds of other metrics. After all, isn’t the Oscar supposed to be about artistic merit and not popularity?

If online buzz amounts to anything in this year’s Oscar race, James Cameron’s Avatar will win Best Picture on Sunday night.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is obviously a closed voting body, but they are influenced by the media just like everybody else. The study started on Feb. 10, the day ballots were mailed to members of the Academy.

Using Spiral16’s online listening platform Spark, we tracked the top three contenders for Best Picture this year: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Inglourious Basterds.

This kind of measurement only takes into consideration volume and not the sentiment of the collected URLs. Unsurprisingly, a huge majority of all of the sentiment surrounding all three movies is positive.

Spark has two sentiment scoring capabilities.

The first is an average score based on all the words on the page and the second automatically extracts the most positive and negative passages.

Among the overt sentiment samples, all three movies have a higher than 97% positive rating. This means that of the loud voices on the Internet, the positive ones far outweigh the negative.

When URLs are scored for an average amount of sentiment, Inglourious Basterds leads the pack, with a 79% positive rating. Avatar is second with 74%, and The Hurt Locker is third with 71%.

Could it be that the multiple last-minute controversies surrounding The Hurt Locker are affecting its overall sentiment score? Is Basterds poised to play spoiler, riding a wave of positive sentiment, and challenge Avatar?

We’ll find out Sunday night! Stay tuned Monday for our Oscar report wrap-up.

Below are some random sentiment excerpts from the study. Click for a larger image:

I’ve been writing about Spiral16’s ongoing 2010 Oscar study this week. We are measuring the power of online buzz about the Academy Awards and by Sunday night, we’ll know if the amount of online chatter for the top three contenders had any connection to the ceremony’s Best Picture winner.

Two things about the way Spark is collecting data:

Avatar is currently in the overall lead, so the graphic to the right represents the site type breakdown for URLs mentioning Avatar and “best picture.”

Below, however, we’ll combine the stats for all three movies and view the study as a whole.

This is how the breakdown of sites looks so far for frontrunners Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Inglourious Basterds It’s actually very similar to the Avatar study:

Also, it’s important to mention that each of these samplings are being done independently of each other. This means that if Avatar is mentioned in the same post as The Hurt Locker, that URL will be accepted as a relevant result in the individual studies for each movie. That way, one film is not able to “steal any votes” away from another.

To illustrate just how widely spread out Oscar talk is all over the web, take a look at our 3D visual map of the Avatar study. The spheres represent URLs and the lines are links between them.

Green spheres have an average of positive sentiment, red are average negative, and gray are URLs with an average neutral sentiment.

This is a visual illustration of how many websites have Oscar talk related to these movies and how they all are fairly disconnected to each other. To explore a working Spark 3D Virtualization for yourself and see what this is really like, click here.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at sentiment—some specific overt stuff and how sentiment relates to the big picture.

In yesterday’s blog, I went into detail about how we set up our 2010 Oscar prediction study. Using Spiral16’s Internet monitoring tool Spark, we aim to find out if there is any correlation between online chatter about the top three Best Picture candidates and the result of Sunday night’s awards ceremony.

The overall percentage for each of the movies hasn’t changed that much since yesterday. Remember, the URLs deemed relevant for this study are only the ones that also mention “best picture.”

Now let’s look at how the results differ in the three separate searches related to each movie. Looking at the Semantic Cloud, you can get a good idea of the language people that are using when writing about the Best Picture race. Although Inglourious Basterds has only 7% less of the share of conversation overall, it’s status as a distant third place is solidified by looking at the total count of words used.

Looking at this, it’s pretty clear that Basterds is running a distant third. It should also be noted that no other nominated movies’ keywords (Precious, Up, Up in the Air, The Blind Side, etc.) showed up before Basterds, further solidifying its place as the odds-on unrewarded bronze medalist .

It’s also worth mentioning that The Hurt Locker has such a solid presence in the word cloud overall.

Other interesting sidenotes:

In all three studies, “oscar” outranks “academy” and “awards,” while “oscars” is right behind them.

This is no big surprise to learn that people are using the slang terminology more than the official title of the ceremony.

With another search today, I also confirmed my suspicions from yesterday with data from Spark. I contended that:

Using two different queries, one for “inglourious basterds” and one for the more subtly misspelled title “inglorious basterds,” I discovered that 46% of all people referencing the film spelled it wrong like Neilsen did. This means their study didn’t pick up a whopping 55% of the traffic that spelled the film’s title right.

We’ll have more data insight tomorrow, so stay tuned.

With the Best Picture category at this year’s Academy Awards expanding to 10 nominees, this year’s race may be the least predictable in recent memory.

Or not.

Nobody really knows, since it is more than just the number of nominees that has changed. The Oscars are also employing a tiered voting system where Academy members rank the 10 films from best to worst and the scores determine the winner.

Even though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are the only ones whose votes actually count, I thought I’d take a look at the amount of online chatter about some of the nominees to see if there is any correlation between the movies people are talking about and the end result of the Academy’s voting.

Using Spiral16’s Internet monitoring platform Spark, I started tracking posts about the two movies that are generally considered to be the frontrunners—Avatar and The Hurt Locker—and the film that many say could be the spoiler: Inglourious Basterds.

Remember, Spark is not limited to merely social media sites. Also, because Spark is not limited to RSS-generated results, it pulls in a huge amount of data.

On Monday, I posted about setting up good search terms to get great results. This is absolutely key. For this study, I searched the title of each film and the words “best picture” to see only the posts that were equating the two in some fashion.

For The Hurt Locker, I left out the word “the” and for Inglourious Basterds, I searched for both “inglourious” and “inglorious,” knowing that everybody will catch the obvious misspelling of “bastards” in the film’s title, but might miss the more subtle misspelling of “inglorious.”

(The Nielsen Company, in a post from yesterday, appears to have made a major goof in their flawed Best Picture study. Not only did Inglourious Basterds come in last in terms of total buzz—not a chance that is accurate—but in their data chart, the movie is spelled incorrectly as well. Guess we know why it came in last! I’m also wondering how they solved the Up/Up in the Air problem, but that’s another story.)

Thankful that they are not considered to be in the top three, I purposefully ignored nominees Up and Up in the Air because differentiating the two would be nearly impossible and lead to a lot of bad data. (You can add “Pixar” as a search term for Up, but how many people are actually mentioning the studio when they talk about the movie’s Best Picture chances? 50 percent? 40?)

I set the date range to bring in results going back to Feb. 10, the day the ballots were mailed to members of the Academy. Hopefully, this brings back a total that is more relevant to the actual vote, as it reflects the online culture during the time when voters will be making up their minds.

Here is the big-picture Best Picture overview as of noon CST today:

Below are some random snippets that bear out some of the bigger themes of this race.

Although Avatar is the most talked about so far, it also is the film that’s been seen by the most people. That means we have to assume that not all the conversation surrounding the Best Picture race is about how it’s going to win. (Check out the very first conversation excerpt.)

Inglourious Basterds’ spoiler chances are a popular topic, as you can see by the snippets in the third box below.

Come back tomorrow for more interesting data in our 2010 Best Picture race case study. After the Oscar telecast on Monday night, we’ll know if there’s any connection between online chatter and who wins the big prize.