I haven’t watched much of American Idol. I’m really not a fan of the signing but I am a fan of using social media to predict popularity contests. So lets give it a go.

First lets look at sentiment. Seems my taste for indie rock (and not pop ballads) isn’t shared by everyone. Sentiment for these folks is pretty darn positive. And positive in almost the exact same numbers. Bowersox get’ one percentage point on DeWyze. And negative sentiment is exactly the same.

But the story doesn’t end there. Since this is a popularity contest, the winner is going to need more buzz about them.

And it looks like over time DeWyze has had an advantage over Bowersox. And last week DeWyze was able make significant gains.

Looking at the percentage of posts ratio, in combination with a tie on sentiment, I think this is pretty safe call for DeWyze. So I’m going on record here for DeWyze.

What I found to be a rather disappointing finale to ABC’s Lost is perfect time for a little sentiment analysis fun using the social media monitoring tool Social Radar. What do I expect to see after the end a show that was much loved show?

I’m expecting to see a real dive in some pretty positive sentiment overall. Maybe not a wholesale hate fest but some definite disappointment. So what does a quick analysis tell us?

First there are a lot of positive things being said about Lost in general. Not surprising. But there are still more people “disappointed” than “satisfied.” Seems I’m not alone but not everyone agrees with me either.

So now lets look at the content of posts. Here the vast majority of references to “Lost” have positive sentiment. That makes it appear that most people have some pretty good things to say about Lost over our allotted time period of  30 days.  Maybe I’m wrong. People may have been pretty happy about the way the show was ending.

But then when we look the actual posts about Lost things start to get a little more mixed. So maybe I’m on to something — people aren’t entirely happy with the way the show is winding down.

OK. So now for the true test. How has the sentiment changed day to day. This shows a huge spike in negativity on the day the second to last show aired and then a more mixed but also more positive take on the very last show.

This tells us there are more people happy about the ending of the show than feeling let down, like me. So way to go Lost writers, you made most of blogoshpere happy, just not me.

The academy awards is a bit of a popularity contest. Not as much as the Golden Globes, so it will probably be a little more exciting to see if there’s any predictive insight here.

I’m just going to stick with the big awards and pull a few charts and see if there’s anything real interesting to look at.

Let’s look at best actor. We have Colin Firth, Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Morgan Freeman, and Jeremy Renner battling it out.

Analysis of the subject “Oscar Actor” tells us that Jeff Bridges leads the pack in sentiment and volume. Looking at buzz and trends, George Clooney is just way more popular — I’m going write this off as the Clooney factor. Colin Firth also has a wonderful sentiment score. But since I can’t ignore Jeff Bridges’ volume and sentiment scores combined, I’m picking Jeff Bridges.

Best actress is looking very Sandra Bullock: 92% positive sentiment and 23% of the conversation vs. just 14% for Meryl Streep – who would’ve thought a year ago.

The Best Director Oscar gets interesting. I think most people were predicting James Cameron had an easy win. He has 19% of the conversation but his ex wife, Kathryn Bigelow has 17%, well within a margin of error in my down and dirty search.  And Cameron’s sentiment score of 89% positive (never mind keywords like “evil”) is below Bigelow’s 94%. Now this is where it gets real squishy, analysis by subject reference is slightly better for Cameron but the sentiment of the posts for Bigelow is far better. Got that? That means people are saying nice things about Cameron more often but their articles are more positive about Bigelow when discussing best director. What do the pure buzz numbers telling us? Searching Cameron and Bigelow within Oscar, there’s just more talk about him. So if you think it’s a total popularity contest it’s Cameron and if you think it’s about a little bit more of an emotional decision go with with Bigelow. I’m going with Bigelow.

Now for Best Picture. I would have thought this category would clearly favor Avatar. It does not. It actually looks a lot like the best director analysis – but closer. So I’m going to have to go against my instincts and go with Hurt Locker. This one is just so close.

What are the Vegas Odds? Are the gamblers smarter?

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges by a big margin 2/15

Best Actress: By a decent margin it’s Sandra Bullock

Best Director: Katheryn Bigelow over James Cammeron

Best Picture: Avatar 4/7 over Hurt Locker 6/5

I’m not pretending to gain any serious insights here, just having a little fun to see if how the blogosphere feels about things and to see if it has any relevance to how the academy votes.

Editors note: Jimmy is not a professional analyst. His wife, who is, will sometimes remind him that what he thinks is a relevant deviation may not really be all that relevant at all. So don’t go betting the cow on anything I have to say. I hope you enjoy the oscars.

OK so you just dropped 2.5 million on media and another half million on production for what? Pissing off a of women who make up 52% of your demographic and influence almost every purchase on the planet. Great job Dodge, Bud Light, Dove. And Audi, really? Not like the Twitterverse wasn’t telling you don’t do it.

Now that I got all that off my chest, here’s a quick take on what the social sphere had to say about things in the macro sense. The USA Today admeter and just about everything else I’ve seen has picked out Doritos as the winner, then Google, and then Snickers. Snickers definitely saw a huge spike but not in the same league as Doritos. Google already has so much discussion online, running a TV spot on the Super Bowl doesn’t show as dramatic spike and it kinda ruins the graph, so I left it off. In case you’re wondering though, it does occupy a big chunk of the “super bow ads” conversation along with Tim Tebow. The Tim Tebow ad doesn’t win any creative awards but Focus On The Family made an excellent strategic play in creating buzz around their ad.

Ok. So we have some discussion but what does it all mean. For Doritos it has definitely moved sentiment in the right direction.

What would be downright frightening to see if one were a Dodge executive is the sentiment trend for the last two days. That was a big stinking pile of money to spend on an ad that pisses women off. Now only single men, who don’t ever want to date a woman will be able to buy that car. Good thing I drive a 10 year old Honda.

This post is the over-due follow up to this one. It took awhile to write not just because I’ve been busy but because I wanted to add to the conversation when other people have already written great comparisons of the social media tools available. Plus there are some smart people writing about how you should use these tools. What I haven’t seen is what I’m going to write today — which comes directly out of a hallway conversation the other day.

“Why don’t you just look it up on Social Radar? That’s what it’s for, right?”

Well, not exactly. Which begs the question: do you need to define what you’re expecting to accomplish before you go off and buy one of these tools? Because if your goals are pretty simple, you may end up spending more than you should. Or if you’re not ready for some of the more complex monitoring tasks, maybe you could start with the easy stuff first.

Categories of tools

I think the easiest way to look at the array of tools available is to use three categories. There are several tools out there to search the Web. There are other simple tools available to monitor the Web and provide you alerts. And there are tools out there that track activity. The last category can be further broken down, which I’ll get to a little later.

Search

Google, Nielson and Technorati all provide excellent resources to search blogs in more or less providing real-time information about your brand. Bing has a social search team working on new tools and now has a Twitter search in beta. And Yahoo will even let you tailor a search engine. So there’s no need purchase an expensive tool if you’re just out to look up a little information about what’s happening on the social web. If you want to search Facbook, today you’ll have to do it on their site if you need anything more than the most basic results (Facebook is moving in a more open direction, so stay tuned). And when it comes to Twitter search, there’s a lot of options for searching Twitter since they have their API open. Some dedicated free social-search tools include:

Ice Rocket

Social Mention

OneRiot

For search, one benefit of the more expensive tools is the filtering of the results. Many providers claim to have the least noise — all appear to be better than the free ones. Another benefit is speed – it takes servers to deliver the goods fast and, well, that costs money.

Tools for alerts

For simple monitoring and alerts, Google, Yahoo, BackType all provide the ability to monitor the Web and provide almost real-time alerts when something is posted on the internet about you or your brand. If a site is popular and has good SEO, Google will give you a pretty close to real-time alert if something you need to know about is posted — for example, I get an almost instantaneous alert every time I click publish. Frankly, even if  you’re using another tool, you should be using these services. You’ll find that some search engines see somethings and others see other things. It’s just the nature of the Web and the different algorithms search engines use. Now if you want alerts that look for aberrations or spikes in volume or sentiment you’ll need to spend money.

Tracking tools

For tracking tools, I break this down into two classes: the free/freemium or inexpensive ones and then the premium tools. Obviously the premium are better for certain purposes (and do a lot more than track) but not necessary for everyone. If you need to get a general idea of the conversation about a brand and watch what’s happening over time there are some affordable, if not free options including from Trackur and Trendrr.

A step up from these tools are free and cheaper tools would be the premium version of the previously mentioned ones or Scout Labs. These tools usually provide on demand search results with sentiment, alerts and some basic charting of activity. I took advantage of the 30 day trial of Scout Labs and found it extremely useful for a pitch we were in at the time. At this price point you will find some great features available.

Premium tools

So if you can do all this stuff relatively inexpensively, or even free, why would you want one of these other expensive tools?

Because you require the ability to slice and dice a fire hose of raw data. And you want to be able to sort, dial in, tweak and drill down into the result without having to deal with noise. You want to reliably gauge sentiment and evaluate trends. And you want the easiest UI available, maybe you even need training and someone to call on the phone to ask questions. You may even want an on demand analyst to help you build reports and make judgements. Not everyone really needs this kind of capability and service or even has the time and perseverance to gain anything valuable from it.

But if you do have the time to dedicate to it, and you have the aptitude for figuring out the right questions to ask the tools, you will discover some great information that may not have been obvious using a cheaper option. And they can just make it easier to do some more complicated tasks like gauging sentiment and mentions during a campaign for a deeper analysis of how a marketing or PR campaign is functioning, comparing the sentiment of your products to your competitors over time to look for market opportunities or product problems, or using them as an on-demand customer research tool.

Radian6, Techrigy SM2, Visible, Sysomos Map and Heartbeat, Biz 360, Collective Intellect, Neilson, and Social Radar are some of the more popular tools available and well worth consideration.

One outcome of the eavaluation process for us was that we found the tools were useful in ways we hadn’t yet realized. This was especially true for our brand strategists who found ways to test hypothesis and prove and her case to team members and clients. But that’s another story.

At Kilgannon, we’ve made the decision to use Social Radar as our new social media monitoring tool.

We did not take this decision lightly. We also scoured the blogs and websites. We also asked partner organizations which tools they were using and then decided on what criteria we’d use to evaluate the tools. Then spent several months looking at various tools – some we demoed and others we looked via webinar.

The tools we looked at included:

Techrigy SM2

Radian 6

Sysmos

BuzzMetrics

Visible

ScoutLabs

eCairn

Webtrends Social Measurement

Collective Intellect

Honestly, we gave all of them serious consideration. And many of them also would have been excellent selections. What it came down to was the before mentioned criteria. These are the main criteria we focused on:

Features: What the tool can do that will benefit our customers.

Training and support: Interestingly, some require more of this than others – as all tools do not allow you to create your own queries.

Cost structure: Notice I said cost structure and not cost.

Much of the discussion among bloggers has been about the wizbang features that these tools have and not the business case for choosing one over the other.

And some of these these tools make more sense for in-house marketing departments than agencies, which we are.

When talking to software providers IN GENERAL (this means not just social media monitoring folks)  I’ve found a reluctance to create a model that works for smaller companies, smaller agencies, and even mid-sized b2b companies. It seems they’re mostly interested in the big fish. That means, just like in media land, they’re catering to the non-niche, consumer audience. There is no reason that a b2b software provider should pay the same for the service as a consumer goods company – they simply do not require the same kinda of band width that Coke or Apple do.

I plan a follow up article with more detail about what I learned in the selection process that should be helpful to anyone looking for monitoring tools.

Update: Follow up here.