Brandwatch Tool Tracks Oscar Frontrunners

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Movie buffs who can't wait until the big reveal on February 24 are in luck: Social analytics and monitoring firm Brandwatch and The Credits, an online magazine from the Motion Picture Association of America, have teamed up to create a live Oscars social media tracker, the Social Oscars.

The tool tracks online chatter about Oscar nominees among critics and the general public using an algorithm that looks at positive feedback in news articles, reviews, blogs and social channels.

According to Eve Sangenito, vice president of marketing at Brandwatch, positive feedback is more applicable than negative because Brandwatch's analysis is of a predictive nature.

Even though Oscar nominations didn't come out until January 10, Brandwatch's analysis has been ongoing since late 2012.

Data collection begins with a central query that monitors all mentions of the 85th Academy Awards. Joel Windels, lead community manager at Brandwatch, says the company crawls millions of sources a day in order to find relevant content.

The data is then categorized based on awards and nominees. A filter is applied to the data, separating critics from public mentions. Finally, an additional filter is applied to distinguish positive mentions.

"So basically, at the very beginning, we looked at as much as we possibly could and then we sliced and diced," Windels says.

According to Brandwatch, the end result is a figure for overall critic and public buzz as well as the number of public and critic positive predictions for every award/nominee.

Per Brandwatch's figures, throughout the second half of January, tweets averaged 1,400 to 1,600 per day. February's daily tweet total has been above 3,000.

As of Thursday (Feb 14), Brandwatch's analysis included 304,550 mentions of which 121,000 were tweets. Brandwatch says Twitter accounts for about 40 percent of the Oscars conversation.

According to Brandwatch, this level of conversation is a 55 percent increase over 2012. Although Windels adds this metric is "possibly a tiny bit deceiving" since Internet use has also gone up since then.

As of Thursday, both the Critic's Choice and Public Choice for Best Picture was Argo. Critics and the public also agreed on Leading Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis. In fact, per Brandwatch, the critics and public disagree in just five of 18 categories. That includes Leading Actress, which was split between Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain.

Unfortunately, even though Brandwatch conducted Oscars analysis last year, it was internal and did not separate critics from the public, so it came to no obvious conclusions, Windels says. That means there's no data to compare against the actual Oscar winners last year.