Social Media Chatter Predicts Oscar Winners (mostly) [infographic]

We’d spend some time discussing the Academy Award show that happened last night except that there isn’t really much to discuss beyond the scathing reviews given to the telecast last night on Twitter and this morning via traditional media. Unlike the Grammy Awards acknowledging the impact of social media and technology by having Ellen Kay look at “Twitter” on an ‘iPad” between segments, the Oscars didn’t even pay lip service to the changing ways we follow live broadcasts.

Fortunately, social media monitoring company, Meltwater Group, decided to take matters into its own hands and track who people were talking about on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, comments, and more to win the best acting and picture Academy Awards in this handy infographic:

Obviously, with the exception of Franco, this highly scientific method ended up “predicting” the correct winners from last night for Best Actress and Best Picture. Hey, in baseball batting 2 out of 3 is really good!

Now, the first thing you probably thought of was that the Franco numbers might be skewed because he was actually hosting the event. According to Wired, Meltwater accounted for this:

“Meltwater searched for instances of each nominee (the movie title or actor/actress name) juxtaposed with Oscar-related terms to make sure the conversation was relevant, and in the case of best actor filtered out the word ‘host’ so that discussion of Franco as the Oscar host would not cloud the results. As you can see, though, he’s still the most popular.”

Bear in mind that they started their statistic gathering from January 25th and ended well before last night’s telecast, so all the scathing mentions of Franco’s indifference on stage didn’t count.

At the end of the day, though, it’s not the people online voting for the Oscars, so the best conclusion you can draw from this data is that people online talked about certain nominees more than other. Still, it’s interesting to see how this online popularity contest compared to how the Academy actually voted.