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American Idol Finale: Can We Predict the Winner Once Again?

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On last night’s episode Crystal Bowersox and Lee DeWyze competed for the final time for the coveted title of American Idol.  Each performed 3 songs, the first was their favorite song of the season, the second was chosen by executive producer Simon Fuller and the third is the first single they will release if they win tonight.

 
For his favorite song Lee chose “The Boxer.”  The judges were pleased, for the most part, with his performance.  Simon Fuller chose “Everybody Hurts” for his second song.  The judges again gave Lee some positive feedback but Ellen said she wished he would have let go a bit more and Simon said he seemed nervous.  For his final song, and possible single, Lee sang “Beautiful Day.” The judges were pleased with his final performance to which Simon said that the competition was designed for someone like him.

For her first song Crystal chose “Me and Bobby McGee” for which all of the judges gave Crystal positive feeback.  The song Fuller chose for Crystal was “Black Velvet,” the judges were again impressed. And finally she sang “Up To The Mountain” for her last song, and potential single.  The judges also praised her for this performance.  In fact Simon said “I thought that was by far the performance and the song of the night. And since this is going to be the final critique I’m ever going to give, that was outstanding.”

In order to determine who is most likely to be named the Season 9 American Idol; we looked at social media and search data. Who do you think will win tonight?

If you have been keeping up with Season 9 please share your thoughts by commenting below. But before you do, check out the facts from search and social media data that we have gathered below.
 

Chatter about Lee DeWyze is much stronger on Twitter and Google than it is for Crystal.  Tough Crystal has  stronger showing on Digg and YouTube.

Google Insights:
 

Google Insight data shows an overwhelming growth in popularity of searches for “American Idol Lee,” “Lee DeWyze” and “American Idol Hallelujah,” which is a song Lee performed on the show. 

Will Lee's sudden surge in online searches and social media mentions translate into more votes?  Tell us what you think.  And don’t forget to tune into tonight to find out who wins Season 9 of American Idol!

 **If you are a new reader to ymarketing's American Idol Prediction Project, check out our past blogs to understand how our Idol Prediction Project works, and how it led to the correct upset prediction of Kris Allen over Adam Lambert in 2009.

Favorite FREE Social Media Tools for 2010

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It seems that there are more Social Media Tools on the market today than there are Starbucks, so it's more important now than ever to save time (and money) to find the tools that excite even most experienced Social Mediaphiles.

That's why ymarketing would like to share some of our favorite (and free!) Social Media Tools for 2010, in no particular order. Some of these tools have been out for some time, while others are brand spanking new. The purpose of this blog is to promote Social Media tools that will make your life easier and more fun, thus the categories will be somewhat random, but their effectiveness will not. Enjoy!

Great all-in-one comprehensive browser for real-time and social web. Tweetdeck allows users to open their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace accounts all in one directory.

  Productivity enhancement service for Social Media users. Hootsuite Helps organize, schedule, and deliver content through Facebook and Twitter.

  bit.ly is one of the first, and still our favorite, URL shortener for tracking and analytics.

  Voice interface technology that let's you instantly acces your Facebook and Twitter accounts simply by speaking into your phone. Vlingo is a great hands free option for mobile tweeting on the go.

Allows multiple people to communicate through corporate Twitter accounts and stay in sync while doing so. No dropped balls with CoTweet, no stepping on each other's toes.

flickr creative commons search is a great place to find free photos (under a creative commons license) that you can use in blog posts, presentations, etc.

Great competitive intelligence for twitter is what Topsy gives you. Keep your social media ear to the ground with this excellent tracking tool. 

Want to see how popular you are on twitter? Wefollow allows you to view categorical rankings of who's hot on Twitter. 

For those of you who are interested in everything social media tools, and want a few suggestions of some great paid tools, here you go:

  Flowtown is a super cool tool allows you to take a random person's email address and quickly determine what social networks that person is on, as well as name, age, gender, and occupation. (I believe it costs $15 a month)

Dashboard program for your Social Media account, Swix promote it as Google Analytics for Social Media. We love the scorecard aspect of it. ($10 a month)

American Idol Judges Heat Up Google & Twitter | ymarketing.com

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Will Ellen or Simon Emerge as the Leader in Web Searches & Tweets

• Simon Cowell - Will he leave after this season? What about that contract?
• Ellen DeGeneres - Will she bring value to the viewers and How much will her Twitter Army affect this year's outcome?
• Paula Abdul - Will America miss her? Did she get a raw deal?
• Randy Jackson and Kara Dioguardi - How much attention can they attract amongst these dynamic personalities?

American Idol Trend & Research Methodology

Readers that followed this ymarketing Predicting Idol Winners blog series last year are familiar with our approach; we use online research tools that measure the impact and scale of searches, comments and buzz around an individual (or a brand) and assess their relative popularity online. While some of our much larger competitors used only search engine data to compile their predictions last season - and got it all WRONG, picking Adam Lambert as the winner - we focused instead on a much broader picture of online interest, factoring in data from Digg, Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, blogs and other social media.... and arrived at the documented CORRECT prediction that Kris Allen would win Idol.

Who's the Judge On Fire?

As USA Today's recent article and Idol Chatter Blog noted, the buzz this season is "all about the judges as Ellen arrives" and "Simon Cowell's exit." You might think that Simon Cowell would lead all judges in terms of popularity and buzz - especially with all the contract talk of late - but by Google and Twitter standards it's all Ellen. Worldwide interest in Ellen appears to have its epicenter in Canada, followed by the US, Singapore, Australia and South Africa.

The Most Tweets?

Ellen DeGeneres is by far and away the leader on Twitter as well. Hmmm, with three Twitter accounts of her own including @TheEllenShow (4 million followers), @Ellen_DeGeneres (85K) and this fan site @EllenFans (34K), I guess this Twitter thing actually works, huh? Simon, in contrast, appears to have just 21K followers @Scowell1 and four tweets to his name (lame, come on Simon!).

Twitter volume with the first names of the judges

Twitter volume with the full names of the judges

Digg

Digg - with a large following of over 40MM unique visitors - is another quality measure of online popularity. And the Idol Heatmap for Digg clearly shows Simon out front, followed by Ellen and Paula, with Randy and Kara bringing up the rear. 

Paula Interest Still High

Paula Abdul pulls in the 3rd place rank overall in interest in search and social media with relatively strong showings in both Twitter and Digg, while Randy and Kara are nearly non-existent.

Idol Interest

So what do you think? Will Simon and Ellen continue to dominate headlines throughout the year or will the contestant chatter takeover in coming weeks? Did anyone emerge in the debut show you think can draw significant interest?

If you are keeping score at home, for now it's:

• Simon Cowell - Digg #1
• Ellen DeGeneres - Google #1, Twitter #1
• Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson & Kara Dioguardi - So far in a clear trailing position
  

Why Businesses Must Blog | ymarketing

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As I talk about the virtues of social media marketing and blogging in particular, with business owners from 20-person companies to marketing executives representing Fortune 1000 enterprises, I frequently encounter the same objections when it comes to Business Blogging:

• "I just don't get it. How would blogging possibly help us reach our business goals?"

• "Blogging is fine for other people, but we're serious about driving our business forward and need to spend our time marketing."

• "Who has time to blog unless they're unemployed?"

And just recently I heard my favorite objection yet:

• "Don't some people blog when just a simple tweet would do?" (a hip reference to Twitter and its 140-character limit and a shot directed at the long-windedness of some bloggers, all rolled into one!)

All of these are legitimate questions and objections (and they all have equally legitimate answers, hopefully answered in this post).

Businesses that don't invest in blogging are losing out on a huge opportunity. 

Here are the top six (6) reasons Why Businesses Must Blog, in order to thrive in 2009 and beyond, in order of importance:

1. Increase Search Equity. Search Engines crawlers (affectionately known as "spiders") scour the internet for food daily; their favorite meals consist of text, headlines (H1 tags), meta data, page titles and links with descriptive anchor text. Well-crafted blogs are a virtual feast. The search engines behind these spiders don't really care if a newly discovered page is a blog or a regular web page; what they're particularly interested in is new, unique, well-crafted content. Blog posts between 200-400 words with good use of headlines, descriptive anchor text and relevant keywords are a virtual Olive Garden to the search engine spiders in a sea of soup kitchens. So the domains these Blogs reside on are rewarded with deposits in their search equity account. If your blog is on your company site (i.e. blog.yourcompanyname.com) then your site benefits and accrues the search equity; if you use a "free" blog site (i.e. yourcompanyname.blogspot.com) then Google or some other webhost gets the benefit. If you need more convincing that using a "free" service is a bad idea for your business, read Top Reasons Why Business Blogs Shouldn't Be On BlogSpot.com.

2. Increase Website Traffic. The clients who we have worked with to setup and properly promote integrated blogs (blog.yourcompanyname.com) have seen their traffic increase between 300% and 2,000%. The effect of these traffic gains - although by itself quite dramatic - is that the number of inbound links multiplies and additional search equity is applied. Since starting our blog (blog.ymarketing.com) we've seen our amount of content pages indexed on Google and Bing triple, and the blog has played a direct role in tripling the number of quality inbound links to ymarketing.com.

3. Increase Search Engine Spider Crawl Frequency. The question of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it fall" has an application in the world of search: if a website gets updated and no search engine spider comes by to re-index the site, then the change didn't really do your business any good. We've seen clients increase their crawl frequency from monthly to several times a week; I have to attribute this primarily to the addition of an integrated blog, and the results are that changes to the site (i.e. meta data testing, new content pages, news updates, etc.) get indexed nearly immediately, so we can get a read on what changes had a positive impact right away. The whole process of test, read and refine is greatly accelerated.

4. Increase Sharing and Word of Mouth. Have you noticed that people typically don't share product information on Facebook? Not too many people "Digg" company information sheets, right? And most of the Internet population resists the temptation to "bookmark" the "About Us" page on your site. People like to share things that are of interest to them on a personal level, and things they think their peers and friends would be interested in. This is true for B-to-B as well. Blogs make it easy for people to share with others. They give site visitors a reason to connect on an emotional level. In our research we have collected data that proves that referred visitors are between 1.5X and 4X more likely to convert into a qualified lead or new customer than general website traffic, so the financial, rational argument for sharing can be made. When we setup client blogs we include the most popular business sharing tools as buttons to make tweeting, digging and sharing on Facebook and LinkedIn as easy as emailing a friend.

5. Qualify Leads before they ever make contact. I recently experienced this myself. A prospect for our business read a comment that I wrote on someone else's blog, liked the line of thinking of my comment as much if not more than the original author, followed the link I provided back to our blog, read several posts, agreed with our approach and philosophy, then contacted us as a well-read, highly-informed qualified prospect. That is happening more and more, and would not have been possible let alone probable before we started blogging.

6. Build Community. The reason most people think of first ("You blog so that you build a community of like-minded individuals, promote discussion, etc.") is actually my #6 reason Businesses Must Blog. Let's be real: If you're not the size of Microsoft, Cisco or Netflix, the community construction aspect of blogging is going to take a while to fully develop. But it will, as long as you make the decision to start blogging, continue to publish quality content, and invite others to participate in the conversation.

A Word on Blogging Best Practices

The Best Practices of Blogging recommend that you spend equal portions of your time reading the blogs of others, commenting on those other blogs, and crafting your own. So if you can only invest, say, two hours a week to this valuable new pursuit of blogging, be sure you start with 1 half hour into finding and reading other people's blogs of interest to you and your business goals, a half hour or more leaving comments and asking questions on those blogs, and an equal amount of time writing your own posts.

Leaving Blog Bread Crumbs

Taking a cue from would-be social media pioneers Hansel & Gretel... One of the best ways to build a community in the early days of blogging is to include a bread crumb - a link to your blog - every time you read and comment on someone else's relevant post or blog. An example:

"A very interesting and provocative idea about the greening of marketing, Michael. I thought you were absolutely right on your assessment of the topic of how direct mail impacts our environment, but consider this one idea you may have missed: Search is the new direct mail. I've written about this topic at http://blog.ymarketing.com/?Tag=inbound%20marketing and invite you to have a look..."

That way when interested readers see your comment and agree with your point of view or unique insight, they'll follow your link and discover your blog.

What do you think... What did we miss? What are the compelling reasons for business to blog that we neglected to include?

Google Insights Predicts Kris Allen Will Become the Next American Idol | ymarketing

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DATELINE: Los Angeles, Wednesday 05/20/09 @ 11AM PT

Regular readers of this blog know that we've been using search and social media data to predict the next American Idol. Since we began the blog we've identified Adam Lambert's overwhelming popularity within this data. You could even argue he's become a "brand" in and of himself. But several weeks back we also identified the rising popularity of Kris Allen. After the two faced off Tuesday, May 19 on the American Idol Finals performance show we knew this project begged for one last blog.

Who will be crowned Wednesday Night's Winner?

Looking at the cumulative data and trying to make the argument against Adam Lambert is like trying to argue that Simon Cowell has nice hair--not an easy task. But as we discussed in last week's Idol Prediction blog, The Search for an Upset: Could a Perfect Storm Propel Kris Allen into the Next American Idol, Adam seems to also be facing a mounting backlash. This seemingly happens to any favorite in just about any competition; America just loves an underdog.

In order to try to zero in on this idea of "momentum" playing a role in predicting the next American Idol, we turned to Google Insights. The results of analyzing both "kris allen" and "adam lambert" related terms were surprising:

• Looking at the Top 10 rising searches over the past 30 days, "kris allen" related terms have outpaced "adam lambert" related terms by 2 to 1
• Breakout terms, terms rising faster than Google calculates the rate of increase, show Kris with a 3 to 1 edge

Google Insights Top 10 Rising Searches - Past 30 days

• Looking at the same data over the past 7 days, Kris' lead of the Top 10 rising searches grows to
  nearly 3 to 1
• Breakout terms show Kris again with a 3 to 1 edge
• Terms rising at a rate greater than 250% show Kris with a slightly better than 2 to 1 lead

Google Insights Top 10 Rising Searches - Past 7 days

Beyond the overall numbers favoring Kris, there's even more evidence of Adam Lambert's popularity erosion when you look at the data on a ‘per name' basis. For instance, looking at just "kris allen" related terms over both the past 30 and past 7 days we see ONLY searches related to his name and Idol in Rising Searches.

However, looking at just "adam lambert" related terms over both the past 30 and past 7 days we see Kris invading these Rising Searches. This includes Kris owning the Top 2 and 3 of the Top 4 risers over the past 7 days. It's this Adam-related Kris surge that for the first time shows Kris not just near even with Adam, but instead as the dominant force.

The Prediction
If you look at all the data, as we stated in last week's blog this race is going to be close. Too close for ymarketing to predict the winner. But if you ask Google Insights, Arkansas' own Kris Allen will shock the world in the Finals Result show tonight, Wednesday, May 20, 2009.

NOTE: If you are interested in seeing some of our past data you can download it here:

• http://blog.ymarketing.com/idol-global-appeal/