Posted by David Carpenter on Thu, Apr 30, 2009
If you've followed the Idol Prediction Project you already knew that Matt Giraud's following (as interpreted from Search and Social Media data) was limited at best. So his Wednesday April 29th departure didn't come as a big surprise, given who he was up against. But now things get interesting.
A post on April 17th "Kris Allen Twitter Momentum" pointed to an uprising by Kris Allen, but last week's post showed continuing strength by Adam Lambert (who came in 3rd and 4th place respectively Wednesday night).
For this week we're taking a look at the question of whether any of the remaining Idols have what could be called truly Global Appeal? WHERE does a contestant's fan base appear to be coming from, what's the size, and is it localized or widespread?
To help us decipher the answer to these important questions we've turned back to search engine data, courtesy of Google, and supplemented this week's findings with data from Facebook and Twitter.
Top Findings:
1. Adam Lambert is a global phenomenon. He is more popular in the Philippines and Singapore than in the U.S.
2. Adam's U.S. support is by far the broadest, with pockets of strength ranging across the U.S., coast to coast.
3. Kris Allen enjoys similar popularity in the Philippines.
4. Kris Allen's U.S. support has an epicenter: Little Rock, Arkansas.
5. Danny Gokey's global popularity is more confined to North America, and his domestic reach is headquartered in NY.
6. Allison Iraheta's global reach is similar to Danny's, as is her U.S. popularity (NY state).
7. Search terms "adam idol" and "adam lambert idol" in some cases outnumber searches for "american idol" and outnumber all other contestants combined.
8. The hottest growing idol-related searches last week (Google calls them "breakout") were "American idol disco", "adam lambert disco" and "kris allen disco" - all growing at a rate of 500% or better.
9. Adam Lambert and Kris Allen continue to top Facebook wall posts, as measured on Wednesday April 29th in the morning.
Are you interested in seeing some more of the research facts for yourself? We've made 18 pages of maps, data and trend research available in one PDF, available free for download.
What do you think? Which Idols have global appeal and global potential? Why are Allison and Danny getting so many votes in proportion to the searches being conducted for #3 and #4 finishers Kris and Adam?
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Posted by David Carpenter on Fri, Apr 24, 2009
While there are many American Idol winner prediction methods out there, even one that monitors busy signals to predict votes: DialIdol, in our ongoing Idol Prediction Project we thought a better predictor would be purchase intent. We at ymarketing argue that a search query ending at iTunes.com is a search with intent to buy. When people are laying down cash, that's got to be more indicative of passion and true popularity than most other available measures.
Searches ending up at iTunes
As of Tuesday, April 21st, "Adam Lambert American Idol" was the #55 highest volume search query sending traffic to itunes, ranking higher than any other current or former contestant. Adam's iTunes traffic is higher than "johnny cash ring of fire" at #62 (which could be argued as Adam Lambert-related), "itunes american idol" at #63, "kelly clarkson" at #102, and "american idol 4/14" at #134. None of the other contestants ranked in the top 238.
YouTube Sensation
Looking at YouTube keyword referrals, "adam lambert" is now the #16 highest referring search keyword to YouTube, up from 25th in this blog's prediction post #1. There are currently 118 different search terms containing "adam lambert" that show up in the top 100,000 driving traffic to YouTube. To put this in perspective, the terms "american idol 2009" and "american idol" rank #126 and #162 respectively. The next current Idol Season 8 contestant from a YouTube perspective is "danny gokey" at #1,697 and 14 total search terms; followed by "allison iraheta" at #2,088 and 4 total search terms; then "kris allen" at #6,943 and 7 total search terms; and "matt giraud" at #11,408 and 7 total search terms in the top 100,000. Since YouTube has become the #2 Search Engine, these findings take on increased importance.
King of the Idol Site?
Adam Lambert drives more traffic to americanidol.com than any other contestant... by a mile. "Adam Lambert" is the #4 search term, and he has 4 of the top 30. Only "Danny Gokey" also has a spot in the top 30 at #11. If the rankings were to be determined by americanidol.com visits referred bv search engines, you'd have to stack the contestants this way:
1. Adam Lambert
2. Danny Gokey
3. Matt Giraud
4. Kris Allen
5. Allison Iraheta
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Posted by David Carpenter on Fri, Apr 17, 2009
Idol Prediction Project Post #2 - In our continuing efforts to track and predict the Season 8 American Idol winner using search and social media data, we noticed early signs of a departure from last week's
All-Adam blowout. If you follow Idol fan sites like
USA Today's Idol Meter you noticed that Kris Allen shot into second place this week after being in sixth the week prior. How? While this week's early search and social web data points pointed in many different directions this week, they provide insight into this surge from Kris:
TWITTER: The twittosphere was lit up Wednesday 4/15 with KRIS ALLEN being tweeted 10-to-1 over Adam for a period of time, but it quickly vanished and by Friday 4/17 Adam had resumed his commanding lead. Kris' tweets were apparently "sparked" by this tweet from Season 6 winner Jordin Sparks, "Kris' performance was awesome tonight"). Adam has a 2-1 edge in the number of tweets vs. Danny and Kris, with Lil, Matt, Allison and Anoop trailing in that order.
Tweet Volume 4/15/09 -Did Jordin Sparks comments ignite the Kris tweets?
Tweet Volume 4/17/09 - By the end of the week Adam's popularity righted the twitter ship.
FACEBOOK: Adam maintains a commanding lead, but Lil Rounds is making steady gains the last two weeks. The following chart leverages data from Facebook Lexicon. Setting the index to 1.0 for Danny Gokey's wall post volume from Wednesday, April 1, 2009, Adam has been running 4.9X that volume for two weeks.
DIGG: By far the most diggs are going to a contestant not even on American Idol, Susan Boyle, who appeared on Britain's Got Talent 2009 and completely shocked Simon Cowell (yes, he's a judge over there as well.) She has 337 diggs in the last 24 hours, compared to 7 for "The Hairstyles of Adam Lambert", and two each for "Saving Matt Giraud", Danny Gokey's "Endless Love" and Adam's "Born to be Wild".
SEARCH: Because of Kris Allen's surge on Twitter we dove into discovering where Kris's fans are going online after searching on his name, and came up with the following results. YouTube leads all destinations with 7.5% of traffic, followed by metacafe at 5.1% and Wikipedia at 4.6%:
Scary: In the "shock and disbelief" category, this just in from digg: Only 1 out of 3 of Americans can name the 3 Branches of Government, but 3 out of 4 can name a judge on American Idol.
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Posted by David Carpenter on Fri, Apr 10, 2009
A Little History
In his book Click, Bill Tancer wrote an entire section on discussing his "making reality television show predictions using search term data as a proxy for popularity." In Season 7 of American Idol he got it close. His final post on the predicted outcome of the show's finale showed eventual Idol winner David Cook trailing David Archuleta by a relative margin of 30%, but he included the following caveat: "If there are no surprises in their last songs, slight advantage to David Cook." I'm not sure the data suggested that outcome, but a big tip of the hat to Bill for bringing the world an innovative way of humanizing the science of web analytics and search. To be fair to Bill, he's been pretty accurate at predicting Dancing With Stars winners too.
A New Spin
A few of us at ymarketing thought it would be interesting to take on the same concept, predicting Idol winners, but using many of the online tools available to us today for much less cost than a mid-five-figure Hitwise subscription. And we decided to expand the scope by adding Social Media to the data sources to perhaps give the predictions a more accurate picture of true popularity.
Data Sources
We are currently using Facebook Lexicon, Google Trends, Compete.com, YouTube and Twitter as our data sources, then analyzing the keywords and traffic on these sites and other top entertainment and pop culture sites, including American Idol, Hulu, People, Pop Eater, Perez Hilton and more, with plans to make weekly updates to this content.
The Prediction
As of April 9, 2009, there is just one clear front-runner. #1 in search data, #1 on YouTube, #1 on Facebook wall posts, and #1 in Tweets. But before we mention the name you're undoubtedly whispering to yourself already, let's examine the challengers:
Lil Rounds was the clear and away most talked about contestant on Wednesday, March 4th after her powerful performance of Mary J. Blige's "Be Without You". Her peak on the walls of many of the nearly 200 million Facebook users reached a level 4Xs that of any other contestant that week, and stands nearly as high as the record wall post peak set on Wednesday February 18th by Danny Gokey. In search queries Lil lags far behind: She's being out-searched 11-to-1 by the leader, and 2-to-1 by Danny.
Kris Allen is #3 in Tweets and a distant #4 on Facebook wall posts, but has pulled even with #2 Danny in overall search query volume for April. He is a distant #4 in searches leading to americanidol.com (behind Matt Giraud, who is 5thoverall), and his volume and time on site are a mere one-quarter or less of the #2 contestant--not to mention the tremendous gap he has from the leader (15-fold gap in time spent on site)!
Danny Gokey holds the record for the most mentions on Facebook in a day, and he held the lead on search queries for one week in January and most of February. His is the #2 contestant search term leading traffic to americanidol.com, but his time on site is just one-third of the leader. Second on Twitter Danny has half the tweets of the leader, but 5% more than his nearest challenger, Kris Allen. Danny is a solid #2 in terms of search queries leading to YouTube, but the gap between #1 and #2 is wide. In overall search queries Danny has been falling farther and farther behind: Google Trends reports the leader is beating Danny 6-to-1 as of March, and the lead has widened to 11-to-1 so far in April.
And that leads us to the clear leader in the competition so far: Adam Lambert is the 25th highest drawing referral search term to YouTube out of all searches ending up at YouTube, not just Idol related terms! Adam draws an estimated 25Xs the volume of runner up Danny and owns at least 23Xs the time spent on site. Adam had a Twitter lead of slightly more than 2-to-1, and his overall search query volume on Google has grown to 11 times that of his nearest competitor. Although he lags Danny in the highest one day volume of Facebook wall posts, he claimed the Facebook lead on Tuesday, March 10th and has held it every single day since.
Although anything at all is possible, based on all the data available, I'd say that this season isn't even close. It's 100% Adam's to lose. He doesn't just have an edge, he is about to lap Danny, Kris and Lil.
As for Anoop and Allison? Good luck. In the realm of search and social media, they're not even in the running.
Who do you think is going to win? Will Search and Social Media results translate into Popularity with phone and txt voters? What other data sources should we be looking into?
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Posted by David Carpenter on Wed, Apr 08, 2009
You've read the news. It's everywhere. The traditional approach to marketing is dying. Examine the predominant media and tactics that make up "traditional marketing": Newspapers, TV, Radio, Print, Direct Mail, Out of Home, etc. and you'll quickly realize like I did that they are all "outbound" tactics - an approach
Seth Godin famously coined as "Interruption Marketing" - the tactics that work only if they
interrupt you to get your attention. Call it "Outbound Marketing", "Interruption-based" or simply
"What we've always done"; the truth is that the lives of consumers have changed-- as well as their response to advertising and marketing. And the reality is, our marketing efforts need to adapt accordingly..
So what works better?
Inbound Marketing stands in the opposite corner of the marketing world as an approach that does not depend on interruption, rather it depends on someone actively seeking you out for information on a topic, service, offering or product. Inbound Marketing is a term defined by Forrester as "The delivery of targeted or customized marketing messages and offers within the context of a customer-initiated interaction. " In practical application, Inbound Marketing involves the strategy of leveraging SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM/PPC (Paid Search), Blogging and Social Media to drive increased traffic, leads and revenue to a business.
Attract highly qualified customers to your business like a magnet
Instead of having telemarketers make endless calls and direct mailers send countless mail pieces pestering decision makers - without any sense of timing, when that decision maker may be in market - the Inbound strategy works by getting your business found by those actively seeking the services, solutions and products you offer, when they're in market.
Leverage existing customer interactions
Forrester goes on to say that, "Enterprising companies are turning to their sales and service interactions as a primary means for cross-sell, up-sell, and retention activities. These channels present an opportunity where: 1) the customer is actively engaged - by choice; 2) customer needs are more transparent; and 3) the ‘right time' might be now."
This is perhaps the strongest argument for a new approach. Let's face it: Consumer have the control these days. They have more channels, more choices, more information sources than ever before. Like it not, The Marketer and The Company are not regaining control anytime soon. The task for savvy marketers today is to educate, add value, and enable the decision making process.
What's on your mind?
Have an interruption marketing horror story to share? Or a great example of a company embracing Inbound Marketing and Customer Interaction on the web? Share your thoughts here. Be sure to sign your name (unattributed comments will not be published.)
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