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We listened, did you? On Friday we gave our well-informed judgement call on the outcome of this year’s X Factor final. We stated that based on our analysis of the conversations on the web over the first 8 weeks of the live performance shows that Matt Cardle would win this year’s X Factor.
We set up our social media monitoring tool, SM2, to monitor the online conversations people were having about each contestant during the live shows. Over the 8 weeks we looked at the volume of conversations but beyond that, we looked a little deeper and studied the sentiment of the conversations around each finalist. Merely looking at the positive sentiment would only give us half the picture, because it was the size of negative value trading off against the positive that would show us the true sentiment and allow us to choose Matt Cardle over One Direction, Rebecca Ferguson and the rest. Had we just looked at the volume of conversations alone, Wagner would be the runaway leader, followed by Cher and then One Direction at Week 3 and what a terrible thing that would have been!
Indeed, some other monitoring products had called ‘One Direction’ as the dead-cert winners and that made for an interesting weekend of waiting to see who would make it through from the Saturday show. Then there was the nervous Sunday to see who would come out victorious having sung their heart(s) out and made the sincere puppy-eyes plea for votes straight down the camera.
Whilst this makes for good banter between social media monitoring tool providers, the real impact is delivered when applying this data to business insights, in terms of product market share and credibility of social media sentiment. Adding the efficiency savings of working with freely available data of this volume, in this case running to many hundreds of thousands, to the credibility of the data, proves social media data is valuable to many businesses.
By looking beyond just volumes, we were able to gain insight and make an informed decision. Sure we weren’t conducting a scientific study to look at the predisposition of Matt or One Direction fans to pick up the phone and actually make their vote count, and neither did we email ALL staff to ‘Vote Matt’!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by James Ainsworth, Nick Chinn. Nick Chinn said: RT @vicky_ryce: RT @Alterian Alterian’s social media monitoring predicted the X Factor result. « Engaging Times – .. http://bit.ly/gdqLC3 [...]
In this age of Wikileaks and the added scrutiny this is bringing to what organisations claim versus the real truth, I think it would have been much more impressive if you’d have videoed this on Friday and shown us examples of your live SM2 dashboards and how you were interpreting that data in order to give this prediction. We all know you can retrospectively date-stamp content via blogging and CMS tools for instance. Are you going to publish some direct outputs from SM2 to illustrate how you arrived at the prediction as opposed to the charts above which have no real points of reference on them.
Hey James H,
Take a look at this article in Music News .com where the prediction was published prior to the unveiling.
http://www.music-news.com/shownews.asp?H=Matt-Cardle-to-win-X-Factor-predicts-technology-company&nItemID=38111
Hello James. Thanks for your comment.
I can assure you and put your mind at ease that no internet trickery, Photoshop or otherwise, is behind this. I can show you the email trail between myself and my colleague when we were working into the small hours of last week to get the data list together and analysed in order to make the call that we did.
The press release was sent out on Friday (Around 1730, as I recall, I was on the train back from London – receipts available on request) and you will see from a simple Google search that a number of online publications picked up on it Friday evening and further coverage was secured on Saturday morning itself.
I agree that videoing the process would make for a more compelling argument of how we did it but time constraints were against us. If there is demand for it we could run a webinar or if anyone wants to book me to give a presentation on what was a bit of fun that demonstrated a number of practical business implications for social media monitoring, I am more than happy to be contacted at james.ainsworth@alterian.com
I do hope this puts your mind at rest that subterfuge, deception and dirty tricks are not at play but simply an astute use of our social media monitoring solution applied to a popular culture event that provides sheer volumes of measurable online conversations.
James Ainsworth, Alterian – Social Media Marketing Specialist, X Factor fan.
Thanks James
As mentioned a few times on Twitter in the last week (as I guess you picked up via SM2
) you have some other opportunities with The Apprentice and Strictly Come Dancing to repeat this exercise and video the process. We don’t need super-polished video like Alchemy etc – even phone video would be better than nothing – particularly for those of us who have used things like SM2 in the past.
Cheers
James
I am not sure what is vertical axis in the chart? I assume it’s true sentiment (negative value trading off against positive as you explain above). Under any case, it looks like that week 8, SM2 came up with value of ~37 for Matt Cardle and ~41 for One Direction. If net sentiment for One Direction is higher, how did you decide Matt as a winner? It’s only after the votes, you see that variance between your prediction and actual votes is much smaller for Matt Cardle than One Direction. Also, if you are making the argument that SM2 true sentiment closely mimics actual votes, how come results are so far off for One Direction?
[...] Alterian is a lone firm that took this approach to predict the X Factor winner ahead of the final in December. [...]