The virtual dust kicked up by more than three million mentions is finally settling, and surprise, surprise, pretty much every social media monitoring company is telling us how good its Oscar predictions were. The truth is that they were a decidedly mixed bunch, so, without further ado... The nominations for the best social media-based Oscar predictions are:
Radian 6: for this very good looking infographic. They started strongly by correctly predicting both Best Actor and Best Actress - this in stark contrast to any of the other nominees listed here. My guess is that slightly more nuance was involved in the analysis run by this Canadian outfit, as almost anyone who made predictions based purely on "buzz," got the best actor category wrong. Unfortunately, they (or was it social media?) failed on the best film category, going instead for The Help.
General Sentiment: Nominated purely for their ballsy prediction that Octavia Spencer might not walk away with the Best Supporting Actress award. Unfortunately they were wrong. And she did.
Flowtown: Nominated for producing probably the best looking of the infographics, for being the widest circulated and for getting Best Picture right. However, the results look like the analysis might have been a bit lacking as they got three of the four Best Actor/Actress predictions wrong.
Webtrends: Nominated for getting on Mashable (and thus being the most talked about prediction). Like Social Flow, they got Meryl Streep right but fell down by going for the bigger names (Clooney and Scorcese) for Best Actor and Best Director.
She Knows: Nominated for being endearingly rubbish and basing their "social media predictions" on the number of Facebook Likes and US Weekly tweets. Their human-based predictions were actually pretty good (correctly predicting the Best Picture and Best Actor awards, but going for Viola Davis in the Best Actress Category), however, the level of subtlety in the social media space definitely makes them favorites for the wooden spoon.
And the winner is... Radian 6.
As far as I can see, Radian 6's was the only real attempt at any subtlety or nuance in social analytics, and they offered a nicely presented graphic to boot.