Glancing at my Twitter stream of an evening, I’ve been surprised at the number of Geeks watching The X-Factor TV show (in the UK) . But then I guess it lends itself extremely well to witty asides on Twitter. This actually makes the show worth watching, much more for the social media discussions around it than the show itself. It’s like being at a football match where the crowd’s chants are more entertaining than the game. If there is a business model for bland, manufactured TV I guess this is it.
So we make no apology for passing on the news that social media monitoring company Brandwatch is claiming that it can predict who is about to exit The X-Factor TV “musical competition” based on what’s being said about it on Facebook and Twitter. I asked what else they track, but sure enough, Twitter tops the list as a data source.
As Brandwatch points out, while the Bookies odds are on contestant Matt Cardle, it’s monitoring has found that boy band One Direction have been at the top of the Brandwatch chart for a few weeks now. They say they predicted the ousting of Katie and Wagner hours before the results were released on Sunday’s live TV show.
Brandwatch says they have been monitoring volume and sentiment of mentions on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums and news sites – but I daresay startups like Datasift would do this, and I’m not wholly convinced by Brandwatch’s numbers. [ Update: A clairification: These are not the total overall mentions in a week, but the top sites out of the 6,084 sites Brandwatch tracks.]
Here are the top mentions for Cher Lloyd in the last week according to Brandwatch.
twitter.com 2261
www.youtube.com 311
www.facebook.com 77
www.digitalspy.co.uk 53
www.xfactorepisodes.com 46
entertainment.stv.tv 37
www.unrealitytv.co.uk 37
www.liquida.com 33
www.thisisbigbrother.com 28
answers.yahoo.com 25
Total for top sites 2908