Can Twitter Predict the Academy Award Winners?

NEW YORK, Feb. 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Passionate discussions among movie fans flood the Internet during the last weeks prior to the Academy Awards ceremony. Many of these conversations take place in Twitter and may be indicative of an actor's or movie's popularity. But can it also predict the winners in Los Angeles?

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E.Life, a social media monitoring and analysis vendor, used its Tweetmeter software to find out.  It started tracking tweets from 25 different American cities mentioning the nominees and displaying them on a U.S. map on the elifemaps.com web site. It was then possible to see the most talked about actors in San Francisco or the hottest movie buzz in New York.

By looking at elifemaps.com some conclusions can already be drawn: Los Angeles and New York alone correspond to 40% of the best movie nominees buzz, not a surprise since most of the media industry is concentrated in the two cities. For the same reason, buzz in LA and NY is assumed to be a stronger indicator for the winners than say Miami or Detroit. The general assumption is that buzz in these two cities has a higher chance of indicating a movie's or star's influence. And as we all know Oscars are all about influence.

If LA and NY buzz is a reliable indicator, according to elifemaps.com, so far Inception will be the winner for best movie and Black Swan will take 2nd place. It's interesting to note that in San Francisco The Social Network has the most buzz. Are geeks to blame?

As for performances, a Brit would take home the golden statuette for best actor. Colin Firth has 50% more tweets than James Franco, who comes in 2nd. The same criteria hint that Natalie Portman will win for best actress. Things get complicated for the best director category. In Los Angeles Darren Aronofsky from Black Swan has the pole position, but in New York David Fincher from The Social Network beats Mr. Aronofsky.  So no predictions here yet.

You can check out www.elifemaps.com for real-time results every hour. The monitoring uses E.Life Twitter monitoring software Tweetmeter. The software tracks and stores all tweets that mention a specific term and processes them to create more than 20 different reports. A free 14-day trial of Tweetmeter is available at www.elifemonitor.com

About E.Life

E.Life (www.elifemonitor.com) is a social media monitoring and analysis vendor that provides social media marketing managers with the information they need to monitor, measure, and report on the success of their social media initiatives. The company's flagship product, Tweetmeter, monitors Twitter for tweets about a brand – or the brand's competitors – in any language and any country. Founded in 2004, the company is active in six countries, including the United States, Brazil, Spain and Italy.

Contact:  Dr. Jairson Vitorino, E.Life Monitor, [email protected] skype: jairsonvitorino

SOURCE E.Life