Well I'm doing what many others are tonight, watching the season finale of American Idol. I have been hooked on this show and last year I wrote this post the day after David Cook won the title. This season has been very entertaining with many talented contestants as well as a new addition to the judging panel.
Digression to my train on thought...Carlos Santana is playing his guitar magic with the various contestants providing the vocals. How cool! No one has that unique style like he does.
Well earlier this week it was reported that
Another article appeared earlier today on Mashable that predicted that Adam Lambert with be this year's champ. By looking at Google search trends – volume, demographic and geographic – from March through May for the top three finalists of prior seasons they were able to spot patterns in the data that seem to predict the eventual winner of American Idol Season 8. It wasn't as simple as looking at who has the most search volume, they also looked at past seasons to see the trends.
So can search engines now predict the future? Will Adam Lambert be the next Idol champion? One thing that is really new from last year is that by looking at search trends we can reveal a lot about what people are interested in right now.Twitter is also a great tool for predictions. You can see the search volume for both Adam and Chis on Twitter Trends. In fact Twitter co-founder Biz Stone came right out and said here that he doesn't see advertising as their business model but instead selling "light analytics" to companies, maybe doing revenue-sharing with mobile phone companies so we can Twitter our way, using our mobile devices, to distraction.
Mashable went on to say that for marketers, this type of data can be viewed as “votes,” helping to gauge the impact of their marketing and product positioning efforts, as well as providing insights into where they currently sit in the competitive landscape. Looking at search trends might not equate to looking into a crystal ball – but it can be a powerful resource for brands who want to keep their finger on the pulse of emerging trends online.
Okay, now for the final votes. They set a record with over 100 million votes. And the winner is......Chris Allen!!!!!
What? How can that be? Even Chris seemed extremely surprised and confused. Oh well, looks like we need to go back and review our search data. Either way, both Chris and Adam will both do extremely well I'm sure. Google and Twitter will also. So let me know what you think of these results. How surprised were you?
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