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Social Media Helps Grammys Achieve Huge Ratings in Broadcast and Social TV

via Mashable by Christina Warren on 2/13/12

The 54th Annual Grammy Awards was a huge hit across social, digital and broadcast platforms.

Excitement for the return of Adele, as well as the tribute to the late Whitney Houston kept viewers engaged online and off.

CBS reported that 39.9 million viewers tuned in to Sunday's award show, the second-largest Grammy audience ever and the best ratings since 1984.

New Social TV Records

Of course, broadcast is only part of the story. This year's Grammy Awards were a hugely social and digital affair. Even with the tape delay (which prevented a real-time social conversation from taking place on the east and west coasts), the Grammys still broke new social TV records.

According to Bluefin Labs, the Grammys earned 13 million social comments. That breaks the record from last week's Super Bowl and absolutely dwarfs every other entertainment event from the last year.

The most-talked about moments included Adele's performance of "Rollin in the Deep" and her win for Album of the Year, Jennifer Hudson's tribute to Whitney Houston and Chris Brown's performance.

The Success of the Second Screen

CBS.com and The Recording Academy worked hard to address the digital, social and mobile component of this year's show. We profiled these initiatives, which included the Grammy Live second screen experience for iPad and iPhone.

Grammy Live was a huge success this year, bringing in 1 million unique viewers across the web, iPhone and iPad. To put that in perspective, 2.1 million viewers tuned into the Super Bowl live stream — and that was broadcasting the actual game, not an additional experience.

When we spoke with CBS Interactive SVP Marc DeBevoise earlier this afternoon, he was extremely happy with the numbers. DeBevoise didn't want to draw a direct correlation between an increased focus on social media, digital and social TV and the mammoth broadcast ratings but we think the figures speak for themselves.

As those of us in Mashable's Grammy Live Blog can attest, social media is the new watercooler. CBS.com and the Recording Academy did a fantastic job reaching out to various social channels, including Twitter and Facebook.

Social Media Sentiment

Social media monitoring company NetBase ran sentiment analysis on the Twitter chatter surrounding the show. NetBase grabbed the net sentiment for trending topics and major terms from Feb. 11 – Feb. 13 and plotted out the changes in sentiment and overall chatter.

While the Grammys themselves received the most mentions, Adele was the most mentioned celebrity. Although LLCoolJ was the least mentioned celebrity in terms of mentions, he had the highest overall sentiment. Unsurprisingly, Adele saw the biggest spike in chatter between Feb. 11 and 13.

When it comes to negative sentiment, Twitter users loved hating on Chris Brown and Nicki Minaj. Twitter sentiment regarding Minaj essentially flip-flopped between Friday and Sunday and she has the distinction of having the most negative overall chatter.

Chris Brown's performance elicited negative reactions from Twitter, as evidenced by various trending topics on Twitter.

As for the Grammys special tribute to Whitney Houston, 73% of the sentiment was positive or neutral and 26% was negative.

NetBase tells us that many of the "negative" responses are actually representative of sadness, not hate or dislike. Further more, in relation to the Grammy tribute, most negative remarks were because fans thought the tribute was too short or not as big as it should have been.

Did you watch the Grammys this year? What role did social media and social TV play in your experience? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Bluefin Labs, grammys, NetBase, second screen, social tv

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