Valerie from BuzzLogic here. Thanks for checking out the American Idol updates on our blog. You are absolutely right – influencer buzz doesn’t necessarily correlate with voting behavior. The purpose of our weekly updates is not to predict the winner (though we will certainly have fun trying!); rather, we wanted to explore the relationship between specific blog conversations (the content, tonality and sheer number of posts published around each contestant) and the popular vote. Week after week it varies: in some cases the influencers are in-step with voters (i.e. consistently high marks for David Cook); other times it’s completely out of sync (the influential blogs seemed to hate Kristy Lee Cook at first sight, but she kept skating by). The weekly updates also benchmark the number of posts and shifts in sentiment week after week. So we can see, for example, that the total posts around David Cook nearly doubled in the last two weeks (from 3841 to 7128), or notice that online opinion leaders started turning against Brooke White the week of April 14.

We will definitely do a more in depth analysis once the show closes. If it appears that voters and the most influential bloggers covering the show don’t see eye to eye, that’s an interesting phenomenon to explore as well.