I’ve finally managed to dig out this v.interesting blog post on a recent piece of research from New York University’s Stern Business School that correlates online “chatter” to higher physical album sales.
What the researchers did was to monitor the levels of online buzz – in particular blogs posts and MySpace friends – created by 108 different album releases in the first two months of 2007, and then cross-referenced this data with the Amazon sales ranks for each of the albums.
The outcome of the research was a close correlation between online buzz and eventual album sales. The researchers did, however, note that their research wasn’t conclusive as to whether online buzz caused sales or merely predicted sales:
“It is not possible to make such a conclusion based on this study. If blog posts start becoming manipulated because people think they have an impact on sales, that the predictive power might disappear because the underlying reasons for it disappear,” they wrote.
This research is particularly interesting when linked to our Opinion Tracker results of the London Mayoral elections. At the moment we’re doing a full evaluation of the Opinion Tracker results, however on the surface the online buzz results we monitored had a very close correlation to the outcome of the election – with Boris outstripping all other candidates in “Buzz” and with a strong positive “Mood” swing in the last week.
More to come on this soon.
