The 53rd annual Grammy awards posted the highest ratings since 2001 with an average audience of 26.5 million viewers, up 3 percent from last year’s telecast.

Grammy buzz

Overall buzz around the 2011 Grammy awards was up 30% more than the 2010 show.

Grammy sentiment 2011

Overall conversations around the 2011 Grammys were 83% positive, down 6% compared to last year.

Grammy sentiment 2010

Conversations around the 2010 Grammys were 89% positive.

Grammy 2011 artist buzz

We analyzed chatter around artists within Grammy conversations. Lady Gaga, who entered the red carpet in an egg, was mentioned most often, followed by Eminem, album of the year winners Arcade Fire, Justin Bieber and Rihanna.

Kanye West is no stranger in the land of social media and has never had an issue drawing attention to himself, especially online. Silly antics keep Kanye in the spotlight of the blog and twitter-verse. Whether or not he has any idea how his behavior is affecting him, I have no clue. I do, however, have insight as to how everyone else on the internet feels about his buffoonery.

I looked to my trusty friend Social Radar to provide some data on reactions to Kanye’s random lash at Taylor Swift at last Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards.  (Here on referred to as “the incident”)

I ran a basic analysis on Kanye, notice that 88% of the results referred to him positively. People liked him, using words like “best, good, beautiful, and sweet” in relation to him. But then “the incident” happened, and so did this change in sentiment:

Looks like Mr. West should’ve considered the outcome of his actions! In just one day, because of this one “incident”, Kanye’s loving following of social media influencers immediately took to center stage, blogging, uploading pirated video clips, and tweeting their hearts away. And they didn’t have anything nice to say:

Notice the change in percentage of the frequency of these negative terms referencing Kanye; they’re all up! Also notice that one of the frequent terms is a Twitter hashtag (#fail).

And look at the role Twitter played in the “incident”. During VMA weekend, Twitter activity related to Kanye trended to increase nearly 50%! Everyone scurried to get their 140 character blurbs out. While no one can control what Kanye West decides to do with his public facing time, we sure can report on the effects they have on the online social scape.