Kid Rock hosted Wednesday night’s 2011 CMT Music Awards live from the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, honoring the best country music videos of the year and featuring country’s biggest names performing live. Taylor Swift, The Band Perry and Blake Shelton were among the big winners. Justin Bieber won his first country music award for his project with Rascal Flatts, and other winners included Sugarland, Lady Antebellum and Miranda Lambert.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online around the CMT Music Awards and artists that won last night.

CMT Music Awards chatter

The CMT Music Awards are currently generating more than double the share of voice in 2011 compared to 2010 (share of voice compares chatter around a certain topic vs. the rest of the conversations on the Internet).

CMT Music Awards sentiment

The green and red lines represent positive and negative commentary respectively, and the grey bars represent total amount of chatter. Chatter around last night’s show was an average of 85% positive.

CMT Music Awards topic cloud pre-show (May 8 – June 7)

During the month leading up to the show, the biggest topic of conversation was voting, as fans discussed voting for their favorite videos.

CMT Music Awards topic cloud post-show (June 8 – 9)

Justin Bieber was one of the most discussed topics of the night after winning his first country music award. Taylor Swift was the next most frequently mentioned artist, followed by Shania Twain (who opened up the show doing a parody of Thelma & Louise with Taylor Swift) and Ludacris (who made a surprise appearance rapping during Jason Aldean’s performance). Miranda Lambert was noticeably missing from the cloud of most discussed topics, although she won Female Video of the Year for her song “House That Built Me.”

Video of the Year chatter

We measured chatter around each Video of the Year nomination throughout the past year. Taylor Swift’s “Mine” video clearly dominated the category.

Sony Music artist chatter

Several Sony Music artists were nominated for awards last night. We measured buzz around Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Brad Paisley, Kenny Chesney, Martina McBride and Sara Evans throughout the past year. Carrie Underwood consistently generated the most chatter throughout the year, followed by Miranda Lambert and Brad Paisley.

Female Video of the Year chatter

Several Sony Music artists were nominated for Female Video of the Year. We measured chatter around each of the five nominated videos throughout the year. Again, Taylor Swift dominated the category.

Content category distribution

More than 90% of chatter around last night’s CMT Awards came via Twitter, and only 6% via blogs.

Gender distribution

Chatter around the CMT Music Awards among males and females was distributed fairly evenly last night and this morning.

Hourly chatter distribution

The chart above displays amount of chatter distribution by hour. Note that times above are UTC, so most conversations took place 7 p.m. -10 p.m. ET — during the show.

For further information and analysis, visit www.infegy.com/socialradar.

The Billboard Awards returned to television last night after a five-year hiatus with a major dose of star power.

Billboard Awards buzz

Buzz around the Billboard Awards spiked following last night’s show.

Billboard sentiment

Conversations around the show were 81% positive. Beyonce was the most mentioned artist, mentioned in more than 20% of Billboard conversations, followed by Rihanna in 20%. Britney Spears was mentioned in 12% and Justin Bieber in 11% of Billboard conversations.

Billboard Awards vs. Grammys buzz

To put the buzz in perspective, we compared chatter around last night’s Billboard Awards show to the Grammys earlier this year. The Grammys generated significantly more buzz following the show in February.

Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles generated heavy chatter online yesterday: Lady Gaga’s meat dress, Taylor Swift’s song about Kanye West, Kanye’s toast to douchebags, Eminem’s comeback performance, and the VMA debuts of Drake & Justin Bieber. We analyzed the conversation and ranked top 25 personalities by amount of content generated below:

1. Justin Bieber
2. Lady Gaga
3. Kanye West
4. Taylor Swift
5. Eminem
6. Chelsea Handler
7. Usher
8. Nicki Minaj
9. Paramore
10. Drake
11. B.o.B
12. Katy Perry
13. 30 Seconds to Mars
14. Beyonce
15. Will.i.am
16. Deadmau5
17. Bruno Mars
18. Jared Leto
19. Ke$ha
20. Snooki
21. Ellen Degeneres
22. Robyn
23. Jason Derulo
24. Ashley Greene
25. Justin Timberlake

Overall chatter around the VMA’s was 74% positive.

MTV heavily endorsed social media throughout the program, encouraging users to tweet their thoughts live. MTV encouraged the use of specific Twitter hashtags throughout the show, and used a Twitter Tracker to count the millions of tweets about the artists.

Individual chatter around the 5 most talked about artists shows that, interestingly, Kanye West had the most positive chatter, followed by Eminem, Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, while Lady Gaga had the most negative chatter among the top 5.

What were your thoughts on the show? Did MTV successfully integrated social media into the program?

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.