MTV aired the 28th annual Video Music Awards (VMA) Sunday night. MTV integrated social media into the experience, encouraging viewers to use social media and their various devices — tablets, smartphones, and their computers — in addition to tuning in via cable TV, to weigh in on the show.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online.

VMA mentions

VMA mentions more than doubled in 2011 compared to last year’s show.

VMA sentiment

Conversations around the 2011 VMAs were an average of 74% positive. Lady Gaga was the biggest topic of conversation, appearing in nearly 13% of all VMA mentions. Lady Gaga kicked off the night dressed as her male alter ego, Jo Calderone, and stayed in character the entire show. Beyonce, who announced she was pregnant, was the next most mentioned artist, followed by Britney Spears, Nicki Minaj, Justin Bieber, Jay Z and Miley Cyrus.

Content breakdown

Approximately 96% of VMA chatter came via Twitter, 46% of chatter was in English, and 60% of mentions were made by males.

Artist buzz

In addition to VMA mentions being up this year, buzz around Bieber, Gaga and Beyonce are also at their highest points of the year. Looks like MTV can still generate buzz about music at least once per year.

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

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.