We were doing some research for a food client this afternoon. They want everyone to buy their product (it’s a fruit) but can’t afford to spend a gazillion dollars raising awareness above the line. If I had my way I’d get them to pay a bunch of celebrities to start spruiking  the ‘insert fruit name here’ diet on Rove and Sunrise, but sadly (and for the greater good of humankind) that’s not going to happen. Luckily they don’t need to do that anyway. With five years of search data setting a rock-solid precedent the spike in ‘recipe’ searches on Google caused by MasterChef is impossible to ignore. The strategy is obvious. Gosh I love digital.

Crazy isn’t it!

Nathan Bush has some analysis here…

And here’s what we sent the press:

Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s reunion show steamrolled the debut of Celebrity Masterchef Australia in an online ratings whitewash last night, reaching a peak of almost 7,000 Twitter conversations an hour versus 1,600 for Masterchef.

The data, collected by Brisbane-based social media monitoring company Dialogix (http://www.dialogix.com.au) showed that Twitter users mentioned the words “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” and tagged conversations with the hashtag #HeyHey more than 22,000 times while the show screened.

Celebrity Masterchef Australia generated 2,740 Twitter conversations, or less than 15% of Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s total.

The influx of tweets made Hey Hey it’s Saturday the number one trending topic on Twitter, which attracted global attention from the social network’s 19 million followers*.

The #HeyHey tag then became popular with American users throughout the night who noticed the trend and began using the words #HeyHey in unrelated conversations.

Dialogix Director Matt Granfield said Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s Twitter success was given a boost early on in the day when host Daryl Sommers (http://twitter.com/darylsomers) joined the network. His first tweet was “make sure you tweet about Hey Hey tonight, using the hashtag #heyhey”.

“Traditional TV ratings give you the number of people who watched a program, but if you measure people who spoke about a show on Twitter you get a better analysis of who actually ENGAGED with the show,” Mr Granfield Said.

“The show had more than 200,000 Facebook fans on the day it went to air and messages were posted on that network alerting people to the fact that host Daryl Somers had just joined Twitter. Within 24 hours Daryl had 1,383 followers.”

Twitter is the fastest-growing social network in Australia with around 800,000 unique Australian users each month.

It’s no secret that I’m a gigantic MasterChef fan. I won’t invade this blog with my culinary musings because I have a whole other platform to do that with (see the content dilemma post below), but I thought it was rather interesting how the Google Zeitgeist has started showing results for a ‘masterchef’ search in Australia. Google makes page suggestions in a website you search for based on their own algorithms for what is popular. Julie was the winner, Chris was the favourite, Poh did exceptionally well, but only one contestant makes it into Google’s page suggestions list. Is it a coincidence that she’s pretty and blonde? Google is a remarkably reliable gauage of popular culture. My money is on Justine to go on to the biggest and bestest things.