Whatever happens at The Voice finale we can be sure that there will be at least one great performance (no it’s not Seal singing “Crazy” again, you silly billy!) – it’s a special live performance by enduring Eighties pop crooner Lionel Richie! We learned this via a tweet by Team Joel’s own Joel Madden:
Of course, the legendary Spiderman-like singer also happens to be Joel Madden’s father-in-law, and that makes me wonder whether the presence of Lionel will provide the Team Joel finalist, Sarah De Bono, with some kind of unfair advantage over the remaining finalists. Exactly how this could possibly serve as an advantage is tenuous and vague at best, but it’s a reminder that – in terms of celebrity access and social media leverage – Joel sits in a highly favourable position over any of the other judges on The Voice.
Joel simply has a greater public reach than Seal, Delta Goodrem or Keith Urban and it’s a fact.
Let’s start with the basic numbers.
The Voice is like televisual crack for Twitter users. The tweets-per-minute rates during the show’s second episode were reported to be around 500 tweets per minute with the highest peak at 924 tweets per minute, and as the show has progressed those numbers have presumably risen.
And thus, with a large chunk of The Voice viewers being active on Twitter, the judges can successfully leverage votes off their friends and followers by directly shilling their respective contestants. When it comes to this direct technique of rustling votes – what I’ll call the “cold pitch” – Joel has a clear advantage.
As you can see in the screenshots below [Author’s note: this is the stage of writing this article where I’m questioning whether this is a good dedication of my thoughts and time] Joel has in excess of 270,000 followers more than the judge with the second highest followers, Keith Urban, followed by Delta and then Seal who has the lowest number of followers because the majority of his fans are middle-aged women who don’t use Twitter. (Come on guys. You know that is just a fact.)
Note: I follow Joel Madden LOL.
As well as Joel’s quantifiably greater reach through the “cold pitch”, he also appears to have an advantage over the other judges in terms of “third party vote-spruiking”. Third party vote-spruiking is basically the act of judges enlisting their high-profile friends to promote voting for their contestants.
Joel has a celebrity friend base that is highly active on social media. For starters, his wife Nicole Richie has made a call out to followers to vote for Sarah De Bono, and Nicole has an enormous Twitter following upward of 3.3 Million.
More of Joel’s high profile pals who’ve been promoting Sarah De Bono include Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz who has well over 2 Million Twitter followers, and DJ Samantha Ronson who has at least 1.6 Million.
The other judges haven’t been able to provide their contestants with nearly as much of a social media publicity boost.
Delta has received an endorsement for her contestant Rachael Leahcar through Melissa Joan Hart (remember Sabrina The Teenage Witch?) a seriously random advocate but one with a not-shabby Twitter reach of more than 200,000 followers.
Then we are left with Keith and Seal. Keith is a gentlemanly sweetie pie who doesn’t seem the type to shill for votes, and his most high profile acquaintance would be wife Nicole Kidman who is far too chic to be on Twitter. And as for ridiculous Seal, (now that he’s divorced from Heidi Klum) it’s pretty unlikely he has any celebrity friends. However, fortunately for Keith and Seal, their contestants Darren Percival and Karise are currently ranking as the top two most popular finalists in the competition (based on results of our recent poll):
So the question is: can the power social media make a significant impact on the voting? We’ll have to wait for The Voice‘s grand finale on Monday night to find out…
Main image by Alexandra Wyman, Getty Images
