PureDWTS 18, Week 2 Partner Switch Twitter Voting: Is It “Rigged?” Part I

So with all the chaos this mysterious (and ridiculous) “partner switch” has created, there is one question I keep seeing the viewers ask: “So how do we know it’s not rigged?” Well, the short answer is “we don’t”; but it got me thinking – what if there was some way for us to measure the traffic of the various couple hashtags floating around Twitter, and see if TPTB were being honest with us about the results of the Twitter voting? Turns out, there IS a way 😉

It’s called Keyhole, and it’s a hashtag-tracking web app that allows you to enter in a specific hashtag and it will spit back all sorts of interesting data about that particular hashtag – how many times it’s used, how many unique users are tweeting it, how many other users that tweet is reaching, an hour-by-hour track of the rate that hashtag is being tweeted – it’ll even tell you from where in the world that hashtag is being tweeted, whether the tweeter using it is male or female, and all sorts of other cool data.  If you guys want to check it out for yourself, you can sign up for a free 3-day trial here.

We’ve upgraded our account to one of the paid accounts so that we can track more of the hashtags, but we probably won’t be able to track them ALL (especially since we aren’t sure if the same-sex couplings are fair game or not).  Wanna help us out? Go here and sign up for the free account (it’s free for 3 days, and they’ll extend it to 7 if you tweet about Keyhole when prompted) – we’ll get an extra free track for the referral, and you get 3 free tracks so you can check out some of the hashtag traffic yourself.  If you’re interested in tracking one of the hashtags for us, you can contact us and we’ll let you know which hashtags we still need to monitor…there are over 99 combinations, if you include same-sex partnerships!

So what’s our goal here? We want to see just how the powers that be are determining these new partnerships – and see just how close (0r how NOT close!) the voting is.  We will try to update you guys throughout the week with interesting observations we’ve made, but for the most part, we’re going to try not to actually influence the voting – we might tell you that the race for Meryl is neck-and-neck between two male pros, but we might not tell you which ones 😉 Hopefully, when voting ends next Monday night, we’ll be able to predict for you guys just who is going to be paired with whom.  Should be a pretty cool social experiment, no? 🙂

Thanks to all who have already helped by creating referral accounts…you’ve made things much, much easier on these weary bloggers 😉 Need more details on how the switch up dance is going to go? Check out this post and this post.