Time to come clean: I’d been waiting for a reason to have a group vs. group competitive poll situation for a week or so, and Guso Drop inadvertently presented a prime opportunity.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, a poll geared toward Westerners that included Babymetal in a race for Most Anything was won by Babymetal. By the time this summer is done, there’s a very good chance that they’ll have the most name recognition in the West of any Japanese artist, period, and they’re already in many ways the backbone of the international alt-idol fan scene. As such, they have a very well-built-out Internet fan presence (that’s full of people with a chip on their shoulder, but that’s not for today); as soon as the poll was shared to the Babymetal subreddit, this thing was over.

So, lesson #1: Find ways to minimize Babymetal’s influence on these things. 🙂 But there’s a tautological factor at play, too, which is that most people are going to come to this site via interest in Babymetal, at least through Phase 1 (Did I never mention that there are phases to this? There are phases to this. Why? Because I work in digital strategy and that’s a thing you can do.), so how to balance that out?

I’ll actually employ a very simple bit of statistical modeling, structured properly but with a lot of number-fudging because I don’t feel like combing the entire Internet to manually count a bunch of 1s and 2s: I’ll “adjust” the results to account for proportional exposure and size of fan base and incoming traffic sources; if you like sports, especially baseball, you’re probably familiar with the idea (ERA+, DVOA, etc.).

In the end, then, the winner is neither Babymetal (who got all the votes) nor Guso Drop (who went and started all of this), but Fruitpochette, who managed two votes despite having absolutely no real online presence. That’s cool!

Which, lesson #2: There’s more awareness and appreciation of these groups than I think we appreciate. Between me and some zealous fans, Guso Drop and Necronomidol and Babymetal supporters all got some encouragement to come and vote; other than initial tweets this morning, neither Fruitpochette nor Haloperi Doll nor Hanako-san nor BiSH (who, come on) nor Party Rockets got any promotion in this at all, but they all got a vote and ergo have at least one huge fan who’s connected with the site. Even Screaming Sixties got a write-in. Nobody took the bait on Kamen Joshi. Smart!

So, lesson #3: There’s potential to actually make this work.

If you’re reading this and made it this far, be forewarned: March Madness begins next week, and we’re going to have a little tournament of our own. I’m still working on the concept and design, so it might not launch at the same time as the NCAA tournament, but we’ll get it going. If we can get the groups to promote, it might actually be kind of fun!