Critical to the Oscar race every year is the money major Hollywood studios spend on generating visible, audible buzz about the films nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. Nielsen figures show that the studios spent $64.3 million on U.S. advertising for the five Best Picture nominees. Almost half of that money ($31 million) went into advertising “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” About $11 million apiece was spent on “Milk” and “Frost/Nixon.” Advertising for the winning film “Slumdog Millionaire” was $6.1 million, followed by $4.6 million for “The Reader.”

However, a more intriguing, revealing analysis of the buzz surrounding the Oscar nominees can be extracted from the social media platforms of Twitter (a service used by yours truly for The Selective Echo) and blogs.

A report by New Media Strategies covering the 24-hour period surrounding the Feb. 22 Oscar telecast shows that “Slumdog Millionaire” and Sean Penn, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Harvey Milk, dominated the total 24,100 Twitter posts concerning the awards.

“Slumdog Millionaire” had nearly 6,400 Twitter posts while “Milk” followed in second with a bit more than 3,600. Meanwhile, “Benjamin Button” mentions managed just a total of one-sixth of ‘Slumdog” mentions, even trailing “Wall-e.”

Penn, by far, was the most talked about individual in Twitter posts, garnering more than 3,000, followed by the late Heath Ledger, who won posthumously for Best Supporting Actor, and Mickey Rourke, who was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in “The Wrestler.”

Similar trends were found in blog mentions, with “Slumdog” leading the pack and with “Milk” and “Benjamin Button” virtually tied for second most frequent mentions. On the individual awards front, however, blog mentions for Rourke and for Angelie Jolie, who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, far surpassed those respectively for Oscar winners Penn and Kate Winslet. Jolie had nearly 22,000 mentions in the 24-hour period.

And, Dustin Lance Black, who won best original screenplay for “Milk,” nabbed a healthy chunk of blogosphere attention with nearly 21,000 mentions in the 24-hour Oscar period tracked.

The blog tracking statistics came from Simon Owens’ Bloggasm.

Bloggers tracked the winning nominee correctly in seven of 10 major award categories.

Now, these statistics might only seem mildly interesting to most folks. However, there is something to be said for marketers, publicists, public relations experts, and all sorts of promoters to begin to get a handle on developing useful qualitative measures for how consumers are influenced by peer recommendations, blogs, word-of-mouth, and social media buzz. A steadily growing body of research literature shows that traditional advertising platforms and approaches have given way to a dynamic environment where it is best to see how content and consumers influence each other in similar and parallel patterns.