Sometimes old dogs can learn new tricks.

In fact, you don’t have to be a fan of that old Schnauzer the Recording Academy to be completely blown away by the elegant and compelling social media campaign it’s created in the run-up to the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards — it’s a virtual doggy ballet, in fact.

Rather than explicitly spreading the Grammys’ in-house branding, the Academy has embraced the notion of user generated content as a reflection of artist buzz.

To exploit this concept, Grammy marketers have created a dedicated site, wereallfans.com (or “we’re all fans” — the contraction is a bit awkward), that collects fan-created YouTube videos, Flickr photos and tweets related to the top nominees and places them in a beautifully miasmic visualizer. It might give you motion sickness, but it’s really cool.

Best of all, you can add to the party by clicking on “join the conversation” in the lower-left corner. Log in to your Twitter, Flickr or YouTube and whatever you post will float off into the fray. Or you can create your own fan portrait. Click on the “fanbuzz visualizer” for a slightly less vertiginous interactive graph showing each artist’s buzz.

Meanwhile, over at Grammy.com, the site’s been loaded up with social features: Facebook and Twitter feeds, community blogging and a free iPhone app, to name a few of the bells and whistles.

For anyone with the money to spend on a massive social media campaign, this is pretty much how it’s done.

Oh yeah, and: Leonard Cohen FTW!

Further reading: Billboard.biz interviews the marketers behind the campaign.