Last week, we showed love for the 52nd Grammys’ massive We’re All Fans social media campaign. Quick refresher: In addition to loading up Grammys.com with social content, the Recording Academy’s marketers created wereallfans.com, an elegant promotional site featuring fluid displays of user-generated content.

Now that the ceremony is over and the numbers have come in, it looks like the push paid off in spades, proving that investing in social media marketing brings tangible returns.

On average, 25.8 million viewers tuned into Sunday night’s ceremony, making for the ceremony’s largest audience in six years. That’s a 35% increase over last year’s ceremony, which was promoted only minimally on social sites.

The built-in buzz around Best-Album-winning Taylor Swift and Jacko-tributing Lady Gaga no doubt helped, not to mention everhot Beyoncé Knowles, who won became the biggest-winning female artist ever by taking home six awards. But we think the real buzz was online.

Mashable ran the numbers for the “We’re All Fans” campaign and found staggering results.

125,760 Facebook Fans
48,776 Twitter Followers
1,505,838 combined views on YouTube for the “We’re All Fans” campaign videos.
2,050,699 combined views on Grammy.com for the “We’re All Fans” campaign videos.
The Grammys were a trending topic on Twitter for more than four days.

Numbers = truthy.

Additionally, the awards ceremony itself reflected the ways in which social media has become an integral part of pop culture and everyday life. Nowhere was this seen more strikingly than in Imogen Heap’s mind-boggling Twitter dress. It was a dress. That tweeted. Crazy.

And there was also Stephen Colbert using an iPad to announce the Song of the Year nominees. Though not overtly social-media-related (and no doubt the result of an Apple product placement deal), the fact that Colbert whipped out an Internet-buzzy device on a mainstream-TV awards show — and got laughs — is pretty significant.

And lastly, on an unfortunate note, the Washington Post blog saw fit to point out how Swift’s cringeworthily off-key performance in her duet with Stevie Nicks echoed across the Twittersphere.

If art imitates life, social media reports it.

Imogen image courtesy Moritz Waldermeyer.

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.