Ozzie Sport

On July 7, 2010, I attended the Digital Sport Summit held in Melbourne, Victoria.  I was really excited to attend for several reasons.  First, many of the speakers were from Australian sporting organizations.  Some of the speakers represented clubs and the league I am doing my research on.  Second, the topic involved social media.  I love social media and better understanding how it is used from an organizational perspective because that can have an important impact on how fans organize themselves.  Third, it was a chance to get out of Canberra.  I love the people I’ve had an opportunity to talk to up here including the Canberra Raiders and Canberra United but the market conditions are really different than those that exist in other parts of Australia.  I also love Canberra but I wanted to go some place where I could get from Point A to Point B and pass by several coffee shops.  I also wanted to see the penguins.  Lastly, I wanted a chance to meet some of the people I’d gotten to know on Twitter who have been helpful in teaching me more about Australian sport.

The speakers included Ed Wyatt, Jeramie McPeek, Anthony Harrison, Peter Jankulovski, Finn Bradshaw, Darren Rowse, Alana Fisher, Nick Marvin and Harry O’Brien.  Below is a gallery of some pictures I took from my seat in the back (where I had a table to write on, could use Twitter on my iPhone with out being annoying, and where I could do data gathering during presentations I was less interested in).  The next two or three posts will include notes from the various sessions I listened to.  I’ve decided to put them into separate posts because one big post would be really difficult to read.

Before getting to those posts, I just wanted to say that the event was really fantastic.  I got a chance to meet a few people from the AFL including two guys from the league and two guys from the Essendon Bombers. (And they were polite when I attacked them with HERE IS A PAPER AND DATA NOT ABOUT YOUR TEAM BUT TO SEE WHAT I CAN DO.) Some of the presentations answered questions I had regarding why data was acting the way it was and explained some of the decision making going on that impacts the fan experience.  It also did this from an Australian sport perspective, with many presenters giving context for how this compared to American and European social media usage. They presented organization, the media and athlete perspectives.  This was useful because it helped put all these pieces into a larger context for how the larger sport industry functions.   If Anthony Alsop and co. put on the event again with a similar price point, I’d happily try to go again.

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I wrote this in April. I thought it was posted here or on Fan History’s blog. After a bit of searching, nope, it isn’t. Therefor, posting it here. This was written at the request of a friend who works for a marketing company in Chicago to discuss the challenges of measuring ROI.

April 19, 2010

One of the most important metrics that people discuss is the value of a customer and the value of followers of brands on various social networks. What is the return on investment for generating buzz in social media? What is the per individual value of having a fan on Facebook, having a fan create their own video content and upload it to YouTube, the value of some one belonging to or listing a brand as an interest on LiveJournal? Virtue, a social media management company, has put the value of a Facebook fan at $3.60 per fan.¹ Their methodology is suspect and their conclusions should not be read as universal across the many industries that utilize social media to promote their products and drive revenue.

Social media is composed of many networks, each catering to their own demographic and interest base. Each of these groups has their own behavioral patterns. Canadians and Brits have different usage patterns for Internet based radio than their American counterparts. The buying power and education level of a Facebook user is different than that of a MySpace user, even if both groups are composed solely of Americans. Added to this mix, there has been a fair amount of research done that says brands themselves do not influence purchasing decisions as much as friends and family. ²

Given this reality, a standard industry wide number is impossible to calculate. A smart company should independently develop a number for measuring the monetary potential of people interested in their brand. To do this, a company should first identify a specific network where they are aware of a community that is already interested in their product. This community can be expressed by listing the brand as an interest, as is the case for Facebook and LiveJournal, by belonging to a group dedicated to the brand for sites like ning and Yahoo!Groups, or by uploading user generated content on sites such as YouTube. Remember: Each of these sites has a different demographic base so you cannot arrive at a single metric across all networks unless you have the same uniform population using multiple networks.

Once you have identified the community you wish to find the individual value for, determine the demographic and geographic composition of the community on that particular network. Stick with information that is publicly available. In the case of LiveJournal, that data includes date of birth, geographic location, the type of account a user has (paid, plus, permanent). For Facebook, this information can be much deeper if you use the data provided to people interested in marketing to them. For a fan page that you do not run, you are limited to their name (for which you can attempt to determine gender) and the network that a person belongs to.

After you have this data, compare it to your known information regarding people who support your brand. If the demographic information does not match information, there is something wrong with that community and you will never get meaningful data. For example, a United States based Christian bookstore may be gaming for autofollowers on Twitter and have a huge following of people from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. On the whole, that demographic is unlikely to convert into potential customers for the bookstore. Trying to go further to assess value of one’s Twitter followers would thus not be useful. ³ If the data does match internal numbers or is a demographic base that you wish to explore, go on to the next step.

If the community demographics match with what you want to explore, create a survey for people who express an interest in your brand. It would be best to make the survey using a format that people inside the network would find easiest to use. For example, on LiveJournal, you may wish to use the service’s polling data; on Facebook, you may wish to create a survey using FBML and make it a tab on your fanpage or create a Facebook application. When conducting the survey, ask demographic and geographic questions that are represented by the data you pulled from public sources on that network. The survey should also ask questions regarding what other networks the individual uses. The survey should also inquire as to how often the customer has made a purchase from your company, what type of purchase was made, who influenced the decision to go with your particular brand, where the people who influenced them were sharing their influence, and what percentage of time those particular influences helped with a purchasing decision.

After the survey results are in, an analysis should be conducted to determine the particular value of each respondent in terms of monetary value of a customer. For example, a person may be a fan of your Facebook fan page. If for example you are a baseball team, the person may be inclined to purchase tickets to attend games anyway. They may respond that they have bought $200 worth of tickets. They may also tell you that they bought $20 worth of tickets to games they would not have otherwise attended as a result of coupons that you posted to the Facebook fanpage wall. The fan may also have purchased tickets they would not have purchased otherwise because a friend on Facebook talked about how they loved the team but had never attended game. The Facebook based conversation created a situation where the person spent another $40 on tickets. The value of this customer on Facebook thus is not $200 but $60 or 30% of their total spending is a direct result of a social media activity on Facebook.

Once the value for each respondent has been determined, normalize this against the demographic composition of the whole population, as every person expressing interest in a brand on a particular social network is not likely to respond to a survey. Remember, different groups behave differently. Some groups are incentivized to respond for their own reasons in order to try to meet their own needs. If the a particular network has two thirds of the population that is female that expressing interest in your product and the survey response is only a quarter for women, the monetary value of your community is going to be wrong.

This method of determining the monetary value of individuals expressing interest in your brand has other benefits. It can help you set benchmarks for improving sales to key demographics and help you identify new demographic bases for your product that you may not have realized. It may also help you identify other networks where you can potentially attempt to drive buzz for your product where the community is less obvious. Most importantly, this method uses real numbers for real customers rather than relying on unproven hypotheticals.

1 http://mashable.com/2010/04/14/facebook-fan-valuation/
2 http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=109574
3 If you find yourself in a situation like that, the best response is to re-evaluate your social media strategies. Something is clearly broken.

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The World Cup is done.  Based on averages, there do appear to be trends for usage around different teams.  I don’t have any other large international competition which to compare this two but it might be of interest to others who are organizing such events like the women’s World Cup for soccer and the Rugby World Cup.  Some national contingents will be the same and if we assume that these patterns hold across nationalities… it might give national sides, companies and organizers using geolocation services an idea which one is better for their audience and which games to target.  This is especially true if we assume that Foursquare and Gowalla users are representative of active social media users period who will use other services to discuss the event.

Related to the results: For the Germany vs. Spain game,between getting data before the event and after the event, Foursquare merged two locations.  If I had just used the one, it would have possibly included an additional 43 checks for the game that were from previous games.  Thus, I subtracted the previous venue’s totals from the venue that they were merged into.

Onwards with the results…

Foursquare

Gowalla

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On Monday, July 5, I had the pleasure of talking to Georgie Herbert at the W-League Melbourne Victory. I’ve tried to convey as accurately as possible what they have told me based on my memory and I asked their permission to reference them in my blog and paper while I met with them.

If you’re not familiar with the Melbourne Victory of the W-League, they are a W-League team based out of Victoria, playing most of their fixtures in Melbourne. They are affiliated with the A-League Melbourne Victory and are run by Football Victoria. The Melbourne Victory have one player who plays for the Matildas.

My purpose in talking to the Melbourne Victory was to help provide background knowledge for my literature review and to generally enhance my understanding of Australian team sport as it may apply other parts of my research. Going in, I had four questions I wanted answers to. These questions were:

1. How do you define fandom?
2. How do you reach out to the fan community?
3. How much influence does league management provide in terms of defining fandom and how to engage in outreach? Do they give guidance on social media policies?
4. How much do other sports, teams and leagues play a role in development and implementation of concepts related to fan engagement and social media?

The Melbourne Victory defines fans as spectators. Most of their fans are friends and family of current players, and players from women’s clubs. These groups account for a large percentage of attendees. Beyond these groups, they have limited definitions of the fan community for their club and appear to use an operating definition of “Fans of the A-League Melbourne Victory club.” The limited definitions appear to exist for several reasons. The first is that Football Victoria places a greater emphasis on promoting their top level Victorian based league over the W-League club. The second reason is because they rely heavily on the A-League Melbourne Victory for the promotion of their club; they piggy back on their promotional activities so it makes separating out the fanbases difficult. The third reason is that it is extremely difficult to carve out a niche for women’s sport in Victoria given the number of spectating options available to fans in the city. Fans just have too many choices of what do and the club doesn’t appear confident that they can successfully market the club in this environment.

The team doesn’t do much outreach of their own. They rely heavily on the A-League Melbourne Victory to do much of that outreach. This includes getting W-League Melbourne Victory news into the A-League club’s Twitter stream and Facebook fan page updates. This is a solution that they have found to be rather effective as they get a number of comments on Facebook in reply to these posts and their does not appear to be any backlash for including women’s updates alongside the men’s news. Beyond co-branded social media and other media spots, the club has an e-mail newsletter they send out and does school offers. They feel that some of their outreach is hampered because they do not have a fixed location for their fixtures; last season they played their five home games in five different venues.

The media comms coordinator does much of the club’s outreach. This is another issue because the media comms coordinator does not work exclusively on the Melbourne Victory W-League team; she is responsible for all of Football Victoria. Outreach is also problematic at times because they have to rely on the A-League Melbourne Victory. While there is an agreement in place that the two clubs will be co-branded, many of the people working for the Melbourne Victory are not used to working on the W-League team and that can take prodding. They were clear that the Melbourne Victory on the whole though are very good at updating when asked. Outreach with the A-League also requires people at Football Victoria remembering to pass on information to the club, which can be an issue as it is not always a priority.

Another issue that effects outreach involves contractual issues with the Victory’s star player and Matilda captain. The Victory only get so many contractual appearances with her a year outside general club requirements. The player is also heavily involved with her own personal branding. This can make it hard to use the player as a way to push their own brand as she has her own agenda that may not match with the club’s agenda.

Football Victoria has several young staffers who work for them whom are big soccer fans and who are social media savvy. They do not officially monitor social media sites for Football Victoria but if they see something that other clubs in leagues like the WPS or A-League are doing that they think would work for the Melbourne Victory, the club will consider implementing it. If they do find something that is extremely problematic on social media sites, fansites or forums, the club will inform the W-League who can then address the problem.

The W-League gives some guidance in this regard but much of the Victory’s social media, fan definitions and policies come from Football Federation Australia (FFA) who first try them out on the A-League. After that, these policies are often implemented on a much more scaled down version

Beyond the answer to the general questions, there were several other interesting things that came up in the interview.

First, the team does not have a formal social media policy for its players. This is similar to the Canberra United and the Canberra Raiders. They haven’t felt a need to have one because so far it has not been an issue. Most of their players are also on Facebook, not Twitter, and Facebook tends to get less media coverage. (Though this is not always the case. There was a player for one of the women’s national team who got into trouble for what she said on Facebook as it got picked up by a Melbourne newspaper.) Added to that, the team gets so little media coverage that the media is unlikely to care what players say on social media sites. That said, the club is planning on offering media training before the season starts. Part of this media training will involve teaching players about safety on social media sites.

The club sees its success as fundamentally tied to the A-League club. If the A-League Melbourne Victory succeeds, they should succeed too. This explains why Football Victoria has pushed to co-brand the W-League club with the A-League club and get them involved. They feel that they can increase their audience, build better awareness and raise the stature of women players and soccer in Victoria this way. Rather than turn to the W-League for guidance, they tend to be much more focused on their A-League counter part.

This decision to tie themselves with the A-League club means that the team finds it hard to get data about their specific fans as there aren’t different channels for the two: The Melbourne Victory of the W-League does not have its own Twitter account or its own Facebook fanpage. This could be problematic down the line as it may harm their ability to effectively target fans as they grow.

The Melbourne Victory are aware of the issues of branding the W-League correctly, finding that balance where you avoid lesbian stereotypes that might harm their brand and the growth of soccer in Victoria. At the same time, they don’t want to swing so far from one end of the marketing spectrum that they end up on the other by using glamour shots and heavily made up super feminine women. They want to find the middle to maximize interest in fans and future female Victorian soccer players.

The Melbourne Victory are in a tough market because of the presence of so many other sports and leagues. In Canberra, the United can garner a lot more media attention because there is less competition. The United and ACT Football can get attention for food eating contests; in contrast, the Victory are lucky if they can get the scores in the newspaper. This is part of their challenge.

Attendance at Victory games is very low. When they talked of high attendance matches, they were talking about 450 people at a game. The average attendance is much lower with a number mentioned of around 250 to 300. Their most successful games have been when they have played outside of the Melbourne area.

In preparation for talking with the Melbourne Victory, I completed an overview of the size of the online community for the team. It can be found at : ozziesport.com/Melbourne_Victory.pdf

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This is more of a thinking out loud so I can delve into it later. One of the things I’ve been curious about is the type of social media research conducted by academics and marketers. The types that I can think of are:

1) Case studies for how a business uses social media and the web,
2) Content studies that look at social media research and website design of a small basket of companies,
3) Sentiment analysis and keyword mentions,
4) Relationship analysis to try to determine how people interact and to identify key influencers,
5) Population studies.

Any more that people can think of? Is there any method superior to another? Should social media researchers be valuing any over the other? Which methods are more popular and why?

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That Ghana versus Uruguay: Wow. Wow.  Also, wow!  It was a major win for Foursquare as the game smashed the record for total checkins set by South Africa for the first game with 676 checkins compared to 335.  The game booted South Africa and Mexico from the top of the Foursquare table.  Sadly, it didn’t do this so much for Brazil and the Netherlands.   Gowalla sadly didn’t see the same Foursquare response.  There just doesn’t seem to be the same audience and there isn’t the same level of deviation of for national sides and between rounds.3.8 average checkin for the top team on Gowalla and 0 for the team on the bottom.  Foursquare has 179 on top and 17.3 on bottom.

There appears to be something going on with Foursquare.  I’ve included at the bottom a table which demonstrates what I’m talking about.  It looks like for four venues Foursquare removed a number of checkins or a large number of people deleted their own checkins.  I’m not certain what exactly happened as I can’t see who checked in and what games were effected.  It is annoying.  (And I don’t know who else is covering Foursquare and the World Cup to see if they’ve noticed these issues.)

Foursquare

Gowalla

Foursquare Checkin Losses

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Sometimes, I make charts and I think they are just that pretty that I want to share. (mmm. Tasty data!) This is one of those charts and it offers an interesting comparison between two clubs, the league they are in and the national team for that sport. The clubs are the Canberra United, the Melbourne Victory, the W-League and the Matildas. The team pages generally get 1/2 to 1/5 the traffic of the league page. The league and national team both got about the same traffic. Then the Australian women win the AFC and the traffic to their page shoots right up. After that, the traffic to the national team page was about double that of the league that a lot of those players are drawn from. Club pages and league didn’t necessarily see a bump as a result though.  The implications for this are fascinating.  It could suggest that national team interest and support does not translate down to the local level.   Soccer seems to have pushed this idea: National team success in the US should help foster interest in the MLS and WPS, and it doesn’t always seem to be the case.  (Yes, not the same country, the Women’s World Cup isn’t going on, etc.  Still, interesting…)

Stats for this chart were gathered using stats.grok.se/ .

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The second round came to an end and the third round is about to start.  My initial thinking was that as the tournament went on, you’d see more checkins at games.  My assumptions were that ticket prices would go up for later rounds, leading to a more affluent, social media connected audience attending these game.  I also assumed that the stadiums would be at capacity, where early first round games would not be. My assumption was South Africa would have the highest average checkins for all team, because of the home country advantage.  I also figured most of the teams left in would be big name team, which would have a wider audience than their own national base. I also thought that Foursquare would always beat Gowalla by a lot. I don’t quite know what I based these assumption on; it just felt like what I thought obvious patterns should be.

Some of these assumptions appeared to be a bit true.  Some of them not.  Appearing in the second round did not mean that a team climbed the ladder of total checkins.  Witness Japan, Paraguay, South Korea, Slovakia, Brazil and Germany who are averaging less than 50 checkins a game on Foursquare at the end of round 2.  Some of these are popular teams and they are all team who played in the second round.  Chile, Brazil, South Korea all appeared in the bottom 16 teams on Gowalla at the end of the second round.  South Africa wasn’t anywhere close to the top on Gowalla.  It should probably hold on to the top spot on Foursquare.  (Mexico has passed it though for total checkins.)  Patterns that I thought would emerge haven’t.

Anyway, on with the data…

Foursquare

Gowalla

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