Ozzie Sport

I haven’t done an update in a month or so… but this is my list of Australian clubs, leagues and athletes on Twitter.  It is sorted by followers.  The list is rather comprehensive but not all comprehensive.  A few accounts have been deleted since the last time I did this.  Those accounts aren’t noted this time around. And unlike the last time around, I haven’t htmled the Twitter accounts.  If you see any people or clubs or fansites that I’m missing, let me know in the comments.

Related Posts:

• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers
• Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs

I’ve been some what lax with collecting data during the past month.  This morning, I decided to remedy this a bit by updating my Alexa rank list for Australian sport clubs and teams.  This is what can be found below.  (The list isn’t all comprehensive.  I tend to mostly focus on the AFL and NRL.) It is interesting to see who is doing well, especially when compared to other clubs in the same league or clubs playing in the same geographic area.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Popular sport team and league sites in Australia
• Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers

I generally don’t believe in sentiment analysis.  I tend to think it is junk because so much of automated sentiment analysis misses contextual clues, relying too heavily on keywords.  Sentiment analysis also tends to give sentiment to bot generated posts and to posts that are neutral.  Despite this, I thought it might be a bit interesting to try to do a sentiment analysis of the AFL fan community on Twitter.  Are they happy or are they sad?  And later, where are the happy fans and where are the sad fans?

The first step in doing that was to collect a whole bunch of AFL related tweets using searchtastic.  I’m currently up around 3,400 tweets. (When/If I do the geolocation version, I’ll provide the raw data set.)  The second step was to develop a list of AFL specific sentiment related words.  In my case, I’m just going with the characteristic of happy and sad to make this easier.  My sentiment keyword list is as follows:

The next step was to give a happy or sad label for tweets that included these terms. The last step was to count up how many Tweets were labeled Happy, Happy / Sad, Sad, No Sentiment.  I generated the following table:

Later, I’m hoping to match this sentiment with the geographic location of the tweets to find out where the pockets of AFL happiness are versus the pockets of AFL sadness are.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• The Impact of Jason Akermanis’s Comments on the Western Bulldogs’s Online Fanbase
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• AFL cheer squads

This was originally written on June 14, 2010. It has not been edited since then. There may be some grammatical errors and citation related issues.

The Impact of Jason Akermanis’s Comments on the Western Bulldogs Online Fanbase

On May 20, the Jason Akermanis says gay AFL players should stay in the closet backlash started in response to his column in the Herald Sun. (Akermanis, 2010) The media covered the story on television, in print and online.  AFL fans discussed it on Twitter, created protest pages on Facebook, wiki articles were updated and a lot of people posted about it on the blogosphere.  Management within the AFL and the Western Bulldogs felt compelled to speak out against Jason’s comments.  People talked of reporting Jason to the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity commission.

From a marketing perspective, Akermanis’s opinions were perceived as damaging to the sport and league.  The Western Bulldogs have an association with VicHealth and the Gay and Lesbian Health Association and Akermanis’s comments seemed to contradict and undermine that support. (Walsh, 2010)  The possibility of negative backlash may not have been apparent to the team prior to the article being published as, according to the Sydney Star Observer, team management signed off on the column. (Noonan, 2010)   The size of the backlash and efforts to try to address it can probably be best evidenced by the suspension of Akermanis from the playing field and talking to the media.

Unlike the Melbourne Storm controversy, Akermanis’s comments do not give the appearance of having activated his personal fan base and the fan base for the Western Bulldogs.  There were no media reports of pastors speaking out on Akermanis’s behalf.  His teammates did not support him.  The media did not dismiss his comments, excusing them because of his otherwise excellent on field performance.  Perhaps had Akermanis made these comments in a different country, his comments would have had the potential to be less damaging to the club he played for.  There is also a general view, at least in the United States, that sport teams are run by conservatives who maintain traditional family values.  The assumption is often that sport fans reflect those same values; those that do not chose to follow other popular culture products like movies, television and video games.   If the fanbase for the AFL had actually reflected those underlying assumptions, the situation could have been much more easily ignored and have had the potential to be much less damaging.

The question is how damaging was the situation for the Western Bulldogs online?  How can this be measured? Did the team lose the potential to grow their audience when compared to other AFL teams as a result of Akermanis’s comments?  Who supported Jason and who did not?

The measurement question is probably the most difficult one to address.  Unlike the Melbourne Storm situation, this does not involve a team: The situation involves a specific player.  Liking or adding the team as an interest cannot necessarily be seen as supporting or condemning Jason Akermanis.  People could like the team because they suspended Akermanis for his comments. It is much harder to attribute page views to Akermanis and/or Western Bulldogs supporters who want to find out the situation in order to justify or reaffirm their allegiances.  Almost none of the media coverage and very few people on Twitter indicated that the fanbase was activated in defense of the team and Akermanis.  Thus, a default assumption for any data is that publicity of the situation will activate a larger audience to be against both the club and Akermanis unless contextual evidence suggests otherwise.

Given the measurement difficulties, this paper will nonetheless try to determine how the online community responded to the Jason Akermanis situation and how this reflects back on the Western Bulldogs.  This will be done by looking at Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, bebo, Alexa and a few selected sites.

Facebook
Facebook is the most popular social network in Australia.  Facebook’s advertising data says that there are over nine million users from Australia using the site.  (1)  The following of some Australian based sport teams and leagues are quite large.  The official fan pages for the Queensland Maroons, Brisbane Broncos, Socceroos, AFL and Essendon Bombers all have more than 50,000 fans.

Given the large number of Australians using the network, the official presence of so many clubs and the amount of media attention paid to the service, a response on network was inevitable.   There are several Facebook metrics that can be looked at to ascertain how the controversy effected the Western Bulldogs and Jason Akermanis.  The first way is to compare the relative growth of the Western Bulldogs’ total fans on their fan page compared to other teams during the same page.  A second way is to examine comparative growth of groups that supported Akermanis versus those that condemned his views.  The third way is to compare demographic and geographic distinctions between fans that support Akermanis, people that condemned Akermanis’s views and Western Bulldogs fans.

If the Jason Akermanis controversy hurt the Western Bulldogs on Facebook, it should have resulted in a loss or slower growth in terms of total and percentage of new fans on Facebook when compared to other teams. Data was collected between March 25 and June 10, 2010 regarding the size of the official Facebook fan pages for several AFL teams. (2)

Table 1

In the period between May 3 to May 30, the Western Bulldogs were in the middle of the teams for number of new fans with 1,453. This was almost three times as many as the bottom ranked Geelong Cats who had 519 new fans in that period and a third of new fans of the top ranked Collingwood Magpies who saw an increase of 4,150 fans. An argument could be made that period had too much time preceding it that could have lessened any potential loss with earlier gains. Thus comparing the period between May 30 and June 5 migh be more helpful as Akermanis was suspended on June 1. That new brought additional attention to the column that led to his suspension. During this period, the Western Bulldogs ranked seven out of nine for total new fans with 213 people liking them. This number may not be that accurate as not all teams that had performed worse than them in the previous period were included in this sample. The better comparison could be between May 3 and June 10, 2010 as it is larger and includes the initial controversy and the suspension use. That data set is also more complete. During this longer period, the Western Bulldogs finish in the middle with a gain of 1,812 fans. This compares to the Carlton Blues who on top with 5,185 new fans and the Geelong Cats who are on the bottom with 657 new fans. All of this supports the idea that, when compared to other team’s growth, the Western Bulldogs were not hurt by the controversy.

Another way of looking at this data is to compare percentage growth of new followers. This number compares a club’s ability to get new followers relative to their own performance as opposed to all AFL fans. Using this number, the Western Bulldogs saw the most growth in the period between May 3 and May 30 with a 22.8% increase. The next highest performing club was the Carlton Blues with 19.5%. The Western Bulldogs growth is impressive when compared to the Essendon Bombers who had 4.5% growth, the St. Kilda Saints who had 3.7% and the Adelaide Crows who had 2.1% growth. In the period between May 30 and June 5, the Western Bulldogs were second only to the Gold Coast Football Club: The Bulldogs had a 3.2% increase in new fans compared to the Gold Coast’s 44.9%. The Western Bulldogs saw .8% more growth to the next highest team, the Richmond Tigers who had 2.4%. The Bulldogs percentage growth was roughly 6.4 times as much as the bottom teams, Essendon, St. Kilda and Adelaide who saw between .5 and .7% growth. For the period between June 5 and June 10, the Western Bulldogs finished second for highest percentage growth. The only team that outperformed them was Greater Western Sydney, another expansion team who had just made a lot of news with their signing of Israel Folau. With the exception of the Gold Coast, all teams had one or more percent less growth than the Western Bulldogs. For the overall period between May 3 and June 10, the Western Bulldogs finished on top with 26.9%, 1.1% more growth than the number two team of Carlton and well above that of the last place performer Adelaide who had 3.3% growth in fans on Facebook. Given these numbers where the Bulldogs led in percentage growth on Facebook, it is hard to argue that the Jason Akermanis controversy hurt their Facebook strategy. It might be argued that the team was able to effectively capitalize on Akermanis related traffic on Facebook and their website to convert some fringe fans into Facebook fans.

Beyond the total fans of official pages, there are other interesting metrics that can explain the fan response to the Jason Akermanis controversy. One involves the creation and growth of Facebook groups and fan pages: Facebook easily allows users to create them and they do. Some of the fastest member growing Facebook groups and fan pages are created to get media attention for an issue, to help people spread the word about breaking news and share knowledge, to express disgust with actions taken by institutions or to express allegiance with a person or organization in response to negative publicity. Once the catalyst for the event is out of the news, many of these groups face stagnant growth and become irrelevant having been abandoned by their creators.

While it is not possible to date the creation of a group, the Akermanis controversy likely resulted in the creation of a number of fan pages and groups. These groups have names such as Jason Akermanis, you are a MORON!, Jason Akermanis: Homophobe and complete fuckwit!, Jason Akermanis is a homophobe., Jason Akermanis is a dick, Jason Akermanis Is Totally Gay, Only Homophobes think Jason Akermanis is a homophobe!, Jason Akermanis should be locked and gagged in a closet!, Don’t you hate it when you’re in the shower and Jason Akermanis comes in?, Jason Akermanis is a homophobe., Jason Akermanis is a F*ckwit, Jason Akermanis Can’t Drive A Race Car, JASON AKERMANIS’S “IQ OF A PLANT”, Jason Akermanis slept with me, Jason Akermanis is a coward, and for people who wanna see Jason Akermanis shove his head up his own Ass. There are a number of pro or neutral Akermanis groups on Facebook. They likely predate the controversy. They include groups named Jason Akermanis, Jason Akermanis Biography, Jason Akermanis Autobiography, The Battle Within by Jason Akermanis, jason akermanis is amazing!, The Jason Akermanis Appreciation Society, Jason Akermanis is a legend, Jason Akermanis handstand appreciation society, and Jason Akermanis for Brownlow 2008. (3)

Some of the anti-Akermanis groups saw relatively impressive levels of growth. Jason Akermanis is a homophobe. is one of the most popular anti groups. It had 126 members on May 20 and had 547 members by May 24. Membership levels stabilized and it had only 627 members by June 12. Don’t you hate it when you’re in the shower and Jason Akermanis comes in? had 171 fans as of May 22. By May 30, it had 482. Most of the other anti-Jason groups sampled had smaller total populations and smaller membership increases. Some of the anti groups were deleted during this period. One such group was Jason Akermanis Is Totally Gay, which had one member when checked on May 20 and was deleted some time between then and June 10. Jason Akermanis: Homophobe and complete fuckwit! had 118 members on May 20 before being removed from Facebook by May 22.

The pro and neutral Akermanis groups in the sample were all smaller than the two largest anti-Akermanis groups as of June 12, 2010. A pro-Akermanis group ranked third for the total number of fans. In comparison to the anti-Akermanis groups, the growth rate was much smaller. The Jason Akermanis Appreciation Society went from 454 members on May 20 to 469 on June 12. Jason Akermanis is a legend saw no growth during that period, continuing to have 201 total members. Jason Akermanis handstand appreciation society saw a growth of one, going from 88 to 89 during that period. Jason Akermanis at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis/107712129252191 is the group that probably saw the biggest percentage increase of clearly established fan pages. It went from 56 fans on May 20 to 165 on June 12. Jason Akermanis at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis/301148780410 went from 307 fans on May 20 to 382 on June 12. Growth levels for the pro and neutral groups are level compared to the anti groups. The data suggests that people did not respond to the Akermanis controversy by rushing out to assert their support of him and his views by joining communities about him on Facebook. The data also suggests that the anti-sentiment regarding Akermanis was not sustained for a long period of time and that people were not scared to affiliate with Akermanis, despite people’s negative attitudes towards him.

Another way of evaluating the effect of the Akermanis controversy on the Western Bulldogs is to compare the characteristics of Western Bulldog fans, Akermanis supporters and Akermanis detractors. Facebook shows the network membership for people who belong to many groups and fan pages, which allows such a comparison to take place. On June 13, 2010, a list of all the members of the Western Bulldogs official fan page was pulled. While Facebook shows the page as having 6,819 fans, it only provided names and network membership for 3,343 people. Of these fans, 188 or 5.6% belonged to a network. A membership list for Jason Akermanis is a homophobe. (4) was also pulled. As of June 13, 2010, the group had 627 members, of which Facebook lists 428. Of the 428, 28 or 6.5% belong to a network. A membership list for The Jason Akermanis Appreciation Society was pulled. As of June 13, the group had 469 members of which 337 were on the member list. Of these, 27 or 8.0% belonged to a network.

Networks are Facebook created groupings that early in the site’s history allowed people to easily filter content to people who shared an affiliation with other users. These networks cover three broad general categories: Places of employment, secondary schools and high schools. The pro-Akermanis people belong to thirteen networks not shared by detractors or Western Bulldogs fans. That means 48% of Akermanis fans do not belong to a network that is shared by Western Bulldogs fans and highly suggests that Akermanis’s fanbase largely is independent of the Bulldogs. Eight anti-Akermanis fans or 27% of that population belong to networks not represented by the Western Bulldogs or Akermanis supporters. This suggests that Akermanis detractors likely come from with in the Western Bulldogs fanbase.

The differences between Akermanis detractors and Western Bulldogs fans are really clear when network membership is sorted by type (secondary school, university, company) and then tabulated. (5) 78.6% of all Akermanis detractors that list a network belong to a university related one. This compares to 50.0% for Akermanis supporters and 48.6% for Bulldogs supporters. Bulldog supporter network membership suggests that the club’s goal of building a barracker base from the working class has been successful. The pattern of network membership may also suggest that Akermanis detractors are older than the club’s current supporter base. Given these two conditions, the Bulldogs are likely to be unaffected by the detractors as they represent a demographically distinct group that the club is not marketing to.

Twitter
Twitter is a popular microblogging platform. Many teams, players and fansites have established a presence on the site. Australian sport fans are also actively using Twitter to discuss their club’s performance, celebrity athlete related gossip and to find other sport news.

There are several possible ways to monitor the impact of the Akermanis controversy as it pertains to Western Bulldogs. Sadly, the most important Twitter metrics are not accessible as the author did not get the data in the moment. (6) These include total number of followers before and after the controversy for the official account and total number of tweets featuring certain keywords. The counting the total number of Tweets by the official account was also not done, as it was believed that this data would not have meaningful results. Unlike the Melbourne Storm controversy, the focus was on a player where the media and fan attention appeared to be on him to the exclusion of his club. Given that, the Bulldogs did not have to respond or change their practices in their official fan communication channels and monitoring their Tweet volume would be unlikely to provide any insight into the fan response to the controversy.

As the three of the most popular Twitter metrics are not available or not relevant, the question is what other metrics can be used? One Twitter analysis tool that can be useful in this case is Twitter Venn. (7) The service creates Venn diagrams based on keywords that a user selects. The service uses Twitter’s search API to find Tweets that mention the two or three teams the user selected, determines if the terms were used together or independently, counts the total Tweets and then creates the Venn. (Clark, n.d.) Using this service on June 11, a Venn diagram (Figure 1) was created. The keywords chosen were based on the goal of trying to exclude irrelevant tweets, such as people talking about their pet Bulldogs or other teams named the Bulldogs. Phrases such as gay, homosexual and homophobic were also not included as their usage extends beyond this controversy and would pick up a lot of irrelevant data.

Figure 1. Twitter Venn. This Venn diagram generated by Twitter Venn demonstrates the lack of overlap between use of Akermanis and Western Bulldogs.

On Twitter, people who mentioned Jason Akermanis did not mention his club affiliation, instead referencing the AFL, gay and other words that indicate the controversy involving the column he published. Based on this, it can be concluded that on Twitter, Akermanis’s comments did not result in rage directed at his club.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the first sources of information that many people turn to when a news story breaks. Articles on the site often provide background information and context to an event, and include a summary and links of breaking news. Wikipedia also has an excellent search engine optimization. When people go to Google or other search engines to find out what is happening, Wikipedia often appears as the first, second or third result. Thus, an increase in an article’s views should be expected when controversy happens.

In terms of the Jason Akermanis and Wikipedia, the way to measure the controversy as it impacts the Western Bulldogs would be to compare the total page views between those two articles. If the controversy reflected more upon Akermanis than his team, the expectation is the page view spike would be higher. The chart below contains traffic information to those two articles for the period between May 1 and June 8, 2010. (8) To give perspective to Akermanis’s situation as it pertains to athlete interest connecting to club interest, data for the Israel Folau, Brisbane Broncos and Western Sydney Football Club articles have been included on the chart. (Figure 2)

Figure 2. Article Views on Wikipedia by Date. Graph shows total views of selected Wikipedia articles between May 1 and June 10, 2010.

The Jason Akermanis controversy did not result in increase in attention for the Western Bulldogs: Total page views by date have a correlation of .280, which suggests that interest in the two is not related. This is much different than the situation that exists for Israel Folau and Greater Western Sydney: The two articles move in tandem in terms of total article views by date with a correlation of .943. (9)

There are two other aspects of Wikipedia worth analyzing as they pertain to understanding the fan community’s actions in response to the controversy. One is the total edits. The second is the location of those edits. For total edits, controversial and high visibility stories tend to lead to an increase in editing. For less controversial news stories, where there isn’t much new information and the topic is not one people are passionate about, there tend to be fewer peaks in editing. Below is a chart (Figure 3) that compares the total number of edits to the Jason Akermanis, Western Bulldogs, Israel Folau and Greater Western Sydney articles.

Figure 3. Total Edits Between May 1 and June 8, 2010 for Selected Wikipedia Articles.

The Jason Akermanis controversy resulted in people editing the article about him. The total number of daily edits does not mirror total number of daily edits to the Western Bulldogs. This continues to suggest that people viewed Akermanis’s actions independently of his club. This contrasts with the Israel Folau situation, where the total number of edits appears to be a bit more connected.

The Western Bulldogs are based in a Melbourne suburb. An argument could be made that the Western Bulldogs should be concerned about maintaining or developing a fanbase in their local area; they do not need to worry about the fan community outside their geographic home. The only way to measure the local fan community response on Wikipedia expressed by editing an article is to use geolocation for IP addresses that have edited an article. As the total edits by date chart shows, there have been very few edits to the Western Bulldogs article since the Jason Akermanis controversy broke. Of the five edits made to the Western Bulldogs article, two edits have been made by users who have not logged in and have a visible IP address. Neither of these edits references the controversy. Both edits are from Melbourne. (10) This suggests that the controversy did not impact their local fanbase.

The edit history for the Jason Akermanis article stands in stark contrast to the Western Bulldogs article. It has a lot more edits and almost all of the non-logged in edits involved editing the article to reference the stay in the closet controversy. There were 29 total edits made by 14 non-logged in users. Of these edits, four are from Melbourne, one each from Camberwell and Sandringham in Victoria, two are from Adelaide, three are from Sydney and three are international. Only 42 percent of the edits to the Jason Akermanis article originate from the Western Bulldog’s geographic home. Determining what this means is more problematic. The most obvious conclusion is that the offended population were geographically dispersed and were more interested in the topic because of the homophobic aspects than because of their interest in Akermanis and the Western Bulldogs. These edits should not be seen as being committed by a base who will punish the Western Bulldogs by not watching games on television or in person.

Bebo
Bebo was a popular social networking site in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the United Kingdom. Its popularity has slipped in the past year but there is still a large population of AFL fans on the site. It probably ranks amongst the top ten most popular social networks inside Australia
Bebo allows people to search for keywords and interest that appear in people’s profiles, in videos, descriptions of bands, groups, applications and skins. For profiles, the general assumption is that people do not update interests listed on them regularly after they register. Doing so generally requires a strong desire to associate or disassociate with a person or organization. This desire has to overcome general antipathy towards updating. Thus, interest levels remain relatively stable unless something happens that causes a huge emotional response.

What does this mean for the Western Bulldogs? Did the Jason Akermanis situation reach that point, causing people to want to associate or disassociate with the team? As of March 17, there were 93 people who listed the Western Bulldogs as an interest. (11) By June 8, 2010, this number had increased to 95. There does not appear to have been an attitude shift that causes many people to want to change their public allegiances. The small increase may mean something when compared to Melbourne Storm who saw zero interest listing growth during a similar period prior to and after a major controversy. (Hale, 2010)

While no bebo video data is available for the Western Bulldogs prior to June 9, video data is available for the Brisbane Lions. On May 1, 2010, a search was done of videos on bebo for the “Brisbane Lions.” This is a team that Jason Akermanis played for. On that date, there were 74 videos which mentioned the Brisbane Lions. Three of these videos referenced an Australian soccer league team. The rest were about the AFL team. Of these 71 videos, only one contained Akermanis in the title or description. As of May 1, it had only eleven views. When the video viewing statistics were check on June 9, 2010, there were still only 11 views: The Jason Akermanis controversy has not translated into people seeking out video content on bebo featuring him to watch.

There are no groups about Jason Akermanis. This contrasts to Facebook, where there are several that cover several different views of the player. The Jason Akermanis did not inspire anyone on bebo to create any anti-Jason group, which suggests either antipathy towards the situation or fans not being particularly active on bebo any more.

The only other large player/club controversy that occurred during this time period involved Israel Falou, who switched from the NRL and Brisbane Broncos to the AFL and Greater Western Sydney. To put Jason Akermanis’s fan community as it related to the Western Bulldogs on bebo into context, it is worth comparing the two players. The following data was gathered on June 8, 2010.

Table 2

Bebo interests suggest that Israel Folau is much more important to the Brisbane Broncos fan community than Jason Akermanis is. Jason Akermanis’s comments look like, based on these numbers, that they would have less potential to harm the club than Israel Folau’s desertion to the AFL.

Website Traffic and Demographics
There are primarily three services which track website traffic. They are Alexa, Quantcast and Compete. (12) Each one has something different to offer in terms of how they measure and information they provide about a site. None of these sites are perfect in that they cannot convey a completely accurate picture of a website’s traffic or the demographic composition of visitors to the site. Despite these deficiencies, using their data can begin to give an idea to the fan response by looking for traffic movement out of sync with other teams and if there was a major difference in audiences visiting the Bulldogs site.

Alexa ranks websites based on the amount of traffic they get. It measures traffic using a user-installed toolbar coupled with other data. (13) (alberto, 2009) They can differentiate traffic based on nation and will provide ranking information by country for sites that get a majority of their traffic from specific countries. Their data is also updated daily. This makes them more useful than Compete and Quantcast in that Alexa provides information about Australian sites and updates daily so that daily traffic patterns can be examined.

On June 5, June 8 and June 9, 2010, the international and Australian ranking on Alexa was recorded for all official AFL club websites. (14) This is not ideal, as it does not include traffic prior to and immediately after the Jason Akermanis situation. Still, it can provide a picture of what was happening 16 days after the incident broke, a few days after news of Akermanis’s suspension was announced.

Table 3.

The only team with less traffic to their site is Greater Western Sydney, a team that has not started playing in the AFL yet. While only three of the seventeen teams saw an increase in Australian traffic ranking from June 5 to June 9, (15) the decrease in rank between those dates for the Western Bulldogs was the most extreme: It dropped almost 2,000 places. This suggests that something is going on to depress traffic to the Bulldogs when compared to other teams.

Quantcast and Alexa both provide demographic information about visitors to a site. Quantcast can directly measure a site’s traffic and build a better demographic picture if a site inserts Quantcast’s code into their site. (Quantcast Corporation, 2008) Quancast’s data tends to be American centric and does not always provide a picture of international visitors unless a site is Quantified. Alexa’s demographic data comes from a survey users complete when they install the toolbar. (alberto, 2009)

Bearing in mind that the Quantcast’s description is based on American visitors, the site characterizes visitors to the Western Bulldogs’s site (16) as female, middle aged, Hispanic, have children, make between $30,000 and $60,000 a year and are college graduates. This information was based on all of May 2010, including the nineteen days before the controversy broke out. Alexa, which has much more data from Australian users, characterizes visitors to the Western Bulldogs site as generally between the ages of 18 to 24, male, college graduates, childless and visiting the site from work.

The Geelong Cats and North Melbourne Kangaroos are closest to the Western Bulldogs in terms of amount of traffic. They are also based in the same metro area. Thus, it makes sense to compare their audience with the of the Bulldogs to determine if the there are demographic differences between the clubs that could be attributed to a shift in viewing habits as a result of the Akermanis controversy.

Quantcast characterizes visitors to the Geelong Cats site (17) as female, extremely young, Asian, having no children, making between $30,000 and $60,000 a year and being college graduates. Quantcast characterizes North Melbourne Kangaroos website visitors (18) as being split evenly amongst both genders, teenaged, Asian, having kids in their household, affluent and possessing a graduate degree.

Alexa characterizes Geelong Cats website visitors as being between 18 and 24, male, having a graduate degree, having children, and visiting the site from bother home and work. Alexa characterizes North Melbourne Kangaroos visitors as between 18-24, male, having a college degree, childless and visiting the site from home.

There does not appear to be a demographically homogenous group visiting the websites of all three clubs. The major difference appears to be the racial make up of visitors, with the Western Bulldogs over representing in Hispanics. It would be difficult to make a claim, based on available website demographic data, that the Akermanis situation changed the composition of the fanbase.

43 Things, Blogger and Other Small Networks
While smaller and less influential sites like 43 Things, Blogger and BlackPlanet have tiny populations, they are worth monitoring as they can often be one of the first signs of a major public relations problem online that can no longer be controlled. Twitter and Facebook can often be very temporal: Things happen in the moment and are quickly forgotten. Those sites are not set up to record fan responses. Other sites, either because they are inactive, allow for longer posting, have greater visibility to people outside the network the content exists on or because influential fans from those networks may have greater crossover to a wider selection of sites, can hurt a club or league’s reputation. The content does not go away. There are influential people on some of those sites that can spread the message to a totally different audience with a different demographic profile. Also, when you’re talking to some one in a much smaller group, there tends to be more trust and greater potential for people to believe what their friends are saying. While a person reading one hundred tweets by nominal acquaintances may be able to forget and move on as things move so fast, in a one on one environment, the chances are the smaller group may have bigger problems letting go and moving on.
43things is a goal setting site that is relatively popular in Australia. Prior to the Jason Akermanis controversy, there was one goal related to the Western Bulldogs: See the Western Bulldogs win the grand final. One person was trying to accomplish this goal. Since the controversy, there has been no change in people creating new goals related to the club, nor in the number of people trying to accomplish the existing goal. There have been no goals, either positive or negative, created related to Jason Akermanis. This mirrors the non-action taken by Brisbane Broncos, Israel Folau and Greater Western Sydney fans who added no goals in response to the change in code news for Israel Folau.

BlackPlanet is a small social network marketed at African Americans in the United States. It has a small community of Australians on it. The major sport league that Australians are interested on the site is the NRL. Prior to and after the controversy, no one listed the Western Bulldogs as an interest. After the controversy, no one updated their profiles to include Jason Akermanis as an interest.

Blogger is a blogging site powered by Google. It is one of the more popular free blogging services in Australia. Users can create a profile on the site, which is used to link their different blogs and comments on one page. The profile page includes an interest field that users can fill out. As of January 16, twelve people listed the Western Bulldogs as an interest. This number only changed by one as of June 4 and June 8, 2010, with 13 people listing the team as interest. No one listed Jason Akermanis as an interest on blogger as of June 4, 2010. It is unlikely that the Jason Akermanis situation resulted in any behavioral change in terms of public allegiances shown on profiles for the Western Bulldogs.

Care2 is a small social network marketed at people who want to make the world a better place. It hosts blogs, groups, discussions, personal profiles, petitions and photos. Care2 has a small population of Australian sport fans using it. As the site is geared towards making a difference and addressing social problems, it is a bit surprising that Akermanis does not show up when searching (19) site profiles, discussions, groups or petitions. As of June 11, the Western Bulldogs are only mentioned four times in blogs and only included on one person’s profile. While this data was gathered three weeks after the controversy, it seems unlikely that with no mentions of Akermanis, the small community on Care2 turned against the team. ecademy is a niche social networking site that is an alternative to LinkedIn for professionals. With no earlier benchmarks, a June 11, 2010 profile search (20) turned up similar results to Care2: No one listed the team or Jason Akermanis as an interest on their profile. It is unlikely that the controversy had an impact on the small AFL community on the site.

Wikia is an extremely popular wiki hosting company (21) that allows anyone to freely create a wiki. They are home to three small wikis dedicated to the AFL and Australian rules football. (22) These wikis are small and not very comprehensive. Two were created prior to the controversy and one was created after it. None have had any edits to the Western Bulldogs or Jason Akermanis article. Coincidentally, there have been no edits related to Israel Folau and Greater Western Sydney. The Wikia community for the AFL was clearly not activated in response to the Akermanis or Folau situations. This suggests that the community is either inactive or more interested in historical on field play rather than off field player antics.

Conclusion
Based on fan behavior online, Jason Akermanis’s comments did not help the player build his personal brand. He upset some fans in the short term, and motivated people to create long time reminders of views that they consider problematic. Very few fans rushed to his defense by affiliating with him or creating groups to defend his position. While the controversy may be problematic for Akermanis, the controversy was less problematic for his club, the Western Bulldogs. Fans did not link the club and player on Wikipedia or Twitter. People did not remove their Western Bulldogs interest on sites such as Blogger or change their behavior goals on sites like 43 Things. Inactive Bulldogs fans were not motivated to become active in order to express disgust for the team. The people that had problems with Akermanis were demographically distinct from Bulldogs fans on Facebook. The controversy harmed Akermanis but it did not harm his team’s image.

References
Akermanis, J. (2010, May 20). “Stay in the closet, Jason Akermanis tells homosexuals.” Herald Sun. Newspaper. Retrieved June 7, 2010, from http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/stay-in-the-closet-jason-akermanis-tells-homosexuals/story-e6frf9ix-1225868871934

alberto. (2009, July 13). “How are Alexa’s traffic rankings determined?” Alexa. Retrieved June 8, 2010, from http://www.alexa.com/help/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=17&sid=70b7eee4fd8d92a4f74c66e3680d1275

Clark, J. (n.d.). “Twitter Venn.” Twitter Venn. Retrieved June 11, 2010, from http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterVenn/view.php

Hale, L. (2010, May 20). “Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy.” Ozzie Sport. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://ozziesport.com/2010/05/online-activity-in-the-wake-of-the-melbourne-storm-controversy/

Noonan, A. (2010, May 27). “AFL closet furore continues.” Sydney Star Observer. Newspaper. Retrieved June 7, 2010, from http://www.starobserver.com.au/news/2010/05/27/afl-closet-furore-continues/25965

Quantcast Corporation. (2008, June 28). “Cookie Corrected Audience Data, Leveraging Multiple Data Sources to
Calibrate Unique Cookie, Machine, and People Counts in a Direct-Measurement Media Economy.” Quantcast. Retrieved June 9, 2010, from http://www.quantcast.com/docs/display/info/Cookie+to+People+Translation+Overview

Walsh, C. (2010, May 21). “Aker’s viewpoint bizarre: Roos.” The Australian. Retrieved from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sport/akers-viewpoint-bizarre-roos/story-e6frg7mf-1225869370860

Footnotes

1. Facebook’s advertising page is located at http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/ .  As of June 11, 2010, it said that there were 9,300,240 people from Australia.
2. The urls for the fan pages in this sample are http://www.facebook.com/adelaidecrows, http://www.facebook.com/AFL, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Lions/21301860172, http://www.facebook.com/OfficialCarltonFC, http://www.facebook.com/collingwoodfc, http://www.facebook.com/Essendon, http://www.facebook.com/fremantlefootballclub, http://www.facebook.com/GeelongCatsInsider, http://www.facebook.com/GoldCoastFC, http://www.facebook.com/teamgws, http://www.facebook.com/hawthornfc, http://www.facebook.com/MELBOURNEfc, http://www.facebook.com/northkangaroos, http://www.facebook.com/portadelaidefootballclub, http://www.facebook.com/Richmond.FC, http://www.facebook.com/stkfc, http://www.facebook.com/sydneyswans, and http://www.facebook.com/pages/West-Coast-Eagles/38862387223, http://www.facebook.com/Western.Bulldogs
   .
3. The following is a complete list of URLs for Jason Akermanis related Facebook fan pages and groups that the author looked at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis/107712129252191, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis/105738419448658, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis/373300971735, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis/376142636801, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis/301148780410, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis-Biography/106142142741832, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis-Autobiography/106446502709782, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis-you-are-a-MORON/109009685810123, http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Battle-Within-by-Jason-Akermanis/110570445624262, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis-Homophobe-and-complete-fuckwit/105067262872425, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=124872100865630, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=118380594866779, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=118537708183794, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=118573961511057, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=344061166761, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20900401086, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10308061363, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19647855868, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=128825660465576, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16522463154, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=109095775801131, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18564050741, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21877556009, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=123972501889, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=107444465957654, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=38642639632, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis-slept-with-me/115552025153010, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis-is-an-idiot/125326927493237, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jason-Akermanis-is-a-coward/105337389512086,  and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dont-you-hate-it-when-youre-in-the-shower-and-Jason-Akermanis-comes-in/124465230905493 .
4. The group can be found at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=118380594866779 .
5. The following table lists the network, the type of network and the total members from the three different groups looked at.
   

   Network	Type	Supporters	Detractors	Bulldogs	Total
   Victoria AU	University	2	1	15	18
   Monash	University	2	8	7	17
   University of Melbourne	University	2	1	13	16
   RMIT	University	0	0	15	15
   State Government of Victoria	Company	0	0	11	11
   Deakin	University	0	2	8	10
   La Trobe University	University	2	0	7	9
   Westbourne Grammar School	Secondary school	0	0	4	4
   Bendigo Senior Secondary College	Secondary school	0	0	3	3
   Curtin	University	0	2	1	3
   Haileybury College	Secondary school	1	0	2	3
   MacKillop College	Secondary school	1	0	2	3
   St. Paul’s College	Secondary school	0	0	3	3
   University of Sydney	University	0	2	1	3
   Catholic College Bendigo	Secondary school	0	0	2	2
   Essendon Keilor College	Secondary school	0	0	2	2
   Hoppers Crossing Secondary College	Secondary school	1	0	1	2
   Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School	Secondary school	1	0	1	2
   James Cook	University	0	1	1	2
   Methodist Ladies’ College	Secondary school	0	0	2	2
   National Australia Bank	Company	0	0	2	2
   St. Bernard’s College	Secondary school	0	0	2	2
   Sunbury College	Secondary school	0	0	2	2
   Swinburne	University	0	0	2	2
   Telstra	Company	0	1	1	2
   UNSW	University	1	1	0	2
   Whitefriars College	Secondary school	0	0	2	2
   Academy of Mary Immaculate	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   ANZ	Company	0	0	1	1
   Australian National	University	0	0	1	1
   Bacchus Marsh College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Ballarat & Clarendon College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Ballarat High School	Secondary school	1	0	0	1
   Benedictine IL	University	0	0	1	1
   Binghamton	University	1	0	0	1
   Bowness High School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Box Hill High School	Secondary school	0	1	0	1
   Braemar College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Burnside State High School	Secondary school	1	0	0	1
   Cairns State High School	Secondary school	0	1	0	1
   Catholic Regional College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Central Queensland	University	0	0	1	1
   Chairo Christian School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Charles Campbell Secondary School	Secondary school	1	0	0	1
   Charles Darwin	University	0	0	1	1
   Charles Sturt University	University	1	0	0	1
   Chelmer Valley High School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Clonard College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Computer Sciences Corporation	Company	0	0	1	1
   Copperfield College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   De La Salle College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Elsevier	Company	0	0	1	1
   Emmaus College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Esperance Senior High School	Secondary school	1	0	0	1
   FedEx	Company	0	0	1	1
   Firbank Grammar School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Ford Motor Company	Company	0	0	1	1
   FRANCE 24	Company	0	0	1	1
   Geelong Grammar School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Gisborne Secondary College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Governor Stirling High School	Secondary school	1	0	0	1
   Griffith	University	0	1	0	1
   Guilford Young College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Gymnase de Beaulieu	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Heathfield High School	Secondary school	1	0	0	1
   Hellyer College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   IESEG School of Management	University	0	0	1	1
   Illawarra Sports High School	Secondary school	0	1	0	1
   John Willcock Senior High School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Jones Lang LaSalle	Company	0	0	1	1
   Kantonsschule Büelrain	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Karingal Park Secondary College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Keilor Downs College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   KPMG	Company	0	0	1	1
   Launceston College	Secondary school	1	0	0	1
   Lowther Hall Anglican School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Macquarie	University	0	0	1	1
   Melbourne High School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Merrimac State High School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Metso	Company	1	0	0	1
   Mildura Senior College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Mincom	Company	0	0	1	1
   Mirrabooka Senior High School	Secondary school	1	0	0	1
   Mount Carmel College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Mowbray College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Nazareth College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Newcastle	University	0	1	0	1
   Newcomb High	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Northern Beaches Christian School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Norwood Secondary College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Nowra Christian School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Nowra High School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Optus	Company	0	0	1	1
   Padua College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Patterson River Secondary College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Presentation College Windsor	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Sacred Heart AU	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Sacred Heart College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Salesian College Rupertswood	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   San Diego State	University	0	0	1	1
   Smithfield State High School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   St Albans Secondary College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   St. Aloysius College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   St. Thomas	University	0	0	1	1
   Star Of The Sea	Secondary school	0	1	0	1
   Star of the Sea College	Secondary school	0	1	0	1
   Strathmore Secondary College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   T. D. Williamson	Company	0	0	1	1
   Tasmania	University	0	0	1	1
   The British School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   The Friends’ School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   The Peninsula School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Trinity Catholic School	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   University of New England	University	0	1	0	1
   University of Peradeniya	University	0	0	1	1
   University of Zimbabwe	University	1	0	0	1
   UT Arlington	University	0	0	1	1
   UWA	University	1	0	0	1
   Webber Academy	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Wellesley	University	0	1	0	1
   Westpac Banking	Company	0	0	1	1
   William Angliss Institute of TAFE	University	0	0	1	1
   Wodonga Senior Secondary College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Wycheproof College	Secondary school	0	0	1	1
   Total	Secondary school	12	5	80	97
   Total	University	13	22	82	117
   Total	Company	1	1	26	28
   Total	26	28	188	242
   Percentage	Secondary school	46.2%	17.9%	42.6%	40.1%
   Percentage	University	50.0%	78.6%	43.6%	48.3%
   Percentage	Company	3.8%	3.6%	13.8%	11.6%

6. Data regarding the comparative size of total Twitter followers for the Western Bulldogs was initially gathered on June 1, almost a week after the controversy first started.  Twitter follower counts for other official club accounts were not recorded on that.  This further hampers the ability to make comparisons between teams.
7. Twitter Venn is located at http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterVenn/view.php .
8. Article view information is provided by http://stats.grok.se/ .
9. The correlation between the Brisbane Broncos article and the Israel Folau article is .155.  The relationship between page views for each article is close to random.
10. http://whatismyipaddress.com/ was used to determine the geolocation of IP addresses.
11. This number came from visiting http://www.bebo.com/c/search? , clicking on the people tab and searching for “Western Bulldogs.”
12. Compete is not being looked at here because they have not updated their data to include May.  They also do not provide free demographic details about visitors to sites that they track.
13. It is important to note that this tool does not measure direct traffic to a site.  Rather, it involves sampling traffic to the site to get an approximate for this his compares to other sites.
14. The list of Alexa pages checked include: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/afc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/afl.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/lions.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/carltonfc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/collingwoodfc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/essendonfc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/fremantlefc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gfc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/teamgws.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hawthornfc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/melbournefc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kangaroos.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/portadelaidefc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/richmondfc.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/saints.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/sydneyswans.com.au , http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/westcoasteagles.com.au , and http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/westernbulldogs.com.au .
15. There are almost certainly cyclical patterns to the checking of AFL club websites: People check them on game and around game day to keep up with the team.  They are unlikely to check club websites when there is no club news and teams are not playing.
16. The Quantcast information is from http://www.quantcast.com/westernbulldogs.com.au#demographics
17. The Quantcast information is from http://www.quantcast.com/gfc.com.au#demographics
18. The Quantcast information is from http://www.quantcast.com/kangaroos.com.au#demographics
19. The url for the search that was confused is http://www.care2.com/find/site#q=%22Jason+Akermanis%22 .
20. The ecademy search can be found at http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=member&q=%22Western+Bulldogs%22&op=Search+People
21. As of June 11, 2010, Alexa ranks Wikia as the 312th most popular site on the Internet.  Compete estimates that the site gets around 3.2 million visitors a month.
22. The wikis are http://afl.wikia.com/wiki/Australian_Football_League_Wiki , http://aussierules.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page , and  http://aflpedia.wikia.com/wiki/AFL_Wiki .

Related Posts:

• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Data absent context can change the meaning: Did Julia Gillard hurt the Bulldogs?
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter

This isn’t particularly high quality. I made it using Microsoft Paint, PowerPoint and Windows Movie Maker. It is good for a giggle.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• A map of Team GWS on Facebook
• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders

After I did A map of Team GWS on Facebook, which included a comment in the follow up about Twitter location, I wanted to do a similar map for other AFL teams using Twitter.

The problem is I can’t easily get all the follower data on Twitter in a way that is easy for me to work with. Instead, I used a tool called Searchtastic to get profile information about people who mentioned specific keywords in their Tweets. Searchtastic pulls that information from Twitter’s Search API and then outputs in Excel. Each Twitter search I did I related to a team: #gosaints for St. Kilda, Lions AFL for the Brisbane lions. (I tried to do at least three Twitter searches for each team to maximize my data set size.) The raw data used in this post can be found at AFLTweets.xls. After that was done, I went through the location field and determined the city, state, country for everyone who had listed a location. I then chose a few teams, added up how many references by city and created the map below. With the particular tool I’m using, I can only add about 7 or 8 teams before I can’t add more. The teams in this sample include: Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Lions, Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies, Geelong Cats, and St. Kilda Saints.

View full map

Things that strike me as interesting: No one from the Northern Territories and only one person from Tasmania and the ACT tweeted about the AFL. Is this because they have less internet access, fewer people, use social networks other than Twitter, or aren’t interested in AFL and these particular clubs? Western Australia also had tiny representation here with the max people per team from the city being one. The state has two teams but fans of the league in the state weren’t mentioning any of the competition. What also strikes me as interesting is that interest in the AFL in Queensland only goes as far north as Maroochydore. Beyond that, nothing. Brisbane suburbs are also largely absent. I should finish the rest of the teams and see if I can’t get a bigger data set to see if that effects the results at all.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• Popular sport team and league sites in Australia
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.

I love visualizing data.  It can make things so much easier to understand.  If you haven’t heard, there is going to be a new AFL team called Greater Western Sydney or Team GWS.  There are a number of Facebook fanpages and groups dedicated to the team.  I went to http://www.facebook.com/teamgws, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Greater-Western-Sydney/110850405598090, http://www.facebook.com/pages/GO-Team-GWS/201507074991 and http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=211851956941.  I created a list of everyone who belonged to those fan pages and groups and the networks that those members were part of.  I then counted the total members of each networks, identified the geographic location of each network, added the total number of people from a city together… and yay! I got the pretty map below.

View full map

People who know Australian geography better than me: Are the fans in New South Wales from western Sydney?

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• Most popular official team pages on Facebook
• AFL cheer squads

Harry O’Brien; Footballer, Collingwood Magpies
This was a presentation I enjoyed even as I boggled.  Part of me is an extremely cynical American who on the face of it took parts of his talk to be: I’m all about promoting myself above anything.  The other part of me found him very genuine and thinking he probably did a lot of good work, promoted a lot of worthy causes and didn’t flaunt his efforts to make those charities about himself.  There was a RMIT journalism student sitting at my table who was a huge fan of O’Brien.  He asked O’Brien for his autograph and O’Brien was really nice about it.  If you get the chance to hear O’Brien speak on this topic, it is worth it.  He was asked to speak about social media from the athlete perspective.

• Denying social media is denying the multitude. Social media is a vehicle for sharing the message that you want to share.
• Why should athletes use social media? To share the message that you have. Harry was asked by Web Guru to contribute to the Collingwood site. This developed into his website, Harry’s World.
• Social media can effect positive change.
• If social media is good enough for Barack Obama and Julia Gillard, then it is good enough for him.
• Harry did his first interview in December 2004 after he was drafted. He used the interview with The Age to share is ideas and beliefs. He stands for sharing hope through positivity.
• Players complained to him about their privacy being violated. He thinks fans just want insight, glimpses into his life in a controlled manner.
• People started uploading pictures of him all over Facebook. He ran out of friends. He was overwhelemed. Then he moved to Twitter. He now loves Twitter. Then he started his own website, which was his dream: Having people here what he has to say.
• Social media is unfiltered. It gives you the essence of a person. He’ll always have insight into the Collingwood Football Club. He can share pictures, videos and eventually merchandise.
• People want Harry to speak! Social media allows him to share his message.
• Harry O’Brien doesn’t really follow sport stars on Twitter, but is aware of what they are doing. He has his own style and doew what he feels is right based on guidelines and a path.
• People are made u of energy. Science has proven it.
• Some one dated $50,000 to one of his charities after hearing about his work. He uses social media but he is not always aware of the real world impact of it.
• Harry O’Brien doesn’t care about other players ranting about service they get. O’Brien studied sociology. Just because you’re a sport person and society values that, it doesn’t mean you should be treated special. You should be proactive, not negatively complaining about bad service.
• O’Brien says football is his profession. Football is like the bait, so he can share his message. His football comments are so general that the club doesn’t have a problem with his activities. If the club wanted to use him more for inspiration, good luck to them as motivation should come from with in.

And that’s it. Those are all the presentations.

Related Posts:

• Melbourne Victory on blogger
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• An interview with Georgie Herbert from the Melbourne Victory
• Canberra Raiders data

I’m not writing this up as a particularly long post, although I could. I was curious as to the impact that Julia Gillard had on the Western Bulldogs. Her name had been linked with them a lot the day of and after she became Prime Minister. I have a paper that I’m trying to figure out what to do with that shows that Jason Akermanis’s comments regarding how gays should stay in the AFL closet didn’t hurt his team. (Though it could have hurt him. That’s a different story.) The US media also made a big deal of Obama being a White Sox fan and there is some evidence to suggest that his presidency helped the team.

The ways I wanted to determine this were to measure the Alexa traffic for the Western Bulldogs site, the number of followers for Bulldogs related accounts on Twitter, the number of fans for the official page and unofficial fan pages on Facebook, the number of and membership increase for fan pages that mention both Julia Gillard and the Western Bulldogs, possibly demographic differences between the Gillard groups and Buldogs only fanpages, the number of mentions for the Western Bulldogs on bebo, the number of people listing the team as an interest on LiveJournal and its clones, the number of pages mentioning Julia Gillard and the Western Bulldogs on google.com.au, and the number and geographic location of edits to the Western Bulldogs article on Wikipedia.

Some of this data on its own might suggest that Julia Gillard hurt the Bulldogs.  Heck, that was my initial assessment.  One of the Western Bulldogs fan pages on Facebook lost 30 people, an anti-Akermanis group lost two people, a pro-Akermanis group lost two people, the Twitter growth was almost non-existent despite Tweets mentioning Gillard, and the Western Bulldog’s site rank on Alexa for Australia fell almost 2,000 places between the 25th and 26th.  Toss in the fact that the Gillard created communities on Facebook were fewer and had much less growth than the anti-Akermanis over the same period.   All of these appear to be really good indicators that Gillard’s effect on the team online was not a great one.

I really want to draw that conclusion.  I almost think I could make a really strong argument that this is exactly the case.  The problem involves putting this into the context of the rest of the AFL.  The Brisbane Lions don’t appear to have an official Facebook fan page but one of their biggest ones lost 30 members the day after the Bulldogs lost 30 members.  Between June 22 and June 26, only one AFL team hasn’t had their Alexa traffic rank for Australia rise; that is the Melbourne Demons.  For that period, three teams saw a rank drop of over 1,000.  Twitter follow gains are about even for all teams.  Official Facebook fan page growth is also pretty close.  In that context, it is hard to say that Julia Gillard had much impact at all.  In fact, for the Alexa data, the big drop could probably be attributed to the fact that they only had half the teams playing a game for this weekend and the weekend before that.  The impact of Gillard on the growth of the Western Bulldogs just probably isn’t there.

In the wider context, no effect.  In a limited context of the team she barracks for, possible effect.  Which conclusion is the right one?

Related Posts:

• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Australian Hockey League on everything
• New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom

This post is basically an update of Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers. I haven’t actively sought to improve or update the accounts included on this list though there are a few new accounts.  A few accounts have been deleted and one has been suspended, LanceFranklin. Deleted and suspended accounts have been marked with a 0 for total number of followers.

This data was gathered on May 30, 2010.  It includes non-Australian teams that compete in Australian based leagues.  It also contains Australian some athlete accounts where the athlete competes for a club in an Australian based league.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers
• Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs

I’ve been data collecting again. In this case, I was updating my Facebook group and fan pages member totals. Eventually, this will all be written up and include an analysis of some patterns that exist. In the meantime, I feel the need to share of this data as the results… surprised me.  I was curious as to which Australian team had the most popular official Facebook page.  Bearing in mind that outside the AFL and NRL, my inclusion list is limited and that not every team has an official page… This list should not be considered all comprehensive.  Still, it gives a fairly good idea of what may be going on Facebook:

Related Posts:

• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs

This isn’t much of a follow up. I was out walking after having read a few chapters in The Australian football business : a spectator’s guide to the VFL / Bob Stewart and I began wondering if there were some geographic pattens in who was condemning Jason Akermanis on Facebook, where condemning equals joining a group or liking a fan page that criticized his comment.

There were two real options to create comparisons: Get information from a few of the smaller groups with 10 or fewer members and declare them representative of each position or find a larger sample and get the network affiliation for all members of the larger group. I decided on the second. Jason Akermanis is a homophobe. is a Facebook group that has gained 281 members since May 20 for a total of 427 members. It appears to have been created directly in response to Jason’s comments and could be seen as condemning them. When scrolling through the membership list, I found 24 people who listed a network they belonged to. We’ll call this the dislike Jason group. As a control group of people who “like” Jason, I chose The Jason Akermanis Appreciation Society. It had 457 members on May 22, up only three from May 20. 24 people in this group also had a network listed. This group should be his fanbase. Their lack of quitting should not be read as supporting his comments: Non-action does not imply support. I’m mostly after the idea of are these two separate groups similar based on location. The following table was generated after tabulating how many people from each group listed specific networks:

The simple answer appears to be yes, there is a difference between the two. Fans of Jason appear to be more evenly distributed across various networks. Of the high schools and colleges I could easily identify, 3 were in the dislike Jason group and 7 were in the like Jason group. 18 university students joined the anti-group versus 13 in the like group. (These numbers are probably off. I’m not completely familiar with all the schools involved so some were not counted.) This suggests that university students were more likely to condemned the comments compared to high school students… or at least, university students were more willing to indicate their displeasure on a public profile. That is a bit interesting. It would be nice to have a Facebook data miner so I could see if larger patterns like this existed.

Related Posts:

• Most popular official team pages on Facebook
• Benchmarking: Jason Akermanis on Facebook and Google
• AFL fandom growth on Facebook: Which team is the winner?
• AFL on Facebook

This weekend, the Melbourne Demons are playing the Port Adelaide Power in Darwin.  This game is one of two AFL games being held in Darwin this season.  I’m rather keen on geographic patterns in fan communities.  Where are they located?  How many people are there?  What is the size and interest level in a particular place?  Given that there isn’t an AFL team based in Darwin and the nearest team is team is over 3,000 kms (1,800+miles), it would be hard to figure out what team allegiances would be based on.  (The Canberra game with the Swans had a large number of people who barracked for the Sydney based team.  Canberra’s distance from Sydney and the Swans support of AFL Canberra are probably the major reasons for that.)  I wanted to explore what those loyalties would be in the Northern Territory to the exclusion of other states.

There really is no good way about getting numbers for the Northern Territory with out picking up everyone else across the country.  And even when that isn’t the case, people frequently will list themselves as residing or belonging to the next biggest city even if they don’t reside there.  This is highly problematic when you’re looking to see if there are pockets of team support in the suburbs and rural areas where city affiliation is more important when dealing with a wider, more international audience that may not have heard of Freemantle but may have heard of Perth, or who may not have heard of Geelong but do know where Sydney is.  There are ways to tease those patterns out by removing the major cities, like Melbourne, where the core is very tiny.  And I’m digressing because even when you can do that, it is rather hard to still just get data off major networks about a person’s interest by city, while excluding other states.  I can’t do that on Facebook, LiveJournal and its clones, bebo, blogger, orkut, 43things, LinkedIn, Twitter, care2… the list goes on and on.  There is no easy solution other than getting everyone and then, after the data is collected, filtering it down by state.

While I have a lot of data of that sort already, not many people live in the Northern Territory.  (For the Adelaide Crows, across six networks and with 75 fans, only one is from the Northern Territory.)  It is really hard to get regional patterns inside the Northern Territories.  My solution to try to figure this out was go to Google.com.au, put in the team’s name and the city.  (I got the list of cities I used from a list of postal codes for the Northern Territory on Wikipedia. I was logged out of my Google account.  I did not use the API.) My list of cities was 114 long after I removed cities with multiple postal codes.  City names, when they included more than one word, were put in quotes.  Team names were put in quotes.  An example search with that would be “Melbourne Demons” “Alice Springs”.

This is all fine and dandy.  You can easily repeat the results.  You should be able to get regional patterns on a large scale that you can’t get with maps.google.com.au or video.google.com.au or bebo. Everything theoretically should work to get a some one accurate picture of the interest level by city in the Northern Territory for both teams.  Except, well, no.  Midstream, methodology begins to change.  Things I had not necessarily thought of come in to play.  First, there are duplicate city names.  This is an issue for Palmerston, which is a city in New Zealand, a city in the Northern Territory and a suburb in the Australian Capital Territory.  Second, some cities have common names or share names with people.  This is the case for Gray, Northern Territory.  It is the case for another city that shares a name of a player for a different AFL team.  This issue might be correctable by adding a “Northern Territory” or an NT to the search phrase.  I did this for Palmerston.  I just didn’t do it consistently because Google did not always realize NT meant “Northern Territory” and there were three wildly different search results in some cases.  It becomes just easier to ignore and accept that search results are going to be faulty.  The third major issue was Google spelling.  This issue can be less obvious unless you actually look at the results.  Moil is a city in the Northern Territory.  Google helpfully wanted correct my spelling by pulling up results featuring the word Mobile.  Moil and Mobile are not the same thing.  Karama and Karma are also not the same thing.  Google, if you don’t specifically tell it that these are not the same thing, treats them as if they are.  When I found this, I did correct the results number by putting a + in front of it to force Google to only pull up results with that exactly spelling.  Outside those two examples, I did this for Katherine, Elliott, Farrar, Gray, Gunn, Malak, Millner, Mitchell, The Gardens, and The Narrows. This helped insure slightly more relevance and didn’t create the problems of what is the preferential way to indicate that a city is in the Northern Territory.

The methodology problems out of the way, it is time for the results.  I couldn’t get a good visualization tool.  (The ones I tend to use aren’t really good with the Northern Territory.  I’ll find a fix for that in the future.)  Therefor, the easiest way to see the results is to download the xls file or the csv file.  The results, to me with out the aid of a map, are pretty boring when compared to methodology but still interesting.  On the whole, it looks like there is more interest in the Melbourne Demons than there is in the Port Adelaide Power.  If I give each team a point if they are more popular in a particular city, the Demons easily win the day with 93 to the Power’s 15 and with six cities being tied.  If I add up all the search results (each city gets added.  This number has little relationship to the total pages in the Northern Territory because many pages reference both teams or multiple cities in the Northern Territory), the Demons also win with 114,368 total pages compared to the Power’s 64,191.  The ratio to cities and total pages is not particularly close.  The Power are more popular in 13% of cities and represent 35% of total pages.

The top city for Port Adelaide Power is represented by the following search: “Port Adelaide Power” Driver NT.  Driver is a popular common word so it is highly probable that this is not accurate, even with the attempt to correct for the Northern Territory by adding NT to the search.  The next city that “prefers” the Power based on total search results is Parap, with 839 results.  For the Melbourne Demons, “Melbourne Demons” +Mitchell is the top city.  That’s another problematic place as this is a common surname.  The next most popular city based on total search results for the Melbourne Demons is Yuendumu with 12,200 page results.   What is interesting here is that Darwin and Alice Springs do not appear at the top of the list, even when we exclude Driver and Mitchell.  When the Demons and Power lists are combined and sorted descending by pages per city, Darwin doesn’t appear until the 12th spot for the Demons and 18th sport for the Power.  Alice Spring doesn’t appear until 32 for the Demons and 39th position for the Power.  The biggest population bases in the territory are not generating the most references for either teams.

I’m not entirely certain why “big” cities don’t rank higher.  Are all the cities ahead of them problematic with their names where steps were not taken to correct for that?  Or is it possible that more rural fans are reliant on the Internet to express their fannishness for a team?  Are there players from these rural communities playing in the AFL so local news sources give additional attention to players that they would not get in more urban areas?  It is possible.  The real reason is probably rather complex.

So if you’re going to the game in Darwin this weekend, you probably see more people barracking for the Demons.

Notes:

1. I could theoretically get data from Facebook’s advertiser page for the number of people who list an interest and live with in a certain distance of a city.  There are just a few limitations.  First, not every location in the Northern Territory is listed.  Second, since Facebook forced users to like their interests, things have been in a state of flux and I’ve found zeros where there should not be zeros based on the number of people who like a fan page that Facebook uses and its default for a search of that interest.

2.  There are other ways I might have gone about doing this besides Google, including searching local newspapers for references to a team.  There are just limitations there in that not every location has its own newspaper and it excludes a lot of fan created references on sites likes bebo and blogger where the audience may be different than the ones that newspapers market to.  I might also have tried a geolocation based search.  I just haven’t found a good one yet that is based in Australia.  And even the ones I have seen tend to focus on Twitter and Foursquare.  AFL fandom is located more than just there.

3.  The methodology problems are a recurring problem when doing any sort of social media or web based research with the intent to create data sets.  It is why I’m generally deeply skeptical of any numbers I see unless some one clearly states their methodology, explains the problems and provides their data to give benchmarks.  This methodology issue also probably explains why much of the research done in regards to social media involves case studies and qualitative style research: The data is just so problematic to attain.

Edited to add: Visualization of this data. It isn’t perfect. There are a number of erroneous data points. (Anything outside of the Northern Territory is incorrectly placed on the map.) That said, it begins to give an idea of these patterns going on… though looking at the map, I don’t really see what I would consider overwhelming patterns. One of the islands is all Melbourne Demons. I had some data for about 15 cities for the North Melbourne Kangaroos that I overlaid to give this a bit more perspective. At some point, I should do every city in the Northern Territory, corrected as much as possible for the problems discussed above, with every team on the map.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular official team pages on Facebook

This is a quick data dump post.  I know who Jason Akermanis is because I saw him play this past weekend in Canberra.  I’ve been told he has a tendency to open his mouth and speak frankly in such a way that his previous club didn’t like him.  Thus, it was apparently not that surprising that he opened his mouth and offended people today.  I may or may not be interested in writing about him and the response to his comments at a later date.  It will come down to time and interest.  Still, benchmarks in case I do and data dumping now for those who might want to write an analysis that I’m not keen to write right now.

Google data

This data was retrieved between 6pm and 7pm on May 20, 2010 Canberra time.   It was retrieved using manual screen scraping.  (I visited each page and copy and pasted the number.)  I was not logged in to any account at the time to prevent my previous searches from influencing the numbers.  The API was not used.  The SE stands for search engine that was used to get the number.  (There are sometimes differences between .com and .com.au.) The Jason story is beginning to circulate but doesn’t appear to be widely picked up outside the metro areas so far. I added a by city component because I find geographic patterns interesting.

Facebook

Before I did Google, I looked at Facebook.  This was done between 5:30 and 6:00pm Canberra time on May 20, 2010.  The Jason situation had already hit Facebook as there was a Facebook group dedicated to being unhappy with Jason by that time.  I found these fan pages by searching for him.  I did not include people or groups in this sample.  None of these pages appear to be officially connected to either the AFL, the Western Bulldogs or Jason Akermanis.

I’m going to speculate that two of those are likely to see an increase in membership over the next couple of days.  How large an increase, I do not yet know and do not feel comfortable speculating about.

After that, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to benchmark the Facebook groups. These can be easy to create. When I looked, there turned out to be a number of them dedicated to Jason, some of which were created in response to the situation. As I have no previous benchmarks, I can’t tell when some of the larger groups were created. Still, this is where the groups about Jason stand now.

Related Posts:

• Most popular official team pages on Facebook
• AFL fandom growth on Facebook: Which team is the winner?
• AFL on Facebook
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom

I recently read a chapter in Fanfare: spectator culture and Australian rules football / edited by Matthew Nicholson about the history of AFL cheer squads.  When I had visited Australia in July, an Australian acquaintance explained to me the importance of cheer squads and talked a little bit about what they did.  The banners they do are really impressive and as an outsider, the organization do to something like that seemed pretty complex.  How do you organize the fans?  How do they all know where to sit and how do they make sure to get tickets to sit in those sections?  How much of that is done online?

My assumption was that a fair amount of the organization would have to be done online and that the organization online could be a key component for keeping a highly mobilized to participate fan base even more mobilized.  I mostly used a little Google-fu and some searching on Facebook.  What I’ve learned is that the team cheer squads information appears to be hosted on the official pages for the corresponding club.  The level of information provided is slightly different but most have contact information for an organizer.  The cheer squad pages don’t appear to have a separate Twitter accounts or Facebook fanpages or mailing lists.  In some cases, fan pages or groups on Facebook have been created.  These fan pages and groups tend to have extremely limited membership and at least one was for a single season.  If there is a separate effort for members to create their own outreach, it isn’t obvious.

I really need to spend some more time looking at this and to check other networks to see if something exists.  I’ve been through bebo a lot and don’t recall having seen anything there.  I also haven’t seen anything on Twitter… maybe old school fansites?  Anyone have any better information or a history of cheer squads online?

Related Posts:

• Popularity of Australian sports leagues across various social networks
• Melbourne Victory on blogger
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• AFL fan community sentiment: Are fans happy or sad?

I’m a little obsessed with foursquare data at the moment and I’m doing this a little early.  I’ll probably update this on Tuesday with a new post after the St. Kilda Monday night match.  At the moment though, based on the two completed games so far this week and last week, this post answers what team has the largest community of Foursquare users.  The surprise is how Collingwood hasn’t run away with this.