Ozzie Sport

This list is far from complete. It is a beginning attempt on my part to really start to work on it. I’m hoping the labels regarding official/unofficial pages are accurate but they are worth double checking just to be sure. If you know of any fanpages or groups I should be watching that aren’t on this list, comment to let me know.

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ecademy is a small social network for business professionals that is an alternative to LinkedIn. It has a small number of people connected to Australian sport. In using and evaluating ecademy, it should be looked at from the perspective of using it liked in: Developing a network of employees, volunteers and athletes who can help network with other professionals to bring in an audience of potential sponsors and higher income bracket fans.

Given the nature of ecademy, the total number of people who have clubs listed in their profiles should not be gauged as a representation of fandom on the network. Rather, it should be looked at as industry professionals who want to be affiliated with the club or league.

One of the challenges involved with measuring membership on ecademy is that team sport names may not be the name of organization that runs the club or league. This could possibly exclude some people actually connected to them. For example, in the W-League, most teams are run by the state football associations, not by a specific organization with the club’s name in the title.

The table below gives an idea as to the historical size of the Australian and Kiwi women’s sport community on the network.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• 43 Things and Australian women’s sport
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Bebo is a social networking site that is popular in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The site’s traffic has been down in the past year or so. It traditionally has has a fairly large contingent of Australian sport fans, with most people being fans of the NRL. It has a smaller population of fans for other sports like the AFL and NBL. There were questions regarding bebo’s viability for most of 2010, when there were rumors that the site would be shut down if it failed to find a buyer. This and a variety of other factors, such as the popularity of Facebook and YouTube, have led to a lot of once active users becoming inactive.
Despite the issues regarding inactivity, it is a site worth looking at to begin to give a snapshot of sorts back in time, to understand the size of Australian and Kiwi women’s sport fandom four years ago to a year ago, when activity levels dropped off. It might be possible to determine where these fans migrated to by looking at growth on other niche networks, which could be useful for determining engagement strategies. This data can also give an idea as to what was popular. If the comparative levels of interest on other networks are not similar, it could suggest that clubs have failed with their marketing strategies or have found a method to really engage in their audience that other clubs could benefit from.

When looking at bebo, there are a variety of ways to do that. One of the first is to use search result totals, and compare the size of the community to other teams and over time. The second way is to look at the size groups/views for videos. The third way is to look at the demographic data for people who lit the team as an interest. This will be broken down by league/federation.

Search: ANZ Championship
The ANZ Championship is the most successful women’s (semi) professional league in Australia.  It makes sense that the team would have the largest amount of interest on bebo.  While this is true,  the community size, the number of groups and videos created by these fans is still extremely limited.  (Their counterparts in the AFL often have 200 to 400 people who list them as an interest.)

Search: AWIHL
This is a niche league, where the men’s team also fail to have people who list them as an interest. If there is an ice hockey fan base in Australia, it is not on bebo.

W-League
Somewhat surprisingly, the W-League fanbase on bebo appears to be a bit larger than that of the ANZ Championship. One possible factor for this could be that the overall fan community for soccer is really large on bebo. Another contributing factor could be that the Canberra United attract male fans to the sport that a W-League team may not otherwise get because the United do not have to compete with an A-League club in their city: If you love soccer in Canberra, you support the top level competitions here. Bebo also has a community of people who uploaded videos. Soccer videos are really popular across the whole of the network. Given that, W-League fans may be part of a larger part of video uploading culture that ANZ Championship fans are removed from.

One issue at play with W-League results is that Canberra United content is easier to pull out than the Melbourne Victory, because secondary keywords are needed to differentiate Melbourne Victory W-League results from A-League results. This means that real numbers for the W-League teams could be understated. Similar issues of a sort exist for the W-League, which shares a name with an American women’s soccer competition. This could lead to an over representation when just that term is counted.

WNBL
The WNBL is the premiere women’s basketball competition in Australia. Unlike the NBL, it does not include a New Zealand team. The problem with one of the teams looked at, the West Coast Waves, is that the name is a rather common phrase and almost none of the video results look relevant to the WNBL team. This type of issue can be a huge problem for women’s (and men) sport when doing promotion and reputation management for the club’s brand beyond the players.

WNCL

The WNCL teams being looked at do not share the name issues that their WNBL counterparts share. Unfortunately, they may suffer a problem with not all results being shown as they often have names with sponsors in them. Official and player content may pull up sponsor named related names. The average fan is less likely to use them as fannish identities are not based around who sponsors them.

Search: Women’s World Cup Soccer
The Matildas are Australia’s national women soccer team. As the W-League is larger than the ANZ Championship, it is not surprising that there is a comparable elevated amount of interest in the team.

Videos: W-League
Only the W-League Canberra United team were checked. Some of the videos for the team had quite a number of views. bebo’s stagnation is quite clear when looking at this data as the number of views for all videos failed to increase between June 3 and November 26.

People: ANZ Championship
The table below includes the demographic data for people who listed ANZ Championship teams as interests on bebo. This data tends to confirm that teams have local interest and don’t have national fan bases.

People: Basketball Australia
The Australian Opals have a similar issue with a few other Australian sport teams: People could use these words but not mean the team. This makes a bit of sense, given that one of the people who list the Opals as an interest is not from Australia.

People: W-League
Some what surprisingly, the people who list a location are not from Canberra. A possible explanation for this is that Sydney bebo users are friends or family of players, who themselves may not be from Canberra.

People: WNBL
Like the ANZ Championship, most fans are from areas near where the team is based. Fans also tend to be young and there is an even mix of male and female fans, which suggests that the WNBL could grow by working to attract that male audience in communities under served by NBL teams.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
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I’m playing with Microsoft MapPoint. It is pretty awesome, except for the fact that some smaller cities don’t register. Anyway, I finished compiling the location of all fans of ANZ Champship teams on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones. Interest in this particular competition is small compared to the NRL, AFL and A-League. For a few people, fans didn’t list a city which makes getting an accurate idea of where fans are difficult. Two cities didn’t appear as they were really, really rural so they were excluded. I took this data and the output was the following map.

The map has that limited perspective because there were no Queensland based fans. That includes people who just listed state, not city. The same situation existed for Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and Northern Territory.

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• ANZ Championship on Facebook’s fanpages and groups
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I’ve spent the past two hours or so culling through various netball related Twitter lists, checking lists that included ANZ Championship teams and players.  After having done that, it looks like five teams have a Twitter presence:  Adelaide Thunderbirds, Melbourne Vixens, New South Wales Swifts, Queensland Firebirds, and West Coast Fever.  For the Thunderbirds, there are two accounts: @AdelaideTBirds and @NatTbirds.  The first is a team account and the second is the personal account of a player.  The Vixens similarly have two accounts, one for the team and a player with a personal account: @MelbourneVixens and @SharelleVixens.  The same situation exists for the New South Wales Swifts: @nswswifts and @SusanSwifts.  For the Queensland Firebirds and West Coast Fever, single players have accounts but the teams do not appear to have an official Twitter presence: @laurafirebirds and @SusanWCFever.

For the team accounts, the Thunderbirds have 62 followers, the Vixens have 904 followers and the Swifts have 90 followers.  This puts the average at 352 followers per team because the 904 skews the numbers really high.  If that is excluded, the average is 76.  For player accounts, the average number of followers is 208.8.  The highest number is 400, for the Vixens player.  The lowest is 66 for the West Coast Fever player.  These numbers are comparable to several of the A-League related Twitter accounts.

Using Twitter Analyzer, the location of the followers of these accounts was determined and the following table was generated:

ANZ Championship on Twitter

The West Coast Fever (represented by their Tweeting player) had the smallest Australian audience and the Melbourne Vixens had the largest percentage Australian audience.  I still believe these numbers are questionably reliable, that people are lying about their location of that there is a huge problem with spam followers on Twitter.  Why?  The Melbourne Vixens have 9 followers from Greenland.   Googling for Greenland and Netball doesn’t bring up any information about sport in the country.  Given that, it doesn’t make sense that the Vixens would have that huge of a following from the country.

If you’re interested in following ANZ Championship teams and players on Twitter, I’ve created a Twitter list @ozziesport/anzchampionship.

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

The ANZ Championship replaced the Commonwealth Bank Trophy as the premiere netball championship in 2008. There are ten teams in the competition, five from Australia and five from New Zealand.  They are:

• Adelaide Thunderbirds

• Melbourne Vixens

• New South Wales Swifts

• Queensland Firebirds

• West Coast Fever

• Canterbury Tactix

• Central Pulse

• Northern Mystics

• Southern Steel

• Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic

With the exception of the Melbourne Vixens, no one lists these teams as an interest on Facebook.  The New Zealand based teams also lack a fan base inside New Zealand’s Facebook community. The Melbourne Vixens have 840 people listing them as an interest on Facebook.  I’ve looked at some of the segmentation of this audience and generated the following data which can give you a better idea of the fanbase for this netball team that actually has a fanbase on Facebook, as determined by people listing them as an interest.

One of the things that surprised me in this little data set is that for fans aged 40 to 49, most of the fans are male.  I’m not sure why this is.  Female fans of the team also look to be overwhelming heterosexual.  For a female sports team, this does surprise me a bit as I would have thought that the percentage would have been a little higher.  The fanbase also appears to be a bit older: High school athletes do not appear as interested in the team, which suggests interest in the team may develop as fans get older and are less likely to participate in the sport themselves.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• ANZ Championship on Facebook’s fanpages and groups
• ANZ Championship fandom location on LiveJournal, bebo and blogger
• eBay.com.au and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport