Ozzie Sport

Yay! It is over. This is the final total. Rankings changed through out the tournament. For the two sites, there were audiences I’d like to call distinct. The data when examined in total suggests that different fan communities inside a wider community of football fans use geolocation services differently. As previously mentioned, this may be useful for people involved with the Rugby World Cup in 2011. I should also see about getting some of my AFL and NRL data out… but that’s not as on point.

The winner of the World Cup was not the winner for average checkins per game they played. English speaking countries didn’t dominate at the top of the ladder. You didn’t need to be a team who made it through more than the first round to crack the leaderboard’s top 10, though it certainly helped. The home team didn’t necessarily hold a major advantage.

Foursquare

Gowalla

Related Posts:

• World Cup, through quarter finals: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, end of the second round: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, end of the first round: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals

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

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

Onwards with the results…

Foursquare

Gowalla

Related Posts:

• World Cup, end of the second round: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, end of the first round: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Gowalla checkin totals

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

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

Foursquare

Gowalla

Foursquare Checkin Losses

Related Posts:

• World Cup, end of the second round: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, end of the first round: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Gowalla checkin totals

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

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

Anyway, on with the data…

Foursquare

Gowalla

Related Posts:

• World Cup, end of the first round: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals

One of the challenges of social media metrics is identifying what numbers matter, how to get those numbers ,  how to organize that data in a way that facilitates quickly getting the data and making it useful, and making sure your data set is complete.  The latter can be problematic as people can always create new communities, groups, hashtags, accounts, etc. If you don’t organize your data in a useful way and regularly update it, you can create such a huge mess as to make your data almost unusable.

This is a problem I’ve run into with my AFL and NRL Foursquare data.  When I first started gathering this data in late April, I spent a day or two looking for all the venues.  Slightly problematic issue arose in that not all venues had been created.  I never went back to regularly check to see if these venues had been created.  What this means is that my NRL data has several huge holes in it, because venues don’t exist or the venue that does exist was not the more popular of the ones created.

Another problem was the data was not collected in a way that I found entirely logical when I revisited it to try to create a table to show the average number of checkins at home and away matches for the NRL.  (I wanted to do the NRL first, before I tackled the AFL because I’m focusing on the AFL and trial and erroring on the NRL seemed wiser.)  I gathered the total checkins and unique visitors every Thursday through Monday night for all venues that played NRL and AFL games that I had identified.  In hindsight, this wasn’t the best way to go about this.  I should have identified everything by games being played as it would have made processing the data much, much easier and I wouldn’t have as much “garbage” data that I have to wade through.  I’ve spent most of the morning correcting this mistake by identifying games and venue locations so I can more easily and efficiently track total checkins for AFL games and some NRL games.  (Later, I can try to do this when the A-League, W-League and NBL start up.)

Looking through existing Foursquare data though, I really don’t know if I will want to process it.  I’d almost rather go through the last quarter of the season, where I know I have a complete data set than try to piece together the data dating back to late April.  I probably won’t do that but I’ll likely have to figure out what to do.  It isn’t pretty and I’m really kicking myself for what could have been a lot of time wasted each data gathering data that I can’t use.

My gowalla data faces similar issues.  The big difference there is I’ve always known I haven’t had a complete data set and it was through processing World Cup data on Gowalla that I realized my collection issues with Foursquare data collection.  I’d love to use Gowalla for AFL/NRL analysis but it isn’t going to happen.  I mean, it really isn’t going to happen, especially as Foursquare is the bigger priority as it has greater penetration in Australia and I never had a complete venue list for Gowalla.

Related Posts:

• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders
• Notes on AFL/NRL foursquare sporting venues in Australia
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)

The first round has ended and we’ve now a fair amount of data for Foursquare and Gowalla. This can be used to try to figure out which fans were most likely to checkin. The top of the table surprised me a bit with who was there and who wasn’t there. The bottom of the table was also a bit surprising. I rather thought that there would be fewer English speaking countries near the bottom and that the Asian and African sides would be over represented. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

Foursquare

Gowalla

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals

On Foursquare, there were changes near the top and near the bottom of the ladder.  Yesterday featured one swarm badge, which was the same as the day before and the day before that. It will be interesting to see how teams progress into the second and third games. After the first round, will totals probably matter more than averages? What audience is seeing second round games?

Foursquare

Gowalla
Gowalla doesn’t have the checkin strength of Foursquare. A big game on it doesn’t even get to the low count for foursquare and a lot of games have 0s. The ladder is also pretty much completely different.

How different are these two tables? Teams were ranked based on total average checkins. The difference was then calculated and 12 teams had positions that differed by 10 or more places with only two teams sharing the same position.

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 5: Foursquare checkin totals

The second round seems to have a lot fewer checkins than the first.  Examples?  South Africa and Mexico’s first game had 335 checkins.  South Afraica’s second game had 36.  Mexico’s second game had 14 checkins. Nigeria’s first game had 203 checkins.  The second game had 19.  What exactly is going on?  Can anyone explain why there are no second round swarm badges?  Is there a different audience attending these games that is less likely to use Foursquare?

Table is sorted by average checkins as that seems to better reflect what is going on. There are a number of changes from yesterday in ranking.

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 5: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 4: Foursquare checkin totals

We’ve got two games for two teams and the rankings have begun to change. As this World Cup goes on, it looks like fewer people are checking in…

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 5: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 4: Foursquare checkin totals

This is an update for matches played on June 15.  No new games with 100+ checkins.

Related Posts:

• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals
• World Cup, day 4: Foursquare checkin totals