Ozzie Sport

I’m trying to improve my list of sporting events on Foursquare as the NRL, AFL, Super Rugby and ANZ Championship leagues all get started this very shortly. The winter season appears to have fewer women’s sports taking place so I really want to make sure that I have a good list. Any help improving this list would be fantastic.

Why am I interested in Foursquare? Because the audience that uses Foursquare tends to be very engaged in social media. It seems to be that if there is a very engaged audience, it is good for netball as it means that the community is self propagating and isn’t limiting itself to a narrow community. It suggests that teams like the Melbourne Vixens, who have an official Foursquare account, are smart to market online in order to reach their audience. Checkins to different event types can help to explain who is using Foursquare in the netball community. (Are fans checking into games? Are referees checking into to training sessions? Are players checking into carnivals?) The type of person checking in can help people in the netball community can help stakeholders develop strategies to best engage in outreach.

I’ve tracked a few netball related events already. The table below includes total checkins to these events on Foursquare.

None of these are particularly major events. Thus, checkin totals being small is not surprising. (And is anyone surprised that people aren’t checking into umpire training?) What I’m more interested in is how the ANZ Championship performs, especially when compared to the WNBL and W-League. I’d also like to see how netball clubs do when the local seasons actually start. The following list includes the events I will be tracking:

Is there anything missing? I know a lot of things are missing. I can find pages like Netball New South Wales’s list of carnivals. The problem with lists like these is they often don’t tell you the location. This was a huge problem when I was looking for where the Silver Ferns were playing: I couldn’t find the facility. (And ticket buying integration was awful. They wanted to sell packages but didn’t link them to games.) (Not a problem just for netball. I had this problem with Australian hockey.) Beyond that, when location is known, it is hard to determine what the location is on Foursquare. I was trying to find North Turramurra so I could try to add some of the events on North Turramurra’s website and just major fail. Meep.

If you love netball, any help by improving this list would be fantastic. Long term, it would be great to be able to add netball to a map like this. Thanks!

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) netball related Twitter accounts (January 20)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

One of the problems trying to visualize Foursquare data is if you have zero checkins for an event, it is the same as not having recorded any data for the event.  So you have a better idea of what is being visualized and what events are not included, the raw data set for events is available at http://csv.ozziesport.com/Foursquare%20List.xls .  (I had over 500 locations.  Of those, I think fewer than 150 had a checkin.) My location to latitude/longitude program wanted to put some Perth locations in the middle of Western Australia.  Whoops!  Foursquare checkins are grouped by sport.  Thus, the WNBL and NBL are grouped together, and the W-League and A-League are grouped together.  If I had more data points, this would probably be a bit more interesting.  Another thing to consider: Sometimes there are 3 different foursquare listings for the same location and each one gets treated differently.

I’m missing data between February 4 and February 7.  Luckily for today, I didn’t actually have any sport events.  We’ll see how this looks long term as more events get added, as cricket season ends and the AFL gets going.

View full map

Related Posts:

• Foursquare and the US Open
• Foursquare Stadium Checkins for 2 September 2011
• Australia sport on Foursquare: Historical data
• Australian and New Zealand sport relationships on Twitter

Missed last week! Ooops! My bad.

Related Posts:

• Australian sport Foursquare checkins: December 15 – 19: A-League tops
• Australian and New Zealand sport relationships on Twitter
• Australian sport on ebay
• Australian sport Foursquare checkins: December 27 – January 2: A-League leads

I don’t fully understand how the tennis down here is organized but this how some of the Foursquare checkins for tennis related events have played out.  They’ve done pretty well for the major events, better than I actually expected.

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Foursquare at the Rugby World Cup
• Foursquare and the US Open

One of the end goals that I have is to do a post like this on a daily basis… (It needs to be automated. By hand, even with the data mined, it took about an hour to compile as I had to line up the accounts, get daily growth, combine by league and federation.) The goal is to track daily momentum for each league when compared to each other. This is probably a few months off. This is done by:

1. Counting only leagues and federations that appeared on at least three sites that I collect from: Alexa with an Australian ranking, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. If a field is blank, it means that there was no data available for that category for whatever reason. If there is a zero, it means there was no change.
2. Alexa data includes only sites with an Australian rank. It compares the difference in rank between January 6 and January 7 for all teams in that league. If there were multiple sites for a league, the differences were totaled.
3. Facebook data includes all accounts affiliated with that league. The difference between followers on January 4 and January 5 was calculated for each account. These differences were then added together.
4. Foursquare data is for the period between December 31 and January 6. The count is for total checkins related to that league. A week was chosen to make sure that leagues that had games in this period were actually included.
5. Twitter data includes all accounts affiliated with that league. The difference between followers on January 6 and January 7 was calculated for each account. These differences were then added together.

The date used in this analysis can be found at Daily Ranking – January 7.xls.

Australian sport leagues: Movers and shakers: NRL, Cricket Australia, A-League

If people are interested in seeing this kind of data again, please let me know. For some leagues such as the AFL, NRL and A-League, I may have enough data to actually compare between teams. The problem with doing teams is that Alexa rankings inside Australia become a problem as a lot of teams just don’t rank. In the case of the W-League, they often share their websites with their A-League counterparts so it makes them impossible to track. For others, I have to have Foursquare data and these teams don’t play on a daily basis… and I just might not have events in their league covered.

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I’ve been looking at Australian sport related checkins. I’ve started looking Australian political checkins. I’ve also been looking at TAB Sport Bet related checkins at a few locations. I don’t think my list of TAB lists is all that comprehensive… because I don’t think a lot of TAB locations are on Foursquare. People don’t appear to checkin to TABs like they might and do checkin to Coles, Subway or universities. I had speculated that major events like the Boxing Day Test may have inspired people to come in at greater numbers, bet and checkin. If that’s the case, it doesn’t match with the data.