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 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

I wanted to create a map of where people who were following Australian political candidates and/or tweeting about the Australian elections were living. I’ve been getting similar data for Australian sport teams and this feels like a natural extension. I’m not doing an analysis of this data and these maps because while I feel I know enough about Australian sport to draw conclusions, I don’t feel comfortable with Australian politics. If some one else wants to do that or use my raw data, please feel free.

Just as a caveat, this is a limited data set that was collected on the morning of July 19, 2010. I used a tool to mine this and the amount of data included was based on what that tool gave me.

Data Collection Methodology

1. Identify the major candidates in the Australian elections on Twitter (Tony Abbot, Bob Brown, Julia Gillard) and some of the more popular search phrases and hash tags used by Twitter users (#alp vote, #aus2010, #ausvotes, #laborfail, #myliberal, #nocleanfeed , #qanda, Abbott-Gillard, asylum boat, Gillard, Greens Canberra, Krudd Labor, Labor Liberals, Rudd Liberals, Tony Abbott, Truss LNP, Warren Truss, WorkChoices)
2. Go to http://www.searchtastic.com/ , run a search for those phrases and accounts. Export results to an Excel spread sheet. (Total tweets picked up: 27,506)
3. Create a new sheet. Copy and paste only those Tweets by people that list a location. (Total tweets included: 26,198)
4. Using location information from profiles, try to determine the city, state, country that the person lives in. Example: Melbourne = Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. ChiTown = Chicago, Illinois, United States. Brizzy = Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. 32.38504,-83.647406 = Perry, Georgia, United States. Oz = Australia.

View full map

Methodology: Gillard, Abbot, Brown, Truss

1. On Excel, turn AutoFilter on.
2. Filter the Tweet column to contain one of the following terms: Gillard, Abbot, Brown, Truss
3. Copy and paste the City, State, Country columns to a new worksheet. Select those columns on the new worksheet.
4. Sort data by city. Remove all locations that do not include City information.
5. Go to Advance Filter. Copy the Unique Records to Another Location.
6. Using a COUNTIF formula, count the number of tweets that mentioned the term by city.
7. Go to http://www.batchgeo.com/ and copy paste the city, state, column, count in the box for step 1. Click on the Map Now button.
8. When Geocoder is finished running, select the Show Geocode button, and copy and paste that data to an Excel worksheet. Save each politician’s tweet references on its own CSV file.
9. Go to http://finder.geocommons.com/ and import each csv file. Finish processing each file using latitude and longitude coordinates.

Go to http://maker.geocommons.com/ and create one map for all four politicians. Use visual theme, sizes.

Please note this map is based on total tweets by location. It is not total individuals who tweeted with the selected keyword.

View full map

Methodology: Labor, Liberals, Greens, National Party
This methodology is a repeat of the previous except the names of the politicians are replaced with the names of the parties.

View full map

Methodology: Education, Work Choices, Asylum
This methodology is a repeat of the previous except the keywords are: Education OR Schools, Work Choices OR WorkChoices, Immigrant OR Asylum, NTB or Broadband, Environment OR Global Warming, Health OR Doctor, Afghanistan OR Diggers.

Other: Follows
I’m planning on adding two maps to this post tomorrow. One shows the location of followers for Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard and Bob Brown. The other map will include location of tweets relating to certain issues.

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

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.

This is the third post in a series of creative research data dumps that relate to the Socceroos.

LinkedIn

LiveJournal and clones

This table looks at activity patterns for LJ comms…

MySpace

Age break down of some accounts’s friends…

Orkut

Twitter
Looking for growth information…

YouTube

Related Posts:

• Popularity of Australian sports leagues across various social networks
• Australian Hockey League on blogger, LiveJournal, and LiveJournal clones
• WNBL on LiveJournal and bebo
• AFL Canberra on LiveJournal clones

I apologize in advance.  This is a stream of conscious rant about various Twitter metrics and analysis that take part in social media.  It is a result of seeing one too many posts about meaning from metrics that I see as meaningless.   This may become a series where I explain problems with other metrics.

Ever see a social media person talk about measuring ROI on Twitter?  The focus tends to be on two major metrics: Total follower count and total retweets.  Whenever I see a consultant advocating the first as a meaningful metric, I want to tell the world that they should not hire that person.  Brand awareness is important.  That’s why companies pay for naming rights of stadiums, even if the ROI is questionable or hard to measure.  Twitter just doesn’t work that way: Getting a follower does not translate into name recognition for your brand, website, interest or self.  Okay, it might…  but not if the goal is to get as many followers as possible.  Here I am defining many as 1,000+.  If everyone who follows you has 1,000+ people they follow, the chance of you getting your message across to them where they will see it are slim to none. (1)   A system that encourages you to go out and seek likely follow backs generally relies on getting them from those 1,000+ follows people.  It becomes a great big circle of following in order to build up followers.    Big deal: You have 10,000 followers, who all have 10,000 followers who never read each other’s tweets.  No brand recognition there.  No personal connection.  No traffic generation.

Instead of total number of followers, the metric you want to measure is the average number of followers for the people that follow you.  Your ideal is a number between 50 and 250.  This generally indicates that the person has a commitment to check Twitter regularly to see what people they follow are doing and have people that will check to see what they are updating.  It means that if you post a tweet, chances are these people will have that Tweet visible on their timeline for at least ten minutes, up to possibly an hour.  Less then 50 follows indicates a person probably isn’t checking Twitter regularly.  More than 250 means much less visibility for you if they are reading their entire timeline.  It also means that their is the potential that the person running the account is using a tool to manage their timeline so that they may never read you.  If you want to get read on Twitter (the rational for getting more followers), you’ve got to target those who will read you to begin with.

Instead of total followers, if you’re a bricks and mortar business, you want a metric of how many of your followers live in areas where your market is.  This, like the average total number of follows your followers have, is not an easy number to get.  If you’re a minor league team in the United States, your market is largely going to be people who live with in an hour or two of your home grounds.  If your team has a relationship with a team up or down the ladder, your market may extend to that area.  Your market may also extend to where places where players from your team originate.  These people are likely to purchase tickets to your game, attend games on the road, listen or watch games over streaming audio or video, or buy merchandise based on your team.  Identify those locations or categories of followers and count them.  Ignore those followers who don’t.  Count the person who lives in your town: Do not count the fly fishing business from Canada, or the follower from Brazil who never mentions your sport and only tweets about Justin Beiber.  The second two, unless you have evidence to the contrary, are not going to convert into any sort of sales or provide a relationship that can further your own goals.  There is nothing wrong with having those followers (2)  even if they provide you with nothing back in return.  Just don’t try to get them by following large numbers of people.  What’s the easiest way to count people in your market?  Follow them and only them back.  If you just want to follow a few people, add people in your market to a list.  This makes the number really, really easy to keep track of as you just have to keep track of new followers that Twitter e-mails you about.  If people didn’t make it on your list the first time, you can add them to your list or to your follows when they retweet you or @ reply you.  Total people following you in your market counts 100 times more than the person not in your market who you likely won’t convert into a potential sale, job or viewer.

Why do people use total followers rather than average number of follows their followers have or the total number of potential people in their market?  They generally do that because the first metric is easy to get a number for.  The second and third ones are pretty hard to get at this time.  Just because a metric is easy to get doesn’t mean it is the right one to use.  In this case, try to spend the time to get the more meaningful number.  That way you know your message is actually getting out to the people who matter.

While I’m on this topic of Twitter follower counts as a metric, here is another one to consider for a special subset of people who mention their social media prowess, with all the details about how to do that available on their website.  When I say their website, I mean that thing they cross promote on Twitter and LinkedIn and on other social networks.  For them, there exists a special metric: Ratio of Twitter followers to the total unique visitors Compete says that they have to their site.  I chose Compete because it actually gives you a number and heavy social media users are more likely to have Compete installed on their browser.  (3)  Given that, the measurement for traffic to their site should actually be higher than it actually is… but I digress.  Twitter followers/Website traffic.  Important metric.  Ideally, the number should be less than one.  If it is greater than one, it says that the person running the Twitter account does not effectively promote what matters: Themselves.  People don’t want to read what that person has to say in any depth.  Twitter followers aren’t clicking on the person’s links.  Followers aren’t sharing links to that person’s content with their own Twitter followers or Facebook friends or linking to it on their blog.  If a person really matters, with a few notable exceptions (4), people will want to follow their links.   The measure of 34,000 Twitter followers/6,000 monthly visitors thus is incredibly meaningful.  It says that the person can get followers but they can’t convert that into traffic: People aren’t interested in more meaningful dialog with the account owner.

Moving on to that second Twitter metric that people like to talk up: ReTweets.  There is nothing wrong with this number and can be useful in terms of determining how entertaining or useful people find the content you’re putting out on Twitter. (5)   It is just one of those metrics that people treat as if it exists in isolation and that’s where it becomes less meaningful.  First, before even beginning to look at the number, ask yourself an important question: Why do you want your content ReTweeted?  If your goal is to use Twitter ReTweets to convert into sales or page views to your site, then 5,000 ReTweets which result in zero sales or zero visits means that your failure rate is 5,000.  Who cares if you get 5,000 ReTweets if it doesn’t help you meet your goal?  If your goal is to use ReTweets to start a conversation and no one @ replies to you or goes to your blog to have a conversation with you, then your ReTweet campaign wasn’t successful. ReTweet metrics are only useful as they pertain to helping achieve other measurable goals.  A ReTweet totals metric, absent another metric, is a number about ego boosts and helping with your own self worth on Twitter.

Other metrics people like to mention for Twitter include total mentions.  The more mentions you get, the more times the tag you created gets used, the better it is for your brand in gaining recognition.  This is great in theory as a measurement tool.  What it ignores is sentiment analysis.  If you can get users to tag 50,000 of their tweets, that could be great brand recognition.  At the same time, it could mean some one else highjacked your messaged for shits and giggles.  (6)  It could also have been highjacked by people who have complaints about your service or product. 50,000 tweets do you very little good if 45,000 are from an angry mob.  If you’re doing a campaign involving ReTweets or mentioning a tag, some people can and do take that too far.  Your audience of tag user may flood their Twitter feed with your message so often that they piss off people into unfollowing them.  That hurts your reach.  Another brand could highjack your tag to promote their related product.  Sentiment and audience reaction ultimately matter more than sheer numbers.  If you can count the total of positive, negative, neutral, highjacked posts using a tag, that number will be more helpful than total mentions.

The major Twitter metrics have serious flaws.  They don’t tell the whole story and often provide a misleading picture.  The only way for these metrics to work is for them to be broken down into smaller, more harder to measure numbers that answer how the measure helps you measure your market.  And please encourage people to stop promoting ineffective measures.  Just because it is an easy number to get doesn’t make it worth using: People shouldn’t be paying for that.  Flawed data is flawed and the industry as a whole is hurt when we constantly allow bad practices to continue.

1. I follow 300 people. I’m in Australia. I can’t keep up with all my American friends when they are busy tweeting while I’m asleep and I don’t have nearly that many followers.

2. Why?  Because everyone thinks that number matter and it doesn’t hurt to have followers who don’t do anything for you.

3. Alexa doesn’t give real traffic volume.  It just gives a ranking compared to other sites.  As we’re comparing Twitter followers to visitors to a site, using Alexa for comparison purposes doesn’t work.

4. Stuff My Dad Says, the BP satire updates, celebrities are all examples where this doesn’t work.  Brick and mortar websites also may be an exception as you can put some content on aggragate services like Facebook and Foursquare.  Bricks and mortar stores can use those discounts on those sites to measure the effectiveness of their campaign.   Websites and content providers?  Not so much.  If you’re reading this, you’re probably not an exception.

5.  In that regard, it is actually a bit more useful than total followers are.  There are fewer bot/indiscriminate ReTweeters/spammers than there are bot/indiscriminate followers/spammers.

6. Yes, this does happen. And it doesn’t always include the usual suspects.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• AFL fan community sentiment: Are fans happy or sad?
• The Impact of Jason Akermanis’s Comments on the Western Bulldogs’s Online Fanbase
• Digital Sport Summit: Harry O’Brien

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

A copy of this can be found in PDF form at : http://ozziesport.com/storm.pdf .  The pdf version that includes footnotes that explain the methodology used and contain additional links.

Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy

By Laura Hale, University of Canberra

On April 22, 2010, the news of salary cap violations on the part of the Melbourne Storm broke online in such publications as the Fox Sports, on television including ABC news and on multiple social networks including Facebook and Twitter. By April 23, the news was available in various print publications including The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. During the news coverage, NRL fans learned that the team had been fined $1.8 million, stripped of two premiereships and were not eligible to earn points towards 2010’s premiership. (“Melbourne storm stripped,” 2010) The team was being punished for salary cap violations over the past five years, where the total cap violation in that period was $1.7 million with $400,000 of that total cap violation occurring in 2009. (“Melbourne storm stripped,” 2010)

Early in the coverage of the Melbourne Storm, several issues were discussed including the impact this would have on the fan base for the team, the subsequent economic fallout for Storm and other clubs in the league, and if the players would try to leave the club or lower their performance level. The consequences that people feared have yet to bear out: The fan base for the Melbourne Storm has grown, attendance has not fallen, membership is up and players have not left the team and the team continues to win.

This article will examine the online response to the Melbourne Storm controversy. Specifically, it will look at the interest patterns on several networks, follow patterns on Twitter and Facebook, and activity levels on 43things, wikis and Yahoo!Groups. It will prove that, on the whole, the controversy has not eroded the online fanbase for the team and has resulted in an increased profile for the team in ways can have a net positive for the team and their sponsors.

Profile Interest

One way to quickly gage online interest for a team is to check the number of people who list them as an interest on social networks that include that option. The level of interest on a network will, in general, increase over time. Including an interest is a rather passive activity that most people do at the time that they signup on a service. They may update their interests once a year when they do an overhaul on their profile. Other factors may result in an update of interests, most notably a desire to associate or disassociate with certain people and organizations. The latter can generally require a certain amount of rage and disillusionment and does not happen that often. For adding interests, it can require a certain degree of wanting to stand in solidarity with some one or thing in the face of perceived oppression. Adding or removing an interest will generally require a large emotional response in people to motivate them to change their interests on social networks where an individual has not been active in the past six months. These conditions mean that numbers for interests are relatively stable or increase. A big shift downward is possible but unlikely.

Did the Melbourne Storm controversy result in people being motivated to update their interests to include or exclude the team? Yes and no, many people added them as an interest on Facebook but the numbers remained level across several other networks.

As of January 9, 2010, 17,020 had listed the Melbourne Storm as an interest on Facebook. By May 9, 2010, this number had increased to 41,240, or 24,220 new people. From January 9 to May 9, 2010, there was also an increase of roughly 120 fans within fifty miles of Hobart adding the team as an interest, going from less than 20 to 140. Canberra saw a similar increase in fans, going from 140 on January 9 to 1,020 by May 9, 2010, an increase of 880 new people listing the team as an interest. For fans within fifty miles of Cranbourne, there was an increase of 5,540 fans going from 7,140 fans on January 9 to 12,580 fans on May 9, 2010. Some of this increase on Facebook can be possibly attributed to a change in Facebook in mid-April, where people were encouraged to add their interests as likes of fanpages and vice versa. (Albanesius, 2010) It cannot entirely explain the shift as the official Melbourne Storm page is a user page, not a fan page so the interest to liking will not be automatically converted. At the same time, the number of people listing the team as an interest is roughly ten times as many who follow the Storm’s official Facebook profile and suggests that interest listing is independent of following the official team presence.

In addition to the Melbourne Storm interest on Facebook, there have been two new interests related to the storm created in the wake of the controversy: “Shame On You Melbourne Storm” with fewer than twenty people listing it as an interest, and “Sucked In Melbourne Storm Haha” with 3,240 people listing it as an interest. The latter definitely connects to a Facebook fanpage with the same name, which has 8,432 people who like it.

While Facebook saw an explosion in growth of people listing the team as an interest, other sites allowing interest listing on profiles remained stagnant or saw limited growth. This includes bebo, where there has been no change as of April 28 and May 9 from 402 people that was originally recorded on March 18, 2010. Blogger saw some growth for the number of people listing the team as an interest. As of January 18, 2010, four people had listed the team. By May 9, 2010, six people had listed them as an interest. As the time frame is wider than that of bebo, it might be possible to account for the increase as a pre-season boost, rather than in response to the controversy. Either way, this was an increase of fifty percent for new people listing the team as an interest.

LiveJournal saw no growth in people listing the team as an interest between January 10 and May 9, 2010. Of the 25 LiveJournal accounts listing the Melbourne Storm as an interest, only five have updated since the controversy broke. LiveJournal’s clones including Dreamwidth, Blurty and DeadJournal also saw no growth as of May 9. This contrasts to the Brisbane Broncos on LiveJournal, where one person removed the team as an interest during a similar period. Dreamwidth had two users listing the team as an interest as of January 9, Blurty had one user as of January 9, and DeadJournal had one user as of December 23, 2009. None of the people on LiveJournal’s clones who list the Storm as an interest have updated their journals since the controversy happened. The most recent updates occurred on Dreamwidth, taking place in early March 2010. The other account last updated in April 2009. The Blurty account last updated in November 2005 and the DeadJournal account last updated in January 2006.

One or two smaller niche networks have limited interest for specific teams or where people only list the NRL as an interest. This includes BlackPlanet, generally targeted at African Americans inside the United States. There was one person who listed the NRL as an interest on the network as of February 15, 2010. This has not changed as of May 9. Care2 is a social networked targeted at people who wish to make the world a better place. As of March 20, 2010, no one had listed the Melbourne Storm as an interest. This changed by May 9, when three people listed the team as an interest. Given the names, limited profiles and join dates, it is possible that these accounts are all tied to one individual. Gaia Online is a small, niche network for role players. As of March 11, 2010, no one had listed the Melbourne Storm as an interest. There is interest in the NRL on the network as people listed the Brisbane Lions, Canberra Raiders, Parramatta Eels and Sydney Roosters as interests. There has not been any change for any of these teams as of May 9. The limited growth and lack of pull back could suggest that larger interest in the NRL has not been diminished on smaller networks as a result of the controversy.

Wiki Activity

Wikis are, at their most basic, web sites where visitors can easily edit the content of the site. Sometimes, there are limits to who can edit put in place by the creator of a wiki. These include requiring users to register or confirm an e-mail before they edit, or to get their account approved by the admin before they can edit. Some wikis have policies when breaking news happen or an article gets trolled to lock down the article so only registered users can edit or wiki admins can edit. The culture of editing on specific wikis thus develops around the who can edit process as locking down wikis to prevent edits can effect the frequency that an article is updated.

For comprehensive wiki articles, the ideal is to have to have editors who approach the topic from different perspectives, where there is inherent conflict in the content and perspective being presented. If this situation does not exist, an article can be highjacked by one or two editors who seek to push their own perspective. The more edits and people involved in contributing to the article, the less likely the article will be biased. This also makes vandalism less problematic as people are incentivized to quickly remove that material.

Wikis can be a good tool for gauging interest in a particular topic over time as most wiki software keeps a record of all edits to a page. For some of the big wikis, like Wikipedia, data also exists for how many views an article has over a certain time period. This can help track more passive community interest in a topic.

Wikipedia’s English language article about the Melbourne Storm is probably the most visited wiki article about the team and appears third in Google’s search results for the team. The article, found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Storm , was created on May 23, 2004. As of May 9, 2010, the article had 1,732 total edits made to it. The controversy involving the Melbourne Storm broke on April 22, 2010. 1,471 of the edits were made prior to that. In the period between the article’s creation and the day before the controversy broke, an average of .681 edits per day were made to the article. In the eighteen-day period since the controversy broke, an average of 14.5 edits per day were made to the article. The vast majority of these edits were made in the first three days, with 90 edits made on April 22, 56 edits made on April 23 and 69 edits made on April 24. On April 24, in response to repeated vandalism, the article was semi-protected; this meant that only registered users who had confirmed their e-mail could edit the article. The protection had the effect of reducing the total number of daily edits to the article. After that, peak editing days included April 26 and May 3 with seven edits, and April 25 and May 5 with six edits. There were zero edits on April 28, May 6, May 7 and May 9. The controversy certainly caused an increase in the number of edits. If the day that the controversy broke and the next two days are excluded, the average number of daily edits is 3.06 edits per day. This is still higher than the period prior to the controversy and the trend will probably continue at least until the end of the season.

The article views per day mirrors the total edits by day. Based on data provided by Henrick (2010, May 1 and May 9), there is a correlation of .904 between the total daily edits and the total daily page views. According to Henrick (2010, May 1) during April 2010, the article was viewed a total of 49,540 times. Of these views, 40,355 views were between April 22, when the story broke, and April 30. The peak day for visits was on April 22, when the article was viewed 14,800 times. The average page views between April 22 and April 30 was 4,482 views per day. If this period is extended out to include data provided by Henrick (2010, May 9) for May 1 to May 8, the average views per day is 2,700. If the three days around when the controversy first broke are excluded, the average edits per day drops to 1,143. This stands in contrast to the period between April 1 and April 21 where the average page views per day was 438. The above average page views trend appears to be continuing. There has not been a decrease in overall interest in the Melbourne Storm on English Wikipedia.

In addition to the English language article about the Melbourne Storm on Wikipedia, there are articles in two other languages: French and Italian. The French language article, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Storm , was created on March 1, 2006. Since the controversy started on April 22 and May 8, there have been 35 total edits to the article. Unlike the English language article, total edits per day peaked on April 24, 2010 with 19 with the second highest editing day occurring on April 23 with 7. The average total edits per day during this period was 2.1. In April, prior to the controversy, the average edits per day was zero. Also unlike the English language article, it was not locked because of vandalism. According to Henrickhe (2010, May 1) peak views per day happened on April 23 and April 24 with 59. The next day with the greatest number of views in the period between April 22 and May 8 is May 8 with 34. The average viewed per day in the April 22 to May 8 period was 17.4 and the average viewed per day in April prior to the controversy was 3.4. The correlation between the total edits per day and views per day in the period between April 1 and May 8 is .7740. The French Wikipedia article saw an increase that was proportionally bigger than the English article but the total views and edits were much smaller on the French article.

The Italian language Wikipedia article, http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Storm , was created on December 21, 2007. The article had two edits in 2008 and one in 2009. Since the controversy broke on April 22 and May 8, there have two edits to the article. These two edits are the only edits made during 2010. According to Henrickhe (2010, May 1) , the total number of article views from April 1 to April 21 was 30. According to Henrickhe (2010, May 8), the total number of page views per day was 58. The day with the most views was April 23, with 14 views. The next day with the most views was May 3, with 8 views. The Italian Wikipedia article saw an increase in the total number of edits and page views as a result of the controversy. It might have been larger but the Italian interest in the team is much smaller to start with than the French or English language communities.

Outside of Wikipedia, there are a few small wikis that focus on the NRL and Rugby League. These wikis generally lack detailed information on the daily total page views but still provide information on the editing history. One such wiki is the NRL Central Wiki that is hosted on Wikia. It has an article about the Melbourne Storm located at http://nrl.wikia.com/wiki/Melbourne_Storm. The article was created on August 13, 2009 and was last updated on October 10, 2009. It has not been updated since the controversy. The wiki the article is hosted has only had three non-bot edits in the past 30 days so the lack of updates is not surprising. A few other wikis have articles that mention the Melbourne Storm. Most of these are institutional wikis where article histories are not available or where content is posted by its creator and never intended to be edited by a wider audience. There does not appear to be a movement by wikis to create additional content in response to or to try to capitalize on interest in response to the controversy.

Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging service. Users can post 140 character messages , called tweets, that are shared with anyone who chooses to follow them. Twitter is one of the most well known and popular social networks in Australia.

There are two main ways to measure Twitter activity. The first is to keep track of the total followers an account has. The second way is to monitor the total number of daily tweets posted about a topic posted across the whole network and by specific accounts.

The Melbourne Storm have an official Twitter account at @MelbStormRLC . There is an unofficial Melbourne Storm Twitter account run by a fansite at @MelbourneStorm_ . As of March 9, 2010, the official account had 458 followers. This contrasts with @MelbourneStorm_ which had 605 followers as of March 8, 2010. By May 10, about nineteen days after the controversy broke, the official account had 1,037 followers and @ MelbourneStorm_ had 720 followers. That was an increase of 579 and 115 followers respectively. The situation has not hurt growth for either account and people are still interested in keeping up with the team and what they are doing.

When compared to the official Twitter accounts for the NRL, Gold Coast Titans, Manly Sea Eagles, North Queensland Cowboys, Parramatta Eels, Canberra Raiders, South Sydney Rabbitohs and New Zealand Warriors, the follower growth for the Melbourne Storm suggests a potential connection to the controversy creating additional interest or a fanbase that has become much more interested in Twitter in a short period of time. (Table 1) The only account with a greater increase in total number of followers is the NRL, which picked up 942 followers. The Melbourne Storm saw a fifty-five percent increase in the new followers. The next closest team of the aforementioned in the same period was the Canberra Raiders who saw a forty-two percent increase. In this context, it reaffirms that additional interest in the team was likely generated by the controversy.

Detailed statistics regarding the total number of references for the Melbourne Storm by day on Twitter are not available. It makes it harder to determine the total daily volume of conversation involving the team in the days surrounding the news leaking about the salary cap violations. People were interested in the Melbourne Storm as the team was briefly trending on Twitter when the story broke. Manual counting can be done but Twitter search only goes back around one week What can be more easily tracked is the posting volume per day of specific accounts related to the Melbourne Storm to compare their activities before and after the controversy broke. In the case of the @MelbourneStorm_, the account does not update regularly with about twenty tweets made during the past year. Their last tweet was on March 24, 2010; they have not posted since the news broke. @MelbStormRLC has posted several tweets since the controversy and has mentioned it. From April 22 to May 9, eighteen days after the story broke, the Storm have made eleven total tweets. Prior to that, the team had made thirteen tweets. The difference in tweet totals is inconsequential. Neither account made changes to their Twitter posting in response in to the controversy.

Searching through Twitter, it is very clear that people are still tweeting about the team and, as of May 10, are tweeting about them at a comparatively higher rate than other teams in the league. One popular way of indicating a tweet is about a certain topic is to include a hashtag in front of a word. This makes the whole phrase easily searchable on Twitter. For example, a person who is tweeting about the Melbourne Storm may include #melbournestorm to indicate the tweet is about the team. There generally fewer of these tweets as a great many accounts on Twitter come directly from RSS feeds. These feeds were not originally created for Twitter and are absent some of the cultural practices and do not use coding tools to help make finding posts easier. Thus, tweets tagged with a # are fewer and more readily countable in search. This allows for comparisons to be made between teams over a short period. For the period between May 3 and May 8, 2010, #melbournestorm beat out all the other teams that were sampled for most the most discussed NRL team. (Table 2) There were twenty-one references for the team on May 5. This is sixteen more than #manlyseaeagles on the same date and the only other team with five or more tweets with a hashtag on a single day. The controversy can likely be seen as the cause for the increase in the number of tweets when compared to other teams in the league.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the largest social networks in Australia and it arguably has the largest population of Melbourne Storm fans online. Outside of interest monitoring, the easiest way to monitor the activities of fans is to examine the fan community’s growth on official pages and groups, and activity levels on these groups.

The Melbourne Storm has an official user profile on Facebook. The profile is for their mascot, Storm Man. It has a limited profile view so only people who have friended the account can view posts and interact with content posted by Storm Man. When the profile was checked on April 6, 2010, the account had 3,203 friends. Checked again on April 28, the account had 4,154. On May 9, the account had 4,401 friends and on May 10, it had 4,494 friends. While the total new friends for their account was fewer than other clubs such as the Brisbane Lions over the same period (Table 3), the team had the largest percentage increase in: 28.7% versus 13.5% for the next closest team, the North Queensland Cowboys. The controversy did not cost the team any friends and resulted in a higher percentage gain when compared to other teams. It has resulted in a net momentum gain that continues almost three weeks after the controversy first broke out.

Facebook Fan Pages are created by teams and by fans. The person who created the Fan Page can post to the wall, control else who can post to the wall, control the type of content posted to the Fan Page and create a unique landing page. Members of a Fan Page can comment on wall posts and indicate they like the post. There are many Melbourne Storm fans that have created Fan Pages and many more have joined, commented and liked posts made to these Fan Pages. A quick search on Facebook for Fan Pages dedicated to the team using the keywords “Melbourne Storm” results in over 500 pages about the team. By looking at a sample of the individual Fan Pages to check the daily posting volume of wall posts and the number of likes and comments to those posts, an idea of how the controversy effected fan interests can be determined.

For this, three Fan Pages were chosen. These were the top three Fan Pages in search that were not created in response to the controversy. They are Melbourne Storm, Best team in NRL.. Melbourne Storm ! and melbourne storm . The total posts per day by the person who runs the Fan Page, and comments and likes per post associated with the post for the day were recorded for the period between April 1 and May 10, 2010. (Table 4) When comparing the total posts in the period between April 1 and April 22, 2010 to the period between April 23 to May 10, two of the three Fan Pages had more posts made by the maintainers before the controversy. (Graph 1) Two of the three groups saw an increase in the total comments made after the controversy. For Melbourne Storm, a Fan Page with over 40,000 members, the increase was massive going from 54 comments to 803 comments. The increase for Best team in NRL.. Melbourne Storm !, a group with 281 members as of May 10, was much smaller. It went from 252 to 257 comments. For all three groups, there was an increase in the number of likes after the controversy took place. While posting levels by Fan Page maintainers may not have increased, the level of engagement and interest in the team for the fan population did. The controversy has created a climate where fans are more engaged with posts.

Mailing lists

During much of the 1990s, mailing lists were one of the most popular tools for fans to use in order to communicate with each other. The creation of mailing lists became much easier when sites like egroups, coollists, topica, Yahoo!Groups and Google groups were created. They largely automated the process of creating mailing lists, provided web based archives and removed barriers of having to understand majordomo syntax in order to join a list.

Australian sports fans actively used these services to participate in their team’s fandom. Some leagues and teams were more popular than other leagues and teams. Amongst the fan communities utilizing mailing lists were Melbourne Storm fans. Most of the lists dedicated to team were on Yahoo!Groups, where there are currently eight lists. These eight lists include melbournestorm2, melbournestormrugbyleague, melbournestormsupportersclub, Storm_Squad, StormSupporters, MSSC-Storm-Mailouts and melbourne_storm_supporters. Many of these lists are no longer active. There are a variety of reasons for this including absent list owners, large volumes of spam content posted on list, people switching to different services in order to express their fondness for the team or fans losing interest in a team. If spam content is not counted in total posting volume by month, the peak posting month was February 2001 with 59 total posts across all eight lists. January 2001 had the next highest posting volume by month with 50 posts. Given the always small and inactive community, it is not surprising that there have been zero posts on these lists since the controversy broke out. These lists have also seen zero growth in membership since their totals were last checked on February 20, 2010. The controversy had no effect on the Storm’s mailing list community.

43things

According to Robot Co-op (2010), 43things “is the world’s largest goal-setting community.” Members of the site set goals for themselves that are published on their profiles and on lists of others who share the same goal. Members are also encouraged to blog about their efforts in trying to complete their goals. Other members are encouraged to cheer people on as they work to complete a goal. When a goal has been completed, people change the goal status to “I did this” and it appears as completed on their profile. This site is relatively popular; according to Alexa Internet, Inc. (2010), the site is ranked the 2,549^th most popular website in Australia.

There are a number of people who have set Australia related sports goals on 43thing. This includes playing for certain clubs to attending the finals to seeing the team they barrack for play. On April 1, 2010, the site was searched for any goals that connected to the Melbourne Storm. Only one goal related to the Melbourne Storm was found. It is “Go to a Melbourne Storm Game.” Two people, erynne and mmcpharlane, had listed this as a goal they were working towards completing. When checked again on May 10, no one had added any additional goals related to the Melbourne Storm. No movement had been made towards completing the existing goal: Both individuals still listed themselves as working towards it and neither had updated their blog to indicate they were any closer to accomplishing this goal. The controversy has not had any measurable impact on people’s goal setting and efforts towards accomplishing their goals as they pertain to the Melbourne Storm.

Conclusion

The controversy involving the Melbourne Storm’s salary cap violations and the subsequent punishment of rewarding them zero points for the season has not resulted in a loss of people interested in the team or resulted in a drop in activity level on the part of fans. Across smaller and less popular services and web sites, there has been no behavior change; the controversy has had a null effect in that no one removed content or interests, nor created content and added interests. For larger sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia, there has been a gain in followers, viewers and interactions. Eighteen days out from the initial incident, a long tail increase in views and interactions exists when compared to the period prior to the controversy. While some of the initial burst of activity and interest could be a consequence of negativity publicity, the long tail interest two to three weeks out is much harder to attribute to solely to wanting to watch a controversy for the sake of entertainment. If interest continue to stay elevated, the club should be able to leverage to increase club membership and sponsorship deals, especially as they apply to their online presence, because they have successfully used the controversy to grow their fanbase. The behaviors of fans demonstrate that have been incentized to express their loyalty and solidarity with the team.

References

Albanesius, C. (2010, April 19). Facebook makes ‘connections,’ adds community pages. PC Magazine, Retrieved from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362825,00.asp

Alexa Internet, Inc. (2010, May 10). 43things.com – site info from alexa. Retrieved from http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/43things.com

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 1). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 49377 times in 201004 . Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/en/201004/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 1). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 276 times in 201004. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/fr/201004/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 1). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 276 times in 201004. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/it/201004/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 9). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 5561 times in 201005. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/en/201005/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 9). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 91 times in 201005. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/fr/201005/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 9). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 19 times in 201005. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/it/201005/Melbourne_Storm

Melbourne storm stripped of two premierships for salary cap breach. (2010, April 22). Fox Sports, Retrieved from http://www.foxsports.com.au/story/0,8659,27022196-5018866,00.html

Robot Co-op. (2010, May 10). List your goals on 43 things. Retrieved from http://www.43things.com/

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I’ve been checking the number of people who list a team as an interest across a number of social networks.  Yesterday, for networks where I had information on 215 teams I have on my list, I added together the number of people who listed a team as an interest in various leagues.  I got the following table.

Interesting to see what networks have what populations.  The WNBL is only really an interest on 2 networks while the AFL is present on every network.  These networks all have different population sizes so total numbers is really apple to oranges in some ways.  I then decided to rank the leagues by how popular they were on each network.  The most popular league ranks 1, the next most popular league ranks 2.  If there is a tie, they share the same rank.  The results of that are in the following table:

This table is a bit more interesting.  Across most networks, the AFL is the most popular league.  The NRL is the second most popular league.  First class cricket, compromising state cricket teams, is the third most popular.  The A-League and Super 14 are close behind.  When you get down near the bottom, patterns become interesting.  The WNBL is not as popular as Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.  This is largely a result of the large number of fans on Facebook.  AFL Canberra is also more popular than the VFL.  This is because of the high rank on JournalFen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues lists the attendance by league for six Australian sports leagues in 2009.  I cannot find a better list of attendance data for Australian sports league, especially the minor leagues.  That makes the rest of this analysis a bit problematic but moving forward anyway… This data is then put into the following table:

For total number of people attending during the course of a season, it certainly seems to track with the average league rank on the social networks in this sample.  Total people and total attendance seems to track some too.  I ran the correlation to confirm these observations:

Total attendance does correlate meaningfully.  Average attendance isn’t as meaningful but the correlation is still relatively strong.  There is a relationship there.

I’ve found that similar relationships exist with American baseball teams.  The issue of course is: Cause and effect.  Does high fan attendance lead to more fans listing their teams as an interest on social media? Or does becoming interested in a team on social media sites lead people to attending games?  It feels like the first but I have no evidence either way.

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Yesterday, I made a post about the most popular Australian athlete, league and team related Twitter accounts.

On Twitter, @anthonyalsop pointed me to a list of Australian athletes on Twitter he had created.  I had missed quite a few on his list and some of those accounts led me to lists where I found additional athletes, teams and leagues.  All told, I added about 61 new rows of data.  There are a few repeats from yesterday’s list as I updated some numbers.  (Historical twitter growth for athletes would be interesting to look at and there are tools for just that.  It is a project for a different day. Maybe.)  There doesn’t appear to be much change.

Things to remember with this list: It does not include athletes who do not play for team based sports.  Swimmers, golfers, tennis players, surfers and race car drivers are not on the list.  It also does not include Australian athletes playing for teams outside of Australia.  This includes cyclists (who are probably the most popular Australian athletes that I can find) as they often compete for teams outside Australia.  It does not include Australian NBA and WNBA players.  It also does not include retired Australian athletes, unless they are now involved in a management role with a specific team.  National teams are included but players are generally sorted by their other playing affiliation. This list does include athletes and teams from outside Australia when the league has teams from other countries.  Thus, South Africa is represented with its Super 14 teams and New Zealand is included with a variety of teams in leagues such as the NRL, Super 14 and the NBL.