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Use of #ausvotes appears to have peaked last night around 7pm: http://bit.ly/a7xJT0 So right before #masterchef #

Though ug. Limit of 100 people. :/ #

I have about 3,000 AFL related tweets saved. Would love to share with some one who will write an interesting analysis for me to read. #

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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.

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AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE ONLINE: a demographic, geographic and social examination of the  AFL fan community online
Introduction
The online ecosystem is changing the definition of sport fandom, how teams engage with their fans, and the potential demographic and geographic reach of sport fandom.  These three components or sport fandom are inextricably linked and are worth studying to understand what sport fandom will look like in the future.

There are currently four operational definitions of sport fandom.  Each definition originates from and is used by a different group.

Popular culture studies scholars like Jenkins (2006) offer the first definition.  They define fans as an active population who engage in activities related to an object produced by the larger popular culture.  This production includes activities like writing fan fiction, creating costumes, producing fanvids and organizing conventions.  Popular culture academics also define fans as posessing a sense of ownership of their product that is removed and distinct from the official one, that they view actors, athletes, copyrighted and trademarked materials as communally owned by fans.

Sports marketers and managers, who broadly speaking, define sports fandom around potential for spectatorship. Stewart (1983), Shilbury, D., Quick, S., & Westerbeck, H. (2003) and Sullivan (2004) talk about various aspects of this, including the goal of teams to sell tickets to matches.  They sometimes diverge from this definition to talk about spectator related behaviors that can be monetized including merchandise sales and television viewership.

Sociologists and historians offer the third definition. This group tends to define sports fandom as a form of identity and as a product of a specific culture.  Cashman (2002) looks at sport fandom in Australia as an extension of a wider Australian identity. Collins (2005) looked at sport as a component of people’s identity as it pertains to the rest of the world: Australian and inward looking or international and outward looking.

The final definition of sport fandom is provided by sport fans themselves and the media.  They define sport fandom around allegiances and in the moment activities that demonstrate these allegiances.

None of these definitions particularly work in the increasingly online-based world of Australian sport.  Fans can more easily be monetized by teams that does not rely on getting people into the stadium.  Identity continues to play a role in fandom but this is changing as the Internet allows teams to draw a more interstate and international audience.  In the moment activities can often extend out years as fans maintain large fansites and become more actively involved in organizations dedicated to but independent of their team.  How fans express allegiance also has changed.  No longer is it based on club membership and being kitted out in a club’s jumper or scarf.  Instead, fans can and do express allegiance by following their clubs on social networks, checking in on geolocation based social networks, creating message boards and fan pages, attending events organized on social networks in order to meet their fellow fans, and creating content related to their clubs to distribute across various networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Twitter, and YouTube.

The definitional change means that more fans than ever could be counted as barrackers for a club could.  This could potentially mean that a club has a different demographic population than the one historically associated with it.  This is because the demographic characteristics of the Australian community are sometimes at odds with populations described by sport historians and sociologists. The potential demographic change necessitates a benchmarking of a club’s population to help future sport historians understand the community as it exists in the period of 2010 and 2011.

Research Topic

I propose to document the demographic, geographic and social characteristics of the AFL fan community online.  This should help several groups including sport historians, sociologists and marketers better understand who fans are, and how current characteristics differ from the past.  It should also help these groups by providing benchmarks for other work done using these populations in terms of making certain groups they study are representative of the larger population.  Hopefully, this topic will help sport organizations make more informed decisions regarding which networks to market on, and help them better cater to specific segments of their fans.

Accordingly, the working title for this research is: ‘AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE ONLINE: a demographic, geographic and social examination of the AFL fan community online.’

Research Questions
The proposed research will focus on the following questions:

•  What is the best methodology for conducting an online population study?

•  What are sport fans in an online context?

•  What are the demographic, geographic and social characteristics of the AFL community online?

•  Why does the online population change over time?

•  What influence do stakeholders have in shaping the demographic and geographic characteristics of the fan community dedicated to their team?

•  How does the AFL population compare to other Australian based sport leagues?

Relationship to Previous Research
This topic is grounded in sport sociology, sport history and sport culture.  These three areas are complimented by a framework of popular culture studies, sociology, history and other areas in social sciences.

Much of previous research involving AFL fans has focused on offline populations, and was conducted using survey research, observational work or historical work.  This is the case for Stewart (1983) where the methodology was based on around club history and observations of match attendance.  A population study done by the marketing agency Roy Morgan Research  (2009) relied on a telephone survey.  There does not appear to have been a large scale study involving documenting the actual characteristics of fans that measures the actual composition of the fan community beyond club membership or match attendance.

Most social media research uses one or more of ten methodologies identified by me.  These research types are:
1. Individual case studies for how a business uses social media and the web;
2. Search and traffic analytics analysis;
3. Sentiment analysis and reputation management;
4. Content analysis;
5. Usability studies;
6. Interaction and collaboration analysis;
7. Relationship analysis to try to determine how people interact and to identify key influencers;
8. Population studies;
9. Online target analysis of behavior and psychographics; and
10. Predictive analysis.
Some of these research methods have been used for analyzing online groups, behavior and content.  The most popular methods include case studies, content analysis, usability studies, influencer identification, reputation management, and interaction and collaboration analysis.  Based on my preliminary research, the last three are ones that the least likely to be done.

When population studies are done, they tend to short, do not detail methodology, focus on one particular site on the Internet and do not compare different populations.  This appears to be because there are few automated tools that allow for measuring population characteristics of several sites at once.  Of the tools that exist, most are focused on providing information related to other methodologies including interaction and collaboration analysis, sentiment analysis, and search and traffic analytics analysis. These tools generally do not provide demographic and geographic population related data.  Those that do offer demographic information tend to focus only on one site such as Twitter or Facebook.

The existing methods and the reliance on automating data collection around a single site acts as an intellectual and practical barrier in doing large-scale population studies across multiple sites.  My research will help provide a methodological framework for doing a population study online that compares populations across different networks and subgroups as this is largely lacking.  I believe this will also be useful in terms of laying a framework for people who want to further explore the methodology for online target analysis, psychographics and predictive analysis as it pertains to demographic and geographic characteristics.

Methodology
The methodology for this research involves two parts: A population study and a series of interview with sport administrators.

The first part involves conducting a population study of the AFL fan community online.  Some of the social networks examined will include 43things, bebo, BlackPlanet, blogger, care2, ecademy, Facebook, friendster, Gaia Online, hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal and its clones, MySpace, orkut, Twitter, Wikia, Wikipedia, Yahoo!Groups and YouTube.  Publicly accessible data regarding gender, age, income, occupation, astrological sign, joined, last logged in, location, dating status, languages understood, etc.  This information will be complemented with social behaviors in the context of events that take place during the AFL season.  This will include the occasional monitoring of the total people belonging to a group or listing specific clubs as an interest.  It will also include gathering some data regarding total actions taken during certain time periods, volume of web traffic as measured by tools such as Compete, Alexa and Quantcast, and total blog posts as measured by tools like IceRocket.

The second part involves interviewing sport administrators.  This includes people working for the AFL and for people from other clubs and leagues including the Canberra Raiders, Canberra United and Melbourne Victory.  The interviews will have a general framework of asking four questions:
1. How do you define fandom?
2. How do you reach out to the fan community?
3. How much influence does league management provide in terms of defining fandom and how to engage in outreach?  Do they give guidance on social media policies?
4. How much do other sports, teams and leagues play a roll in development and implementation of concepts related to fan engagement and social media?
These questions will be supplemented with other questions based on answers given.  The interviews will take place in person to facilitate the ability to ask related questions.

The results of the population study will be contextualized in the thesis conclusion to help provide context for why specific communities have the demographic, geographic and social characteristics that they do.

Intended Outcomes

At the conclusion of this research, an established, repeatable methodology for conducting population studies online should be established.  Shortcomings for this type of research will also be established, providing context for the data within and for others who are trying to do similar research. Maps of where AFL fans are located will exist.  These maps will show population distribution by website and by team.  There will be benchmarks for community size that can be used by future research to examine growth patterns and population shifts.

This information will be disseminated over the Internet with copies being shared with the AFL and its clubs.

Timetable
The timetable for this research will be based around the AFL season, with a majority of the data collection being done right at the beginning of the season, during the season and shortly after the season ends.  During the off season for the AFL, numbers should be stable as there is less club news and the teams will be less active in promoting their games.   Appendix A provides a more detailed breakdown of the proposed timeline.  This timeline assumes that most of the work will take place over two years, though if a possibility exists of compressing it down to one, that will be explored. Data has and will continue to be gathered from between April 2010 and October 2010, the end of the AFL season.  During the data collection periods, work will also be done on completing the literature review, methodology, introduction and getting other administrative tasks like ethics clearances to be completed.  Interviews with sport organizations will take place during the data collection period and while completing the data analysis and conclusion.

Budget
The majority of the research would be computer based and involve data mining of online resources.  Some assistance may be required in developing tools to automate data mining of publicly available information and running the applications developed to do that work.  There is an intention to supplement knowledge gained through data mining with interviews. Travel may be required to interview management and staff involved with developing a team’s online presence.  The intention would be to take a trip to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane to conduct these interviews.  The attempt would be made to compress as many interviews as possible into the fewest trips possible. Ideally, the department would assist in funding travel to talk to teams.  Funding for travel costs would also be sought from the AFL.

Approvals and Permits for Ethical Research
Approval would need to be attained from the UC Committee for Ethics in Human Research in order to conduct interviews with sport managers.

Reasons for Choosing the University of Canberra
I chose the University of Canberra after having visited the Australian Institute of Sport in July 2009 and learning how the Australian system for sport worked.  The University of Canberra’s Sport Studies has close contact with the Australian Institute of Sport, sporting federations and with the professional sports leagues in the country.  These resources are important as they allow access to sports administrators who can provide context to social, demographic and geographic patterns that research will reveal by explaining a team’s role in the online fan community.

REFERENCES
Cashman, R. (2002). Sport in the National Imagination, Australian sport in the Federation decades. Sydney: Walla Walla Press.
Collins, T. (2005). “‘One Common Code of Football for Australia!’: The Australian Rules and Rugby League Merger Proposal of 1933.” In R. Hess, M. Nicholson, & B. Stewart (Eds.), Football Fever: Crossing Boundaries (pp. 27-38). Hawthorn: Maribyrnong Press.
Jenkins, H. (2007a) Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, H. (2007b) “Afterword: The Future of Fandom”. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. J. Gray, C. Sandvoss and C.L. Harrington, eds. pp. 357-364. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Roy Morgan Research. (2009, July 19). More Than 7.6 Million AFL Supporters A Great Market for Prospective Sponsors 2008 Grand Finalists Hawthorn (Up 72,000) & Geelong (Up 99,000) Have Biggest Jumps in Support. Roy Morgan Research. Press Release. Retrieved May 31, 2010, from http://www.roymorgan.com/news/press-releases/2009/906/
Shilbury, D., Quick, S., & Westerbeck, H. (2003). Strategic Sport Marketing (2nd ed.). Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin.
Stewart, B. (1983). The Australian Football Business, a Spectator’s Guide to the VFL. Maryborough, Victoria: Kangaroo Press.
Sullivan, M. (2004). “Sports Marketing.” In J. Beech & S. Chadwick (Eds.), The Business of Sport Management (pp. 128-153). Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

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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 .

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

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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.

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An hour talking to the AFL people in Canberra! Loads of fun. live talking sport and social media. #

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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.

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View full map

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

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Methodology

When conducting social media research, there are ten general methods that can be used to gather and analyze data.  These are:

1. Individual case studies for how a business uses social media and the web,
2. Search and traffic analytics analysis,
3. Sentiment analysis and reputation management,
4. Content analysis,
5. Usability studies,
6. Interaction and collaboration analysis,
7. Relationship analysis to try to determine how people interact and to identify key influencers, and
8. Population studies
9. Online target analysis of behavior and psychographics,
10. Predictive analysis.

Each of these methods offers insights into various aspects of the web and its population.  The type of analysis used is often specific to the purpose of the research, involved blended approaches from traditional analysis types, and different methods are often used in conjunction with each other.  These methods often blend quantitative and qualitative analysis.  Choosing the correct method of gathering analyzing data can be one of the biggest hurdles for being able to measure ROI and understand how a community works.
This section will provide a brief summary of each type, explain how to conduct this type of research and give examples that used that methodology.

Predictive analysis
A search on 13 July 2010 on SPORTDiscus had three results for “predictive analysis.” A search on the same date on Scopus had 605 results, 275 of which were in engineering, 132 in computer science and 102 in medicine. Predictive analysis is probably one of the least used analysis methods, especially in social media and fandom.
What is predictive analysis?  At its simplest, it is identifying a future event or events, monitoring selection actions that precede the event and seeing if those events can be used to predict the outcome of similar events in the future.  If a predictive value is found, an organization can monitor behaviors to help make more informed decisions.
An example of this type of research is “Predicting the Future With Social Media” by Asur and Huberman (2010).  Their goal was to determine if tweet volume and sentiment on Twitter prior to a movie being released could be used to predict how well a movie performs at the box office.  Their methodology involved identifying movie wider release dates that took place on a Friday, creating a list of keyword searches related to those movies, and using the Twitter API to collect all tweets and aggregate date that mention those keywords over a three month time period.  The authors then compared the tweet volume to box office performance.  They concluded that social media “can be used to build a powerful model for predicting movie box-office revenue.” (Asur & Huberman, 2010)
This type of research can be used in conjunction with other methods.  It can be used along side a population study to see if certain actions will result in demographic changes.

References

Asur, S., & Huberman, B. A. (2010). Predicting the Future With Social Media. Social Computing Lab. Retrieved from http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/socialmedia/socialmedia.pdf



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• 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.

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• COI : Cost of Inactivity.
• You need a community manager. Community managers deal with content and moderation.
• They have over 160,000 people supporting their World Cup bid fan page.
• They have around 100,000 fans for the Socceroos on Facebook.
• They have a policy similar to that of Essendon regarding moderation.
• A good post has 250 comments.
• The coach decided to not allow players to use social media during the World Cup. FIFA also has their own guidelines for social media usage by players.

Nick Marvin; Chief Executive Officer, Perth Wildcats

I wasn’t expecting to take as many notes during this presentation as I did. The organization seems very on the ball with what they are doing. I really enjoyed this presentation.

• Marvin is not a sport guy. It is not his background.
• He has a sporting model based on the business model:

Top of triangle:
Member
Customer
Advocate
Fan
Prospect
Bottom of triangle.

• Winning isn’t everything. Engagement and tribal belonging are more important.
• Converting fans into paying customers: Specia deals on Twitter, discount codes. Target Perth Wildcat fans using e-mail.
• 51% of Facebook fans are likely to buy. 67% of Twitter followers are likely to buy.
• 35% of women are looking for deals online.
• CRM to SCRM: Need to move that way.
• Broad traditional media campaign is important to run but it is important to run that parallel to a social media and e-mail strategy.
• Going through social media, it allows:

1) Real time,

2) Direct/No intermediaries,

3) More authentic,

4) Less noise,

5) More frequent, and

6) Appropriate length.

• Social media allows real time feedback.
• The Perth Wildcats players sign a contract with the team for ethical behavior and community work.
• You need to monitor your brand.
• BackType and Social Mentions are two tools to help you monitor your brand.
• The Wildcats hire for character first. Character helps to build a brand.
• The Perth Wildcats use social media to monitor staff welfare. One person who the CEO saw tweet about feeling ill he talked to and suggested they go home if they are not feeling well.

Panel discussion: Nick Marvin, Jonathan Simpson, Jeramie McPeek, Alana Fisher

This was interesting but not as much interaction between panelists as there could be. It was at times more of a dialog with the audience. Still, lots of interesting things to learn from the panel.

• The Wildcats have increased their ticket prices 35% just to decrease the demand.
• The AFL is watching the NBA is doing and checking their own policies for online broadcasts as it relates to radio/audio.
• Steve Nash does his charity work quietly, without broadcasting it.
• Essendon has the best merchandising sales in the AFL. Essendon has a good situation as many advertisers approach them directly to cut their own deals, unlike other clubs who are hamstrung by the Telstra deal.
• Essendon encourages players not to look at comments. The club has talked with players about managing Facebook, and educating players in how to deal with social media.
• The Suns get in contact with Twitter people when people impersonate players and management.
• The AFLPA is working on snuffing out fake accounts on Facebook as they can be problematic.
• The Perth Wildcats CEO sat down and talked to a player who was slagged in the blogosphere.

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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

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Neither Google Latitude nor Loopt allow for any data collection to monitor patterns. Boo. #

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I was really keen to hear from an AFL team about how they handled social media and fan engagement as this pertains to my research topic. It was one of the three presentations that I found most useful.

Finn Bradshaw; Chief Online Editor Sport and Racing, Herald Sun
This was a really interesting presentation from the perspective of a company that is trying to monetize interest in sport for their own purposes.

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Ed Wyatt; Journalist, SEN

Ed Wyatt was the first speaker. There were a couple of things I thought were worth noting.

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The speakers included Ed Wyatt, Jeramie McPeek, Anthony Harrison, Peter Jankulovski, Finn Bradshaw, Darren Rowse, Alana Fisher, Nick Marvin and Harry O’Brien.  Below is a gallery of some pictures I took from my seat in the back (where I had a table to write on, could use Twitter on my iPhone with out being annoying, and where I could do data gathering during presentations I was less interested in).  The next two or three posts will include notes from the various sessions I listened to.  I’ve decided to put them into separate posts because one big post would be really difficult to read.

Before getting to those posts, I just wanted to say that the event was really fantastic.  I got a chance to meet a few people from the AFL including two guys from the league and two guys from the Essendon Bombers. (And they were polite when I attacked them with HERE IS A PAPER AND DATA NOT ABOUT YOUR TEAM BUT TO SEE WHAT I CAN DO.) Some of the presentations answered questions I had regarding why data was acting the way it was and explained some of the decision making going on that impacts the fan experience.  It also did this from an Australian sport perspective, with many presenters giving context for how this compared to American and European social media usage. They presented organization, the media and athlete perspectives.  This was useful because it helped put all these pieces into a larger context for how the larger sport industry functions.   If Anthony Alsop and co. put on the event again with a similar price point, I’d happily try to go again.

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April 19, 2010

One of the most important metrics that people discuss is the value of a customer and the value of followers of brands on various social networks. What is the return on investment for generating buzz in social media? What is the per individual value of having a fan on Facebook, having a fan create their own video content and upload it to YouTube, the value of some one belonging to or listing a brand as an interest on LiveJournal? Virtue, a social media management company, has put the value of a Facebook fan at $3.60 per fan.¹ Their methodology is suspect and their conclusions should not be read as universal across the many industries that utilize social media to promote their products and drive revenue.

Social media is composed of many networks, each catering to their own demographic and interest base. Each of these groups has their own behavioral patterns. Canadians and Brits have different usage patterns for Internet based radio than their American counterparts. The buying power and education level of a Facebook user is different than that of a MySpace user, even if both groups are composed solely of Americans. Added to this mix, there has been a fair amount of research done that says brands themselves do not influence purchasing decisions as much as friends and family. ²

Given this reality, a standard industry wide number is impossible to calculate. A smart company should independently develop a number for measuring the monetary potential of people interested in their brand. To do this, a company should first identify a specific network where they are aware of a community that is already interested in their product. This community can be expressed by listing the brand as an interest, as is the case for Facebook and LiveJournal, by belonging to a group dedicated to the brand for sites like ning and Yahoo!Groups, or by uploading user generated content on sites such as YouTube. Remember: Each of these sites has a different demographic base so you cannot arrive at a single metric across all networks unless you have the same uniform population using multiple networks.

Once you have identified the community you wish to find the individual value for, determine the demographic and geographic composition of the community on that particular network. Stick with information that is publicly available. In the case of LiveJournal, that data includes date of birth, geographic location, the type of account a user has (paid, plus, permanent). For Facebook, this information can be much deeper if you use the data provided to people interested in marketing to them. For a fan page that you do not run, you are limited to their name (for which you can attempt to determine gender) and the network that a person belongs to.

After you have this data, compare it to your known information regarding people who support your brand. If the demographic information does not match information, there is something wrong with that community and you will never get meaningful data. For example, a United States based Christian bookstore may be gaming for autofollowers on Twitter and have a huge following of people from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. On the whole, that demographic is unlikely to convert into potential customers for the bookstore. Trying to go further to assess value of one’s Twitter followers would thus not be useful. ³ If the data does match internal numbers or is a demographic base that you wish to explore, go on to the next step.

If the community demographics match with what you want to explore, create a survey for people who express an interest in your brand. It would be best to make the survey using a format that people inside the network would find easiest to use. For example, on LiveJournal, you may wish to use the service’s polling data; on Facebook, you may wish to create a survey using FBML and make it a tab on your fanpage or create a Facebook application. When conducting the survey, ask demographic and geographic questions that are represented by the data you pulled from public sources on that network. The survey should also ask questions regarding what other networks the individual uses. The survey should also inquire as to how often the customer has made a purchase from your company, what type of purchase was made, who influenced the decision to go with your particular brand, where the people who influenced them were sharing their influence, and what percentage of time those particular influences helped with a purchasing decision.

After the survey results are in, an analysis should be conducted to determine the particular value of each respondent in terms of monetary value of a customer. For example, a person may be a fan of your Facebook fan page. If for example you are a baseball team, the person may be inclined to purchase tickets to attend games anyway. They may respond that they have bought $200 worth of tickets. They may also tell you that they bought $20 worth of tickets to games they would not have otherwise attended as a result of coupons that you posted to the Facebook fanpage wall. The fan may also have purchased tickets they would not have purchased otherwise because a friend on Facebook talked about how they loved the team but had never attended game. The Facebook based conversation created a situation where the person spent another $40 on tickets. The value of this customer on Facebook thus is not $200 but $60 or 30% of their total spending is a direct result of a social media activity on Facebook.

Once the value for each respondent has been determined, normalize this against the demographic composition of the whole population, as every person expressing interest in a brand on a particular social network is not likely to respond to a survey. Remember, different groups behave differently. Some groups are incentivized to respond for their own reasons in order to try to meet their own needs. If the a particular network has two thirds of the population that is female that expressing interest in your product and the survey response is only a quarter for women, the monetary value of your community is going to be wrong.

This method of determining the monetary value of individuals expressing interest in your brand has other benefits. It can help you set benchmarks for improving sales to key demographics and help you identify new demographic bases for your product that you may not have realized. It may also help you identify other networks where you can potentially attempt to drive buzz for your product where the community is less obvious. Most importantly, this method uses real numbers for real customers rather than relying on unproven hypotheticals.

1 http://mashable.com/2010/04/14/facebook-fan-valuation/
2 http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=109574
3 If you find yourself in a situation like that, the best response is to re-evaluate your social media strategies. Something is clearly broken.

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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

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If you’re not familiar with the Melbourne Victory of the W-League, they are a W-League team based out of Victoria, playing most of their fixtures in Melbourne. They are affiliated with the A-League Melbourne Victory and are run by Football Victoria. The Melbourne Victory have one player who plays for the Matildas.

My purpose in talking to the Melbourne Victory was to help provide background knowledge for my literature review and to generally enhance my understanding of Australian team sport as it may apply other parts of my research. Going in, I had four questions I wanted answers to. These questions were:

1. How do you define fandom?
2. How do you reach out to the fan community?
3. How much influence does league management provide in terms of defining fandom and how to engage in outreach? Do they give guidance on social media policies?
4. How much do other sports, teams and leagues play a role in development and implementation of concepts related to fan engagement and social media?

The Melbourne Victory defines fans as spectators. Most of their fans are friends and family of current players, and players from women’s clubs. These groups account for a large percentage of attendees. Beyond these groups, they have limited definitions of the fan community for their club and appear to use an operating definition of “Fans of the A-League Melbourne Victory club.” The limited definitions appear to exist for several reasons. The first is that Football Victoria places a greater emphasis on promoting their top level Victorian based league over the W-League club. The second reason is because they rely heavily on the A-League Melbourne Victory for the promotion of their club; they piggy back on their promotional activities so it makes separating out the fanbases difficult. The third reason is that it is extremely difficult to carve out a niche for women’s sport in Victoria given the number of spectating options available to fans in the city. Fans just have too many choices of what do and the club doesn’t appear confident that they can successfully market the club in this environment.

The team doesn’t do much outreach of their own. They rely heavily on the A-League Melbourne Victory to do much of that outreach. This includes getting W-League Melbourne Victory news into the A-League club’s Twitter stream and Facebook fan page updates. This is a solution that they have found to be rather effective as they get a number of comments on Facebook in reply to these posts and their does not appear to be any backlash for including women’s updates alongside the men’s news. Beyond co-branded social media and other media spots, the club has an e-mail newsletter they send out and does school offers. They feel that some of their outreach is hampered because they do not have a fixed location for their fixtures; last season they played their five home games in five different venues.

The media comms coordinator does much of the club’s outreach. This is another issue because the media comms coordinator does not work exclusively on the Melbourne Victory W-League team; she is responsible for all of Football Victoria. Outreach is also problematic at times because they have to rely on the A-League Melbourne Victory. While there is an agreement in place that the two clubs will be co-branded, many of the people working for the Melbourne Victory are not used to working on the W-League team and that can take prodding. They were clear that the Melbourne Victory on the whole though are very good at updating when asked. Outreach with the A-League also requires people at Football Victoria remembering to pass on information to the club, which can be an issue as it is not always a priority.

Another issue that effects outreach involves contractual issues with the Victory’s star player and Matilda captain. The Victory only get so many contractual appearances with her a year outside general club requirements. The player is also heavily involved with her own personal branding. This can make it hard to use the player as a way to push their own brand as she has her own agenda that may not match with the club’s agenda.

Football Victoria has several young staffers who work for them whom are big soccer fans and who are social media savvy. They do not officially monitor social media sites for Football Victoria but if they see something that other clubs in leagues like the WPS or A-League are doing that they think would work for the Melbourne Victory, the club will consider implementing it. If they do find something that is extremely problematic on social media sites, fansites or forums, the club will inform the W-League who can then address the problem.

The W-League gives some guidance in this regard but much of the Victory’s social media, fan definitions and policies come from Football Federation Australia (FFA) who first try them out on the A-League. After that, these policies are often implemented on a much more scaled down version

Beyond the answer to the general questions, there were several other interesting things that came up in the interview.

First, the team does not have a formal social media policy for its players. This is similar to the Canberra United and the Canberra Raiders. They haven’t felt a need to have one because so far it has not been an issue. Most of their players are also on Facebook, not Twitter, and Facebook tends to get less media coverage. (Though this is not always the case. There was a player for one of the women’s national team who got into trouble for what she said on Facebook as it got picked up by a Melbourne newspaper.) Added to that, the team gets so little media coverage that the media is unlikely to care what players say on social media sites. That said, the club is planning on offering media training before the season starts. Part of this media training will involve teaching players about safety on social media sites.

The club sees its success as fundamentally tied to the A-League club. If the A-League Melbourne Victory succeeds, they should succeed too. This explains why Football Victoria has pushed to co-brand the W-League club with the A-League club and get them involved. They feel that they can increase their audience, build better awareness and raise the stature of women players and soccer in Victoria this way. Rather than turn to the W-League for guidance, they tend to be much more focused on their A-League counter part.

This decision to tie themselves with the A-League club means that the team finds it hard to get data about their specific fans as there aren’t different channels for the two: The Melbourne Victory of the W-League does not have its own Twitter account or its own Facebook fanpage. This could be problematic down the line as it may harm their ability to effectively target fans as they grow.

The Melbourne Victory are aware of the issues of branding the W-League correctly, finding that balance where you avoid lesbian stereotypes that might harm their brand and the growth of soccer in Victoria. At the same time, they don’t want to swing so far from one end of the marketing spectrum that they end up on the other by using glamour shots and heavily made up super feminine women. They want to find the middle to maximize interest in fans and future female Victorian soccer players.

The Melbourne Victory are in a tough market because of the presence of so many other sports and leagues. In Canberra, the United can garner a lot more media attention because there is less competition. The United and ACT Football can get attention for food eating contests; in contrast, the Victory are lucky if they can get the scores in the newspaper. This is part of their challenge.

Attendance at Victory games is very low. When they talked of high attendance matches, they were talking about 450 people at a game. The average attendance is much lower with a number mentioned of around 250 to 300. Their most successful games have been when they have played outside of the Melbourne area.

In preparation for talking with the Melbourne Victory, I completed an overview of the size of the online community for the team. It can be found at : http://ozziesport.com/Melbourne_Victory.pdf

Related Posts:

• An interview with the CEO of the Canberra United
• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Traffic to W-League Related Wikipedia Articles by Date

Slow internet interfering with my productivity. #

Only work I have left on one bit of data collecting involves Wikipedia. Yay! Will take 2 to 3 hours tomorrow then kicking it for the day #

Friendster's search leaves something to be desired. I can't find much of anything on it. #

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Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• AFL fan community sentiment: Are fans happy or sad?
• Digital Sport Summit: Harry O’Brien
• An interview with Georgie Herbert from the Melbourne Victory

1) Case studies for how a business uses social media and the web,
2) Content studies that look at social media research and website design of a small basket of companies,
3) Sentiment analysis and keyword mentions,
4) Relationship analysis to try to determine how people interact and to identify key influencers,
5) Population studies.

Any more that people can think of? Is there any method superior to another? Should social media researchers be valuing any over the other? Which methods are more popular and why?

Related Posts:

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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

Stats for this chart were gathered using http://stats.grok.se/ .

Related Posts:

• An interview with the CEO of the Canberra United
• An interview with Georgie Herbert from the Melbourne Victory
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs

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