Ozzie Sport

This is mostly for my own interest. Data for these sites is because I have a script to automatically fetch this information. Foursquare is when I have identified games. Alexa and Twitter are gotten daily. Facebook is every third day. Trying to determine a schedule for ebay.

Any thoughts? Are the results for the most popular and least popular teams who you would have predicted?

1. Alexa site Australian rank data was from February 14, 2011. The Australian rank was subtracted from 35,000 in order to award high ranking teams with more points.
2. Totals are based on total checkins to the NAB Cup games played on February 11, 2011.
3. Twitter totals are from February 14, 2011 and count total followers to the official team Twitter account.
4. Facebook totals are from the official fanpage. Data was gathered on February 13, 2011.
5. Ebay data is based on http://ozziesport.com/2011/02/australian-sport-on-ebay/ that post. When team info was not available, it was searched for on February 14, 2011.

Related Posts:

• Australian sport on ebay
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)
• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia

I have a new toy.  I can get the total number of search results for various terms on ebay.com.au.  This can be useful around periods of controversy as it helps to better understand how say the market responds from a seller’s perspective.  Do people start listing items when people make the news?  Or do they take them off the ebay market because they worry they won’t sell?  Do listings fall on the weekends?  Do they increase on the weekdays?  Is there a natural range for some teams and athletes where there is a consistent number of items for sale?  So yeah.  I have a shiny new toy.

One of the problems with using search result totals is there is no pressure to normalize the use of a team.  This normalization happens on delicious, LiveJournal and blogger.  If you don’t use the most popular form, you won’t be found.  eBay doesn’t have that same issue.  People can put whatever they want with out the same pressure to normalize the language in their listings.  This makes it much harder to get an accurate population count for the total number of items related to a sport, league, club or athlete.

Despite the limitations presented by doing search, I’m interested anyway.  I compiled a list of search terms related to Australian and New Zealand sport.  The complete list of search results can be found below.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)

In a recent post, I talked about what I saw as the importance of the GWS Giants in developing a local fanbase.  This post is another that explores the geography of Australian Football League fandom as a function of geography.

This post is based on data gathered using the following methodology:

1. Develop a list of  AFL related Twitter accounts and sort them by team.  Remove all AFL accounts that cannot be connected to a team.
2. Get a lot of the followers for all those sport related Twitter accounts.   (This process takes a while.  I can only use one Twitter API code set.  This limits the number of calls I can make to something like 150 or 350 per hour.  For each of those individual calls, I can get information on one page of a account’s followers.  Each page consists of about 20 followers.  This means the whole run took about a week and it started on January 18.)
3. Cross reference User inputted locations to actual Australian city locations .
4. Combine all followers by sportinto one file.  Remove duplicate entries so that if, for example Person X follows  @stkildafc, and @zacd_6 Person X gets counted once for Australian Rules, not two times.
5. Count the total number of followers by AFL team and by city.
6. Combine the total number of followers by sport with all the cities in the electorate the city is from.  For this analysis, that data can be found at Australian city location to electorates .  This list was created using the official list of Australian polling places by electorate.  The following cities were left off the totals: Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra.  These cities were left off because they would skew the results as people that say they are living in Melbourne are actually probably living in a different suburb.  (The CBD of these centers is very tiny.  There are probably more people claiming to live in Melbourne on Twitter than actually living in Melbourne CBD proper.)  If a town is included in multiple electorates, it is counted in all those electorates: Brunswick and Brunswick East  are counted for both Melbourne and Wills.

The complete totals for the results above are available at Australian Twitter Sports Electorates Report. The raw data is too large to easily upload.  If you would like access to it, please leave a comment.

Related Posts:

• Australian sport on ebay
• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Has there been a population shift for the AFL on Dreamwidth Studios since June?

As an American, I have an obsession with the geography of sport.  City is fundamental to my identity.  I’m from the Chicago area and my sporting loyalties are based on that.  My sport team rivals are based on geography.  The Chicago Bears are going to play the Green Bay Packers in an NFL playoff game.  This geography based rivalry is more important then winning the Super Bowl.  We cannot lose to our hated neighbors to the north! (They wear cheese on their heads for pete’s sake!)

This concept of geography of sport is why I constantly want to look at location over other Australian based sporting numbers.  I’m that ugly American sort that some Australians don’t like because I feel like if I explain to you my reasons as to why geography should matter more to Australian sport, you’ll finally get it!  (And if you don’t get it, I clearly need to explain it to you more.)

Greater Western Sydney is one of the places where I occassionally get obsessed with geography, even if I don’t post about it.  Today, I decided that I should post about it and went about getting the data to do that.  First, I got a list of all of GWS related tweets.  These tweets came from archives I had on TwapperKeeper.  Beyond the GWS specific Twitter lists, I pulled the #AFL tagged tweets and then filtered out all the tweets that did not mention GWS or Giants.  I ended up with a list of around 996 tweets or so when all the lists were combined.  I then compared the user names with city/state/location information I had in order to attempt to match the tweets with a location.  The list I have to match is pretty huge, with Twitter user information from well over 1 million different user names.  When user names were matched up, I had 621 tweets that I had a location for.  (That’s pretty good as I normally get around 10 to 40% unknowns when looking at some follower lists.)  I mapped these on the map below.

After that, I got the follower information for @GWS_Giants.  They had 1,923 followers.  I had Australian city information for 1,057 of them. (In both cases, I removed all non-Australian cities.) I added these to the map below.

The purpose of this map?  It is to determine regional interest in the team.  My supposition, as that annoying ugly American who believes regional barracking is key to a club’s success, is that for the team to succeed, most of their support has to be based in New South Wales and the ACT.  I was pleasantly surprised at the number one city for Tweet location.  That appears to signal the team has done a decent job of attracting local interest in terms of getting locals to Tweet about the team.  Then I looked at where followers came from… and the problems seemed to be a bit bigger.  The GWS Giants’s market doesn’t really factor into their top Australian cities for attracting followers: Only 6 of their top 20 cities are in New South Wales or the ACT.  Ouch.  Other states just completely over represent.  To me, this signals problems in that their current target audience isn’t as large as the less relevant audience.  (Translation: Who cares if some one in Hobart follows the team unless the Hobart follower attends matches and buys merchandise?)

View full map

So a question: Do you think that the geography of the GWS Giants Twitter followers and Tweeters matters? Is this data relevant in analyzing how successful the club has been in garnering local support? Does the geographic spread surprise others?

Related Posts:

• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• Greater Western Sydney Giants and ACT4GWS
• Fundamental problems in the GWS Giants fanbase?
• Australian and New Zealand sport relationships on Twitter

I was originally going to rewrite my rather critical in a frustrated way piece to make it a bit less critical, more constructive. Then I got a chance to talk to some one at the GWS Giants and I better understood some of the thinking that went on. The decisions made aren’t ones that I would have made (switching domains, not deleting the old Facebook page right away and doing a major push to get new followers, the colors, not engaging the online community as much, launching with a website that wasn’t mobile friendly, waiting close to a month to delete the older Facebook page that had 2,000 more followers) but I better understand why these things happened. Given the issues with the colors and the AFL, their decisions made sense. I’d love to compare them to the Gold Coast Suns but the Suns had a name and colors after competing in the VFL for a season. The Suns also had the advantage of continuity with the name because they could be called the Gold Coast Football Club and the Gold Coast Suns; sharing those two names means they didn’t have to destroy their previous branding.

I have a lot of data regarding the GWS Giants. I’m not sure exactly how to construct them into a workable dissertation chapter as things are harder when you’re using a quantitative methodology. I can put context to some of my numbers, such as a bump in the number of new followers on Facebook and Twitter, and increased ranking on Alexa. That correlates to the announcement regarding the colo(u)rs and team name. There are some things I still can’t explain like those pesky Facebook demographics. (And they haven’t changed to be more aligned with other clubs’s demographic profiles on Facebook.)

Most of data involves a great deal of continuity. Names don’t change. Domains don’t change. Facebook fan pages don’t change. (Or they do but the old one was a profile page and the new one is a fan page. The profile page doesn’t get replaced so much as made redundant and it generally has fewer friends than the fan page.) When you’re doing quantitative analysis, continuity is very important. Audiences take a while to build up at a location. New groups/pages/domains are obviously going to start off smaller and then build. Those new pages basically are like hitting the reset button data gathering wise. You can still get useful data out of it but it requires a great deal more qualitative analysis and contextualizing to make it work. That sort of thing has never really been my goal. (And it is ultimately why I probably don’t want to work for a club or league.) I’m not necessarily as interested in how this textual treatment changes the numbers so much as I’m interested in community demographics and mass behaviors. Part of the goal of my dissertation is to prove that a quantitative approach is a valid one for studying fan communities. Change like the kind that took place means I’ve got to deviate methodology wise in order to write a chapter on the early development of the GWS Giants fandom.

Moving on…

… as some one living in Canberra, my perspective on the situation is probably a bit different than Sydney and Melbourne footy fans because of local media coverage. We didn’t get the Sydney perspective on colors and naming decisions here. Instead, our coverage was focused on the ACT4GWS movement. The goal was get 5,000 Canberrans to become members, to signal to the AFL that the ACT fanbase was committed to having a team here. There were big banners with the domain name at a couple of ovals, little post card things asking people to become members at many locations around the ACT, and television ads featuring the team’s famous coach. After a while, I tuned this messaging out.

The whole team reveal felt disappointing in the end. Canberra wasn’t even on the jersey. The colors didn’t connect with the ACT. (We love green here. Or blue and gold.)

As some one who one follows social media and knows enough about what works, I was even more disappointed by ACT4GWS, the local social media campaign to promote AFL in the ACT. Social media takes work and sometimes money to do right. I’d almost rather they hadn’t created a Twitter account and Facebook account because they didn’t do it right. They didn’t reach out to any of the major bloggers. The campaign’s Twitter account didn’t interact with its followers. They couldn’t get Canberrans to follow them on Twitter. (As of November 21, the movement had 96 followers, 43 of whom were from the ACT. Amongst all AFL accounts on that date, 573 Canberrans had been identified.) ACT4GWS didn’t host any tweet ups. They didn’t use Foursquare to promote local events. The content they put out was really generic. At times, it felt aimed more at the local media than it was at the Canberran community. (Who was that for? Couldn’t they have just called the Times and provided Canberran AFL fans with more content social media fans desire?) I just wasn’t engaged in a way that made me feel like this was for me as an AFL fan living in Canberra looking for a “local” side to support.

Social media is supposed to be fun and interactive. This was not. Most importantly, social media is supposed to help attain institutional objectives and I can’t see how their implementation connected with getting more people to pay $50 to become members. Frustrating. Frustrating. The blame for this clearly lays with local AFL people, with Canberran organizers, and not with GWS people in Sydney. So these issues I had as a Canberran fan are not the fault of who I was kind of blaming. My bad.

I have the quantitative data to do an okay chapter on ACT4GWS. Here, there is continuity. Here, it makes much more sense to focus. If I’m going to do a chapter on about the Giants, that’s where it feels like the data would be best contextualized. I can bring the Giants into it in the context of the club’s Canberran fan base.

Related Posts:

• Fundamental problems in the GWS Giants fanbase?
• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• Why I’ve been hesitant to criticize Greater Western Sydney
• A map of Team GWS on Facebook

For the past month or two, one of the Australian sport clubs I’ve talked most about via instant messenger services and e-mail, on the phone with a few acquaintances and in person with anyone who will listen to me is Greater Western Sydney. I’ve talked about their web strategy, their Twitter strategy, their off line engagement strategy, how they’ve reached out to Canberra, their team colours (or color if you’re American like me) and team name, their Facebook strategy.

I just haven’t blogged much about it beyond GWS Giants web traffic performance and Fundamental problems in the GWS Giants fanbase?. I’ve been intending to write a chapter on them for my dissertation. (I just haven’t been able to find the motivation to do that.) I’ve had a few conversations about why I’m not doing the blogging thing given all my obvious issues. The reasons are many: I might like the AFL to hire me when I graduate and I’d really rather not piss them off by being highly critical of their engagement strategies. (This was countered with: But what about academic honesty? Isn’t that inherently dishonest not to publish results because they are unfavorable? I’m not even sure how to answer that. True but not right?) I’ve argued that I would rather be some what clinical and have as much data as possible to support my conclusions. (I honestly haven’t done much research about the market implications of jersey color selection and the sale of merchandise/size of a fandom. ) I’ve argued that I can really only tell things three ways: Glowing praise, neutral/dispassionately with data to support my possibly unfavorable conclusions, tactless and attacking. Given my issues, I was stuck on the third one as I just don’t feel constitutionally able to set aside what I see as some major fail. I’ve also argued that I’ve been trying to get a hold of Greater Western Sydney to provide context for their actions so I can be more fair. (I’ve called several times. I’ve e-mailed a number of times. I’ve even used their feedback form. I’ve never heard back.) I’ve also argued that the one time that I did get to meet with GWS people, my advice seemed to be summarily ignored and a promised follow up never happened. I was later told by third parties that the GWS people I met with were not interested in numbers, didn’t have enough of a grasp of social media to understand what I was talking about… oh and yeah, one of the people I met wanted to do a PhD in a similar area as me. Thus, providing GWS with additional data and analysis that would fall on deaf ears? Not interested in it. I’d rather have my private discussions. I’ve also been avoiding blogging about the GWS Giants because my department has a relationship with them. I don’t want to be critical of their social media performance because I don’t want to spoil any potentially good work that my department may do with them. That would not only hurt my relationship with the GWS Giants and the AFL, but with my department.

I’ve also hesitated because I feel like I’m at a disadvantage. I’m an American who has been in Australia all of 9 months. I only started researching the AFL about a year ago. I’m a female operating in what I see as a traditionally male dominated space. Whine whine whine. In talking to some people who haven’t read my blog and seen the research I do and who don’t understand social media, I feel like this puts me at a disadvantage because who is this pushy American female who comes in and tries to tell Australians about their national game?

To a degree, I sometimes feel goaded into speaking my mind (even if I don’t actually post). Several people have told me to ignore my issues and insecurities and go for it. I’ve done that in the past. I’ve lived to regret it. There are certain people you don’t criticize in public because the consequences are that bad. There are certain people you avoid criticizing in private as you don’t want it to get back to them. I always fear when I am goaded into things, that I won’t have any support or that having promised support will cost people and I hate seeing people punished because of me. It makes me hesitant to do so.

The reasons why I don’t criticize Greater Western Sydney are similar to why I don’t criticize other sport teams and athletes. These reasons are why I tend to post tables full of data and dissertation chapter type material, and material where there largely appears to be a positive takeaway (or possibly funny, if I can write that post on Shane Warne and Elizabeth Hurley.). Is this hesitancy good for my research? I don’t know. By not criticizing, I could gain access to people and insight I might not otherwise. If I do, the research could be better.

There are no easy answers and I’ve yet to get over myself.

Related Posts:

• Greater Western Sydney Giants and ACT4GWS
• Australian sport on ebay
• Twitter popularity of AFL teams by electorate
• GWS Giants web traffic performance

Eventually, I’m going to do a paper looking at the development of the fandom for the GWS Giants online.  In the mean time, I’ll probably just dribble out some data context and analysis free.  The table below includes Alexa Rankings for GWS Giants related sites and for the Gold Coast Suns.  The Suns are offered as a counterpoint to see how another new club is doing.  Australian Alexa Rankings only appear if the site appears as a top 100,000 site in the country.

For a period of a few months, the Giant’s Australian rankings just disappeared.  Relaunching with a new domain meant that it took a couple of days before the site appeared again.  The domain switch probably contributes to the disappearance of their old site.  The lack of ranking probably hints a bit that the club neglected to promote (or successfully) promote their website in the lead up to the announcement and with their GWS for ACT campaign.

Related Posts:

• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• Australian sport on ebay
• Twitter popularity of AFL teams by electorate
• GWS Giants on Twitter: Follower location versus Tweet location

I love demographics. I try to get demographic information when I can. There aren’t many official numbers regarding the exact percentage of female fans for the AFL but the general rule of thumb appears to be that the AFL has always had more female fans than the NRL. The AFL numbers tend to estimate the female fanbase as being 33 to 50% of all fans for the AFL. The NRL numbers tend to suggest the female fanbase tends to top out at around 10%.

The difference between the traditional AFL fan composition and the NRL fan composition should work in the AFL’s favor as it attempts to put another team into the Sydney area: They aren’t competing for the same fans (women) and the AFL has a much larger pool to draw from (the other half of the population).

That said, this doesn’t appear to be the case. Facebook’s numbers suggest that only 18.8% of the GWS Giants fans are women. Let’s compare this to the Sydney Swans, where Facebook says the percentage of female fans is 38.2%. That 20% is a huge difference. GWS Giant’s female participation is much closer to the NRL than the AFL numbers. This suggests to me that something is fundamentally off here. Heck, it suggests that rather than catering to a new market of sport fans that weren’t interested in the NRL that the GWS Giants are actually competing with the NRL for market share. If that’s the case, it is a recipe for disaster for the Giants.

(As an aside, the historical observational NRL numbers may not hold up to the situation online. The Wests Tigers community on Facebook? It is 40.5% female.)

There is another thing that feels completely off to me and suggests a fundamental problem with how the GWS Giants are marketing themselves: Lesbians are under represented. On the whole for both the AFL and NRL, female lesbian fans tend to outnumber their gay male counterparts. GWS Giants? Not the case. Lesbian fans make up 0.5% of all their fans and gay men make up 3.8%. To offer perspective on Facebook, the Sydney Swans have lesbians make up 3.3% of all fans (where orientation is known) and gay men make up 1.2% of all fans. Again, this suggests some fundamental problem in marketing. I just don’t have the historical understanding to explain why.

There was a big push to promote Team GWS in Canberra. People talked about how the team would basically be a home side AFL club for Canberra. It looks like part of this plan went pear shaped. Canberrans make up only 8.5% of the total GWS Giants fans on Facebook. If an eye is turned towards Twitter instead? GWS is not even in the top ten for most popular teams that Canberrans follow. Victorian Bushrangers, ACT Brumbies, Cadel Evans, New South Wales Blues, St. George Illawarra Dragons, Canberra Raiders, Wests Tigers, Wallabies, Parramatta Eels, Collingwood Magpies, Stephanie Rice, Cycling Australia, Melbourne Demons, Sydney Swans, Cricket Australia, South Sydney Rabbitohs, Queensland Reds, Gold Coast Titans, Socceroos, Eamon Sullivan, Gold Coast Football Club, Western Force, Penrith Panthers, New South Wales Waratahs, Canberra Cycling Club, Geelong Cats are all more popular. To give this perspective, the ACT Brumbies have 238 Canberran followers compared to GWS Giants’s 60. The Giants are smashed between Geelong at 66 and Hawthorn at 59. The team doesn’t appear to have generated much real interest in Canberra. This should be a concern if GWS is looking get into the merchandise market as they don’t appear to have a position anywhere close to the major teams based in the city. This is another fundamental problem that needs to be addressed if the club is really serious about Canberra.

Related Posts:

• Greater Western Sydney Giants and ACT4GWS
• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• A new week, another St Kilda controversy
• Twitter popularity of AFL teams by electorate