Ozzie Sport

friendster is small social networks.  Alexa ranks it as the 685th most popular site on the Internet and the 1,483th most popular site in Australia.  It is not nearly as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but is more popular than bebo and appears to have a slightly more active community.  In 2009, friendster was acquired by an Asian company and sought a more Asian audience and worked to improve the mobile version of the site.  Given that, the direction of the site, if Australian and Kiwi sport teams are looking at friendster, it should probably be with an eye towards growing their Asian audience.  This focus would not necessarily lend itself to women’s sport outside of soccer.

Despite the potentially limiting audience and best approach to using the site, it is worth looking at as the more sites examined, the greater the understanding of how Australian and Kiwi women sport fandom exist on the Internet.

One of the ways friendster fosters communities is through groups.  There are several Australian sport related groups, including one for the Socceroos with over a hundred members and one for the Melbourne Victory with over sixty.   While this community for men’s sport exist, the same does not appear to be true for women.

Searching friendster groups is done by country.  For this, search was conducted for Australian groups.  If quotation marks are not used, every group that mentions any of those terms is used.  That means that pages and pages of search results need to be sorted through or quotation marks need to be used in order to improve search results.  This is not ideal as many women’s sport teams use common words or have multiple names, if sponsor names are considered.  The results below give an idea as to how this plays out.

Related Posts:

• Ecademy and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Bebo and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• 43 Things and Australian women’s sport

ecademy is a small social network for business professionals that is an alternative to LinkedIn. It has a small number of people connected to Australian sport. In using and evaluating ecademy, it should be looked at from the perspective of using it liked in: Developing a network of employees, volunteers and athletes who can help network with other professionals to bring in an audience of potential sponsors and higher income bracket fans.

Given the nature of ecademy, the total number of people who have clubs listed in their profiles should not be gauged as a representation of fandom on the network. Rather, it should be looked at as industry professionals who want to be affiliated with the club or league.

One of the challenges involved with measuring membership on ecademy is that team sport names may not be the name of organization that runs the club or league. This could possibly exclude some people actually connected to them. For example, in the W-League, most teams are run by the state football associations, not by a specific organization with the club’s name in the title.

The table below gives an idea as to the historical size of the Australian and Kiwi women’s sport community on the network.

Related Posts:

• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• 43 Things and Australian women’s sport
• Care2 and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• BlackPlanet and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport

care2 is a small social network dedicated to people who are interested in making a difference. There is a small population of Australians and Australian sport fans on the network. The network is interesting because it allows its users to blog, create petitions, join groups and upload photos. Despite being a niche network for activist, it has all the features that most social networks have an its users take advantage of them to post about their own interests. The type of user here is different than some of the other types of fans online and given their activist interest, they might be worth courting as they may provide positive brand associations if their activist work matches with the philosophy of the team.

While the Socceroos may have four mentions in blogs and the Fremantle Dockers have twenty-four, Australian women’s sport do not fair nearly as well.

Related Posts:

• Friendster and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• 43 Things and Australian women’s sport
• Data dump: Australian sport on bebo

blogger is a popular blog hosting site. Many popular Australian and sports blogs use it. In the United States, the site also has high press visibility because of its inclusion in Google’s blog search and the number or journalists using Google Alerts, which pulls its notifications from Google’s blog search. The reliance on blogspot has been decreasing as people have eased away from blogging or switched to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The Australian sport population is smaller than that of Bebo but larger than that of 43 Things. For example, Collingwood had 68 fans on bebo and 7 people with Collingwood related goals on 43 Things. Blogger has 22.

Beyond the press reliance on using blogger as a source, another thing that makes a blogger audience desirable is that the format encourages people to write more. That additional content should encourage people to be more thoughtful and create dialogs around the team that they are blogging about. Theoretically, the longer and more prolonged the engagement that fans have regarding their team, the more likely they are to reaffirm their relationship with the team.

Sadly, the size of the Australian and Kiwi women’s sport community on blogger is non-existent when compared to their male counterparts. The lone fan of the Matildas is a male from South Australia.

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

43 things is a goal setting community found at www.43things.com/.  Compared to professional sports for men, the women related goals are less likely to exist and less likely to involve a component that expresses fandom such as a desire to buy a shirt or attend a championship match.  This presents two issues.  First, the number of goals related to women’s sport is less than men’s: There is clearly a gap in interest levels between men and men’s sport that needs to be addressed.  Beyond that, it highlights the idea that women’s sport does not have the built in spectatorship that men’s sport has and people do not identify as clearly as fans of these teams.

The table below begins to give an idea as to the amount of interest in randomly selected women’s clubs, leagues and athletes on 43things over time.  As you can see, there isn’t. For comparisons sake, the Fremantle Dockers have 5 goals, the Collingwood Magpies have 6, Hawthorn Hawks have 4 and the Melbourne Storm have 2.

It appears, based on the audience using the site, that growing the women’s sport related goals in an organic manner, done with out deliberation on the part of various stakeholders, appears unlikely.  There is barely an audience for men and the Australian population using the site is much smaller than on other networks.

Related Posts:

• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)

This is an updated version of from November 13 , November 16 and November 18.

If there is anyone missing, please let me know. I’m always happy to improve this list. I feel like there are probably more roller derby accounts out there that I’m missing. I also feel like there should be more Kiwi women on the list that I’m just not seeing. If anyone knows a good place to begin to find either group, please comment.

If anyone wants the list of followers for these accounts and all the public information that you basically see in the list below, please let me know and I will be happy to send you a csv file containing that information. I’m just hesitant to upload it as I only have so much bandwidth and I have about 805 files with follower information.

The biggest movers on this list appear to be ItsStephRice, RochelleGilmore, Sally_Fitz, gypsy_gilmore, libby_trickett who have all gained 50+ followers. This contrasts with kristy_giteau, MelissaBreen_, muirsop, TheFlyingBats, saltydolls, samikennedy, SportingSheilas, watsonjessica who all lost between 1 and 3 followers, which if you think about it isn’t that many followers.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)

Yeah, it is that time again! I’ve added about 10 new accounts to this list. They were mostly journalists, people I saw referenced on my Twitter feeds or people that were mentioned in the comments of my previous post. There are a few that where the accounts to have been deleted or otherwise just did not get counted and those are just left off this list rather than be signified with a 0. This is an updated version of Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (version 2), October 4 and October 11, November 11, November 16 and November 18. If I’m missing anyone or anything, let me know.

For probably 99% of these, I have a list of all the person’s followers. If you want to see that information, please let me know and I will be happy to send you the csv with that information.