World Cup, Vuvuzela And Fandom – Before the Final Eight

As social media and vuvuzelas reach a crescendo in the 2010 World Cup, I’m going to try to make sense of it all. This is part 1 of a multi-post series, in which I wanted to capture the top 8 teams up against each other, before they played each other. Therefore, I cut off the data this morning prior to the Netherlands vs. Brazil game — the data you see below is for the pat 30 days prior to today. I will be taking a closer look at the teams who played today and will play tomorrow, and then tracking semifinals into finals.

One of the first places I recommend to start your analysis is the social media share of voice. It’s a great way to immediately compare yourself to your competitors across a specific timeframe. I tracked the 8 teams against each other over the past 30 days to give us the best idea of the composite social media achievements across the duration of the competition:

As you can see, Germany is leading the pack with the volume of conversation (across all channels: blogs, microblogs, online news, video, discussion forums), at 20% of total. Next closest talked about team is Brazil, followed by Argentina and Spain. This is very interesting, as some of the other populations are larger than that of Germany — just goes to show that fandom is truly universal. But is the high volume of conversation always a good thing? As with the American Idol example of Siobhan Magnus, high volume of conversation is no indication of favorability of conversation. To really dig into how we feel about these teams, I compiled some sentiment stats.

To compare negative and positive sentiment across the 8 teams, I added up all the positives and negatives, and then expressed each team’s positive and negatives as percentages of the total. Most teams’ positive and negative %s were fairly close to each other and that team’s overall share; I looked for largest discrepancies first.  The largest gap between positive and negative, in favor of positive was Uruguay: the team garnered 12.66% of total positive mentions vs. 9.57% of total negative mentions, on a 9% of total share of conversation (keep in mind that this data does not reflect today’s social media chatter, which definitely seemed to slam Uruguay due to the results of its game against Ghana). The largest gap in favor of negative sentiment was Argentina: it garnered 17.13% of all negative and 11.3% of all positive, on a 14.9% of total mentions. Most of the other teams fell somewhere in the middle:

More positive than negative:

• Spain got 16.59% of total positive sentiment and 14.5% of total negative, on a 14.4% of total conversation
• Paraguay got 8.73% of total positive sentiment and 5.79% of total negative, on a 6.1% of total conversation
• Netherlands got 8% of total positive sentiment and 6% of negative on 6.8% of total conversation
• Ghana got 12% of total positive sentiment and 11.8% of negative on a 11.15% of total conversation

More negative than positive:

• Germany got 16.9% of total positive sentiment and 20% of total negative on 20.2% of total conversation
• Brazil got 13.75% of total positive sentiment and 15.27% of total negative on a 17.45% of total conversation

If you read this blog, you know I love tag clouds — the Attensity360 tag phrase report allows you to zero in on the most germane topics for your chosen keywords. I thumbed through the reports for all of the teams, and the largest single nugget was the huge amount of chatter about Spain winning. Apparently, EA declared Spain to win against Brazil in the FIFA 2010 finals, via a game simulation engine, and this story got picked up by blogs and tweets the world over. Since we know Brazil already got knocked out this morning, I wonder how accurate this simulation engine is, and what the methodology is. Portion of the tag cloud is displayed below:

What did the chatter look like over time? Very very “spikey”, driven by game events (see below). Ghana and Germany appear to be the hottest contested topics, with

For a follow up post on how Ghana, Brazil, Uruguay and Netherlands fared today, as well as how Germany fared against Argentina, and Paraguay vs. Spain tomorrow, check out our subsequent posts! We will even have an analysis of Germany vs. Argentina before and after tomorrow’s game — in German!