The World Cup Has Runneth Over: A Look At Semifinalists

It is no longer possible to contain excitement over the FIFIA2010 World Cup! We are down to the wire, in the semifinals, and this weekend we will crown our champion team.

Last Friday I posted about how social media feels about the remaining 8 teams (as of that morning). I learned some interesting nuggets through my research, one of which was that Germany was the reigning champion in terms of social media share of voice. I looked at data again today, to understand if anything shifted after the top 8 played each other last Friday and Saturday. Here’s what I found (all data from 7.2.10 – 7.5.10):

Of the chatter around the four semifinalists, the majority is still about Germany:

Game day gave a lift to each team: Uruguay and Netherlands on 7.2.10, and Germany and Spain on 7.3.10, with conversation tapering off afterwards. Of all the teams, Germany had the sharpest spike, which is consistent with its share of conversation.

How do people feel about the four semifinalist teams? I applied the same sentiment analysis as I did with the last post, calculating each team’s proportion against total sentiment.

• Germany still has the highest percentage of negative sentiment at 35.88% of total negative conversation, on 36.5% of total conversation, with 29% of positive conversation
• Spain is most even-keeled with 22.4% of total negative conversation and 22.4% of total positive, on a 22.7% total conversation
• Uruguay and Netherlands had a similar sentiment breakdown, with slightly higher positive than negative sentiment.
  • Uruguay captured 24.5% of total negative sentiment and 27.6% of total positive sentiment, on a 21.9% of total conversation.
  • Netherlands captured 20.9% of total positive and 17.3% of total negative, on 19% of total conversation.

Because we do a lot of business in the EMEA, and such a huge part of our company is in Germany, (and now World Cup is shaping to be 100% European in the finals), I wanted to have some fun with social media data in German. Even prior to being acquired by Attensity, Biz360 tracked social media conversations in 16 languages, across native sources. Because Germany played this weekend against Argentina, I wanted to see if there was a difference in chatter across social media prior to Saturday’s game against Argentina vs. after the game. With the help of my German colleagues, I set up some topics around the German words for “Germany”, “German”, “World Cup”, “Futbol” and their variations. The tag cloud below measures 30 days prior to the Germany / Argentina game. It shows an equal leaning towards Germany and Brazil winning the World Cup (circled).

After the Germany / Argentina game, the discussion of winning has shifted dramatically towards Germany winning the World Cup, above any other team. The font of the tag phrase is much larger than above.

We will be measuring share of conversation, sentiment and trying to pinpoint interesting nuggets via phrase clouds, once more after the Germany / Spain game tomorrow. Our analysis will be focused on Netherlands and the winner of tomorrow’s game, as they head into the finals. Who will win? Only time will tell. We are not attempting to predict that here, as the champion wins on skill and ability to play better than the competitor, not social media popularity or “voting”. However, soccer fans are some of the most passionate fans in the world, and World Cup is THE soccer event, which guarantees lots and lots of chatter and a glimpse into how people feel about their favorite teams in the heat of soccer passion.