Analysing social media to find fan favourites

By Dev Mookerjee

Combining sophisticated analytics software and natural language processing technology, IBM can gauge positive, negative and neutral opinions shared across hundreds of thousands of social media posts.

At the Australian Open this year, IBM is providing two types of social media analysis - both accessible to the public online.

  • Daily Player Popularity Ranking - A daily updated ranking of player popularity across the entire social web on the ibm.com/Australian Open website.
  • Social Leaderboard - A realtime look at the most talked about players on Twitter on the Australian Open website

The Daily Player Popularity Dashboard is a daily snapshot of the most popular players at the Australian Open being discussed on social media. This includes all the Australian players, and the top 20 men's and women's seeded players at the tournament this year. The dashboard is updated every morning and will run for the duration of the Australian Open 2013. Post event, we will be releasing an infographic to summarise our findings.

At the backend, IBM Social Media Analytics (US) is being used to scour the entire social web including news sites, millions of blogs, forum posts, Twitter, Facebook, and video sharing sites, to isolate all player discussions during the Australian Open. Once isolated, each discussion is analysed using text mining algorithms to identify all the positive references to players.

Most Popular Players on Social Media

The Social Leaderboard is a technology that IBM has also been working closely with Tennis Australia for last couple of years. It tracks the most talked about players on Twitter and the percentage of positive and negative sentiments about them. Fans can watch their favourite players move up or down the rankings as they tweet about them in real time.

As new technology continues to change how sport is consumed by fans and media, my interests also turn to the business application of this technology and how it can change the way we interpret customer insight, particularly for today's CMOs. The same social sentiment technology being used by the Australian Open can be leveraged by organisations as a new form of market research, offering insights to help better understand and respond to consumer trends. Imagine having the ability to customise incentives and services to be more in tune with what customers are specifically asking for, using data to tailor offerings to address fast-moving trends and real-time customer needs. Or using this intelligence to guide and accelerate product development decisions with up-to-the-minute trends analysis.

The technology is already here, and Tennis Australia is reaping the benefits. How is your organization looking at using social media analytics?

Dev Mookerjee is a Business Analytics specialist with IBM Australia. You can follow him on Twitter (@mookerjee) or connect on LinkedIn.