The Olympic Neon Yellow Shoe Fetish

Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

If you’ve been watching Olympics track and field and you haven’t noticed the florescent yellow and green shoes, the first thing on your to-do list today should be to visit your opthamologist.

You may have even missed the 9.63 seconds it took for Usain Bolt to capture gold in the men’s 100 meter final, because you were focused on those bright yellow/green shoes that seem to suck you in no matter how hard to try not to look at them. Those shoes are the brain child of Nike, a company that is NOT an official sponsor of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

As you can see from the word cloud based on emotions expressed in social media over the last few days, the most common emotion expressed towards those shoes is positive. Whether people describe it as love, best, awesome, beautiful, or something else, people do love the shoes. Of course, you have to also notice words like shocking, monstrosities, horrified, yuck, wtf, and ugh so it isn’t all positive. When all of the sentiment about the shoes is analyzed, we end up with a profile that is 32% positive, 57% neutral, and only 11% negative. Though I’d like to pull more people out of the neutral zone and put them into the positive zone, that still sounds like success to me.

Those of us who watching the Olympics on television are seeing these flaming hot shoes as blurry yellow dots. You can’t see a logo on the shoe. You can’t see any branding at all. You just see yellow. Clearly, the shoes are making a statement but do consumers know what that statement is, what brand the shoes are?

We ran a second word cloud, one incorporating any mentions of brand names. You can instantly see that consumers do indeed know who made those shoes. There are no mentions of Adidas or Puma or any other brand of shoe. Consumers have done their homework and searched the internet to find out. It’s Nike all the way across the sky. And how do consumers rate Nike on this achievement? Across all of the verbatims where consumers recognize that Nike is the creator, 8% of the verbatims are negative, 52% are neutral, and 40% are positive.

Is Nike regretting not being an official sponsor of the games? I highly doubt it.

Who beats China and the USA on the Olympics leader board?

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

As it stands right now, the People’s Republic of China is in a near dead heat with the United States of America for the largest number of Olympic medals. But is that a fair comparison?

For a statistician, population counts mean everything. When we consider the number of medals won by each country as a ratio of their population size, the USA and China are not even close to the top of the pack.

Grenada, with its single medal and a population of just over 100 000, blows all other countries out of the water. Four medals and a population of just over 2 million, puts Slovenia firmly in second place.

Canada is in 34th place, USA is in 45th place, and China is in 57th place. And our fine host, Great Britain, sits nicely in 15th place.

Firmly in last place sits India with just one medal and a population of more than a billion people.

For my money, I’m betting on Grenada. Go Grenada!

SuperBowl, BrandBowl, and now the OlympicsBowl

Friday, August 3rd, 2012

1. Any Brands Mentioned 2. Any brands mentioned along with aquatics 3. Any brands mentioned along with cycling

In the game of sports, the fastest time, the heaviest weight, or the most intricate footwork determines the winning athlete.

In the game of branding, there are many determinants of who won the game. Sometimes, the shear amount of money spent on a campaign will result in it being the winning brand. But does that pan out when we look at the Olympics? Let’s have a quick look at which brands are getting mentioned most often in the social media space.

For this project, we collected and analyzed hundreds of thousands of social media comments. We measured brands ranging from restaurants to retailers, automotive companies to financial companies, food to beverage to home care products.

In Word Cloud #1, we can see which brands are mentioned most often across the entire Olympics dataset. Google is the clear winner here even though they have spend $0 on sponsoring the olympics. In a close race behind come iPhone, Yahoo, and Apple, more brands that are not sponsors of the Olympics.

In Word Cloud #2, we look at the brands mentioned when people are talking about aquatics sports at the Olympics. Google once again is the clear winner with Yahoo, iPhone and Android following close behind. Paying sponsors? Nope.

Finally, in Word Cloud #3, we look only at verbatims related to cycling events. In this case, the iPhone is the clear winner, followed by Adidas and BMW. Finally! Adidas is indeed an official sponsor.

It makes you wonder. Do companies really need to officially sponsor the Olympics? Maybe Adidas thinks so. I think not.

Olympics Sentiment on Facebook: Positive Thoughts Only Please!

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

Those of us who do social media research know that the kinds of opinions you see in Facebook are often very different from what you see in Twitter, YouTube, or any other website. People gravitate towards the websites that best suit their personality which means every website has its own Olympic vibe.

In the traditional world of market research, you can look at this as a sampling exercise. If you don’t consider the opinions from one group of people, your research results will incorporate a massive confound.

This chart demonstrates just how severe that confound can be. Facebook, the first website in the chart, contains the largest collection of positive verbatims. Specifically, 49% of Facebook verbatims are positive vs just 14% negative. However, among the full list of websites shown here, between 16% and 49% of the verbatims are positive, a huge range of 33 points. And, between 3% and 27% of the verbatims are negative, a range of 24 points.

Perhaps another way to look at this is if you want to read something nice and be happy, go analyze Facebook. But, if you want to be a Negative Nelly, then head on over to Topix.com.

Battle of the Olympics Television Networks

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

As much as many of us are enjoying following the trials and tribulations of the Olympic athletes, many of us are also bemoaning the television coverage.

Tape delays mean that some people have to wait five or six hours before they can watch an event. Tape delays also mean that sometimes the event results are released before the event has aired and the final results are spoiled.

And what about coverage? Can you find the sports you want to watch when you want to watch them? Is it in the  level of detail that you wanted to see those sports?

The end result is that everyone has their favorite channel to watch. Whether it’s the channel showing the most Olympic events around the clock, or the channel that pays just minimal attention by reporting only final results, you know where to go for your daily dose.

In this chart, which maps the social media sentiment of hundreds of thousands of online comments, we can quickly see which networks are winning the Network Olympics.

Right off the bat, we NBC with the largest circle in the upper left corner. The large circle means that they are enjoying the largest volume of conversations. Unfortunately, they are also enjoying the smallest percentage of positive messages and the largest percentage of negative messages. Sorry NBC. You’re clearly in last place.

However, the race for first place is tight. Many networks are in the ideal quadrant where the percentage of positive messages is high and the percentage of negative messages is low – Bottom Right. Fox and CTV fight it out for the optimum position with the highest number of positive messages and the lowest number of negative messages, but neither of them can compete with the volume of conversations that BBC has.

So who won the medals? Drum roll please….  The Bronze goes to Fox, the Silver to ESPN, and the Gold goes to BBC.

The Good and the Bad: It’s All Relative at the London 2012 Olympics

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

Are you watching the Olympics on tape delay wondering why there are empty seats in the arena? Are you wondering what that crazy tower in front of the stadium is all about? Are you curious about some of the unbelievably fast times?

If so, you’re like many of us who are noticing much more than just the events and the athletes. And, since many of us are posting those questions and comments in the social media space, why don’t we just dive right in and take a little look see at those conversations.

The chart you see here plots just a few of those events in terms of how many people are talking about them in social media (the vertical axis) as well as how happy people are when they talk about about the event (the horizontal axis).

So far, the most positive event has been the opening ceremonies with both the most chatter and the most positive chatter. The cauldron itself, though marred by disappointment because people can’t actually get to it, is still quite positive. It’s nice to be sitting in the top right quadrant where the world view is green and gold.

On the other hand, the empty seats in the stadiums, the tape delays for those of us across the pond, and yet more doping speculations, are struggling to gain positive mentions. And though the OrbitTower is generally being received well, it’s not benefiting from very much chatter. It’s not so nice to be sitting in the quadrants of red where chatter is negative or where chatter is low volume.

Join the Conversition team over the next two weeks as we notice the little, and the not so little things, happening at the London Olympic Games. We’d love to hear what events you’d like to see added to the chart!

Who Cares if The Olympics are Almost Here?

Monday, February 8th, 2010

With the Olympics just days away, you would think that there would a lot of excitement in the air. We gathered over 30 000 opinions from across the internet to see for ourselves.

Just a few months back in August, about 23% of people expressed excitement and anticipation about the forthcoming Olympics. But, 75% of opinions expressed disinterest, and about 2% weren’t anticipating them at all.That’s not a good showing for a global event but let’s give folks the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe things have changed in recent days? We evaluated opinions from just the last few days to check. A few more opinions express anticipation now, but the rate has only increased from 23% to 32%. That still leaves us with about 63% of opinions expressing disinterest, and another 6% who just wish the Olympics were over.

Where are some of the negative opinions based?

• Unfortunately, some of the Olympic venues have been experiencing unusually warm weather leading to the trucking in of snow. This does not look good for an event that is trying to portray an image of environmental consciousness.
• People are taking notice of a TV ad in which Michael Phelps is seen swimming to the winter Olympics, a sport that only takes place during the summer Olympics.  Perhaps the intended humor didn’t reach the target audience.
• Some resorts have had financial difficulties and this could cause headaches for travelers.

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Regardless, let’s hope that the neutral opinions quickly sway positive and that Mother Nature cooperates.