The growth in social media, particularly among sports fans has given rise to a sense that if you have not shared, liked or tweeted about a major event then you have not actually been there or seen it.
Heineken has chosen to mine this vein of user generated content as a key part of its strategy around sponsorship of this years Heineken Cup. It will create visual displays around Dublin using social media excerpts over the finals weekend of May 16-18 and has been capturing sentiment across twitter through a social media tracker.
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[ismember]Over the semi final weekend they measured the positive and negative sentiment of tweets along with volume and trends to reflect the activity on Twitter around the two matches games in Montpellier and London, and the four teams of Munster, Clermont Auvergne, Saracens and Toulon.
The data collected paints a colourful picture (below in infographic form) of how fans reacted to the highs and lows of both matches. It also though points out numbers which while illustrative in terms of comparison, are still dwarfed by the numbers watching on TV.
Munster fans scored one win at least by producing the largest volume of tweets – 27,919 – with Saracens supporters the least active with 17,914 tweets.
They were also the most positive being marked as 82% positive despite being beaten. The second half surge of hope clearly played a part here and indicates a bond with fans that is worth more than silverware.
Clermont, even though they won and made it to their first final, were perhaps deflated from what looked like a stroll at half time to nervous hanging on as the clock ticked down.
Jonny Wilkinson defied age and displacement by being the most popular player with his Twitter handle (@JonnyWilkinson) being used 10,734 times and a tweet in which he was photographed alongside team-mate Matt Giteau (@matt_giteau) was retweeted 385 times. Ronan O’Gara was the most popular of the Munster playuers but with less than 1,000 mentions.
“Today, so much of the conversation around sports events takes place across social media,” said Karl Donnelly of Heineken. “We recognise how important this space is. A social sentiment project like this has never been seen before in Ireland.”
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