SuperBowl Social Sentiment

I’ve been so busy here in San Francisco this week covering the IBM SmartCamp finals that I’ve not paid nearly enough attention to one of my favorite subjects this time of year, NFL Footbal.

Never mind that I dumbly booked a trip back to Austin smack dab in the middle of the SuperBowl (thankfully I’ll be flying JetBlue, so I’m optimistic I’ll catch Madonna and the full second half of the game at 35,000 feet).

But before we ever get to the actual gridiron action, IBM has once again partnered with the University of South California Annenberg Innovation Lab to conduct a little social media smackdown analysis prior to the main event.

Overnight results of Super Bowl Twitter buzz drove Giants quarterback Eli Manning’s ‘T score’ for positive sentiment ahead of Tom Brady. Manning now leads with 66% vs. Brady’s 61%, which represents an 8-point shift compared to the previous day.

Specifically, they’ve already analyzed one million Tweets to determine which of the two quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Eli Manning, are the social media fan favorites.

Thus far, it’s very close, and really depends on when you take the pulse, but to date, the Giants’ Eli Manning has a slight edge at 66% positive sentiment, compared to Tom Brady’s 61%.  But that’s an 8-point shift from the prior day, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, on the virtual sidelines, Giants head coach Tom Coughlin has a 76% positive rating, above both all the other players and coaches on both teams.

As you look into the rest of the roster, it’s the wide receivers getting all the attention, with Wes Welker #1 in positive sentiment, and Victor Cruz a close 2^nd.

This analysis, of course, though in all good fun, demonstrates the powerful influence social media are having on organizations, companies, governments, and brands.  New analytics technologies make it possible to understand positive, negative and neutral sentiments, and can detect irony and even apply machine learning to distinguish between Tweets that are nothing but background noise from those that are truly brandshaking!

But hey, if football’s not your thing, IBM and USC will also be following sentiment around the upcoming Academy Awards.  More on that in a future post.

In the meantime, learn more about IBM’s social analytics capabilities from our director of digital marketing and analytics, John Squire, in the video below.