Students Analyze World Series Fan Sentiment Using Twitter

Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, wrote an interesting guest post on A Smarter Planet about the analysis of fan sentiment during World Series baseball games.

IBM and USC Annenberg Innovation Lab students analyzed tweets from fans during the event, which equal almost twice as many as the entire Championship Series, showing that social media engagement is very high. Trends they discovered from the analysis are that those who appear on TV the most during the game usually receive the highest number of tweets, although these could be negative responses as well as positive. Also, fans often use social media sites like Twitter to announce their favorite players and the ones they like the least. Taplin writes about the uses for this kind of analysis:

Understanding actual fan (or consumer) sentiment – about baseball, movies, fashion trends, the latest mobile phone and more – versus what the so-called experts might predict will be a hot seller or trend, can transform the kinds of make-or-break decisions that large and small businesses are faced with all the time.  And it can help companies and people make those decisions before it is too late – like what kinds of promotions to run, whether to sell a new fashion to the masses online or introduce it on Main Street.

Photo by USC Annenberg