Yes, this post is a day late. But let’s just pretend that yesterday didn’t happen. Wednesday hasn’t come yet. The World Series hasn’t started. The Detroit Tigers didn’t get hammered by the San Francisco Giants in game one. It never happened.
Looking back at social media talk for the past month (September 23 – October 23) about the Detroit Tigers and the San Francisco Giants, we’ll see if it’s possible to predict a winner for the World Series. (To be fair though, I tried this last year and turned out be wrong)
Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics tool, I compared the overall talk about both teams. In doing this, I found that over the past month the Giants had been talked about slightly more than the Tigers. The Giants received over 2,750,000 mentions accounting for 54% of the conversation, while the Tigers had been mentioned over 2,300,000 times making up the other 46%. In terms of odds, those numbers really aren’t too far from each other.
Looking at a breakdown of those mentions we can see that throughout blogs, forums, online news and Twitter, the Giants were being talked about more than the Tigers.
I then looked at the overall sentiment around each of the teams. Here I found another close call where the Giants seem to come out slightly on top. At first, it seems very close as the Tigers have an overall favourable rating of 78% and the Giants a 79%. When we look a litte close we see that the Tigers have have 22% of their talk being negative, while the Giants have 21%. However, the big difference comes in positive talk as the Giants come in on top with 28% while the Tigers have only 24%.
Detroit Tigers
San Francisco Giants
I tried to dig a little bit deeper to see if there were any tell tale signs in the actual talk happening. While a lot of post-season baseball words occupy both teams word clouds’, there didn’t seem to be any thing that stood out to show one team as having a better chance than the others.
Well, this year seems to be a tight one in terms of social media activity. But, since we’re trying to make a prediction using this data, I would say that the San Francisco Giants seem to have a slight edge. They have been talked about more and have slightly more positive talk around them. Last year, one team seemed to run away in my prediction and then wound up losing, so lets see if this year social stats can show us the world series winner ahead of time.
Social media aside, who do you think is going to win?
