Rugby And Oil

This past week has seen two significant events in New Zealand. The first being the quarterfinals of the Rugby World Cup in a nation that is mad about the sport.

The second is grounding of a large container ship offshore from a pristine area of foreshore and the resulting environmental disaster caused by leaking oil.

Given the environmental concerns one would have thought that oil would be thicker than water, or in this case, sport.

A snapshot of social media, in this case Twitter shows how one concern has outstripped the other. The chart below demonstrates the topic interest in New Zealand, midday on October 11th. Rena is the name of the ship that ran aground. Rugby topics are highlighted in yellow.

Not surprisingly it is the environmental agencies such as Greenpeace and Bird Rescue who are the most vocal and being a month out from a general election the Green Party is also using the opportunity to push its message.

Topic Cloud

Even more interesting is the cross connection between conversational topics as can be seen in this visual chart from Social Collider which mapped 2,317 conversations

Click on the image to see the larger chart

The SocialCollider reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter. Particles are mapped two dimensionally based on their position in time (vertical axis) and search query ID (horizontally).

Search results of each query are automatically connected vertically via smooth, curvy B-splines in the same color. If results from different queries are somehow related a spiral is first drawn around the older particle but will eventually connect the other related particles horizontally.

The size of the spiral corresponds to the number of cross-connections the related message/tweet has accumulated.

Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

Related articles

• New Zealand's passion for rugby (bbc.co.uk)
• Oil spill threatens reef and wildlife in New Zealand (newscientist.com)

On The Ball - How Social Media Is Building The Rugby World Cup Buzz

Open publication

It hasn't been the easiest of tasks promoting a world class event such as the 2011 Rugby World Cup.  Shortly after New Zealand won the rights to stage it the world plunged into a deep financial recession which must have put a dent on ticket sale projections.

Then followed two significant earthquakes that affected Christchurch, one of the main venues for the Cup. The second one on February 22nd caused massive damage and loss of life.

Key Phrases over 6 months - Note February 22nd impact
Click on the chart to view larger version

Undaunted by this malevolent force of nature, the RWC organisers have soldiered on rearranging schedules and shifting venues to other cities.

Hand in hand with the extraordinary circumstances of this global sporting event has been the use of digital media and in particular social media, to build positive buzz about the tournament and entertainments.

As the research in the above presentation reveals online sentiment has largely remained unerringly positive over the past month.

Growth on social media networks is now starting to gain momentum with :

• 3,000 new twitter followers in the past four weeks
• 65,000 more Likes on Facebook over the same period

Network associated online with Rugby World Cup -  Note 'Bob Parker' is the Mayor of Christchurch.
Click on chart for the larger version

The main web site receives 159,443 unique users per month and 14, 625 page views per day.  As might be expected most interest in the website comes from rugby playing nations:

New Zealand 31.0%

South Africa 9.9%

United Kingdom 8.4%

Australia 6.6%

A key reason for the success of the event's digital strategy is the integration of various channels; for example the social media icons are clearly visible in the top third of the web page.

Web landing page

With the Rugby World Cup kicking off this September it will also be interesting to see how users of twitter and Facebook record their experience.

Related articles

• England will open Rugby World Cup in Dunedin (independent.co.uk)