Full details are below – please pay particularly close attention to the Eligibility Requirements.

The Project

We are seeking a highly motivated candidate to participate in an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project which draws on several ‘big data’ sources on Australian online public communication.

This PhD project provides an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the flow of information across the Australian online public sphere at large scale and in close to real time, within a world-class research environment. With an ERA ranking of 5 (well above world standing), Creative Industries at QUT is the leading institution for Media and Communication research in Australia, and ARC Future Fellow Professor Axel Bruns is an international research leader in the area of Internet studies.

The PhD researcher will be supervised by the ARC Future Fellow. This position will be located on the QUT Kelvin Grove campus, Brisbane, and will commence in mid-2015.

The researcher will carry out a range of tasks associated with project activities, including:

• using data collection and analysis methods and instruments developed for the project for a variety of purposes, including:
  • post hoc research into user activity patterns and information flows in the Australian online public sphere across a wide range of cases;
  • speedy and agile analysis of online activities in issue publics related to current events, and publication of initial analysis;
  • input into further development of online media tracking and analysis methods and instruments developed by the project.
• contributing to the development of new models of communication processes in the Australian online public sphere by:
  • tracing the trajectories of intermedia information flows across the diverse datasets available to the project;
  • developing and testing a range of preliminary models for the conceptualisation of issue publics and other formations of public discourse in online environments;
  • contributing to the integration of these models into a more comprehensive framework for understanding processes of communication across the contemporary media ecology.
• contributing to the dissemination of research findings from the project by:
  • publishing preliminary analyses and findings in relevant outlets (The Conversation, project website and other publications, etc.);
  • presenting project findings at relevant national and international conferences in media and communication and related fields;
  • publishing research outcomes from the project in sole- and collaboratively authored articles and chapters in high-profile journals and books.

This PhD project supports an ARC Future Fellowship research project investigating intermedia information flows in the Australian online public sphere. The emergence of new media forms has led to a profound transformation of the Australian media environment: mainstream, niche, and social media intersect in many ways, online and offline. Increased access to large-scale data on public communication online enables an observation of how the nation responds to the news of the day, how themes and topics unfold, and how interest publics develop and decline over time.

Eligibility Requirements

You must have:

• first class honours (H1), or equivalent, in media and communication or a closely related area;
• demonstrated expertise in research on the contemporary public sphere and on information flows in online and social media;
• demonstrated knowledge of, and entry-level experience with, qualitative and quantitative research that uses innovative methods drawing on ‘big social data’ from social media and other relevant online sources;
• demonstrated understanding of current themes and issues in Australian public debate, and of the contemporary Australian media environment;
• effective written, interpersonal and computer-mediated communication skills;
• demonstrated computing skills, including familiarity with digital research management and social media research tools.

How to Apply

You’ll need to submit:

• your CV;
• the names of two referees;
• a detailed statement addressing the eligibility criteria.

Send your application to Professor Axel Bruns (a.bruns@qut.edu.au) by the closing date.

What Happens Next

We’ll award the scholarship based on academic merit, research experience and potential.

If your profile meets the eligibility requirements you’ll be asked to submit a formal application for admission to the PhD.

Further details are available on the QUT Website.

Given this popularity, and a significant overlap between the target market for Big Brother viewers and the social media platforms, it will be interesting to observe the extent to which social media activity (and perhaps, eventually, sentiment) acts as a predictor for votes on the show. In this blog, following the first round of nominations, first eviction and the first round of single nominations, we are going to look to the data from the last 2.5 weeks to try to test whether social media activity acts as a predictor of public votes.

So far, at least, it has been a mixed bag, but let’s start with the positive; the public vote for the ‘Perfect Pair’ dance competition, in which the winners were awarded $30,000, was held between the final two pairs – Lawson and Aisha & Dion and Jason. The public then voted for the pair with the best dance through JumpIn, but did they actually just vote for their favourite pair? If we use social media activity as a barometer, it seems that could be the case. Our data showed a tight race, which Lawson & Aisha just pipped, and indeed the public vote came back 51.8% in favour of Lawson & Aisha. Perhaps, if they had been up against, say, Travis and Cat – who were hardly mentioned this week – they would have won by even more:

Lawson also tells an interesting story in the overall polling; as seen in the chart below which highlights the running total for all housemates; largely anonymous until the dance-off and his decision to give Aisha the lions share of the prize money ($20,000) was rewarded in the social media volume.

Below is a running total of Twitter mentions for the pairs since launch night, however we will focus on the last week’s long-winded and highly debated eviction process for the time being. Nominees made up 5 of the six most talked about housemates on the night before the eviction process began, and the ones not being talked about were being carried by their partner based on the pairs table:

We can of course ask some other interesting questions from these charts: where were Skye and Lisa when they were ‘saved’? Were Jake and Gemma losers in the public vote due to anonymity, or hatred? What caused David and Sandra to be saved, when they were virtually anonymous through the first week, and only talked about subsequently in regard to David’s chauvinistic comments. Was it better for David to be hated, rather than not talked about at all? Related to this, there is the question of screen time and popularity inside the house, allowing us to address what went wrong for Gemma this week, given her achieved intent to secure airtime?

Up for eviction this week were Skye & Lisa, Jake & Gemma, Travis & Cat and David & Sandra. Ever since the Katie & Priya first week fiasco, Skye & Lisa have been by far the most talked about pair of the season and consequently were saved on Monday night as per our prediction based on the previous graph, with Skye & Lisa the most popular pair on the 22nd September. Interesting here, however, is that Gemma & Jake were the pair with the second most social media activity, and the most popular during the nomination period, indicating that the sentiment will also be a significant factor in creating further predictions.

While we have our own tool monitoring Big Brother discussion (http://bigbrother.thehypometer.com), Channel 9 (Mi9/JumpIn) have also launched a counter, the “Big Brother Radar”, which captures tweets and Facebook statuses by those who seek, deliberately, to be noticed by the radar using official C9 hashtags (e.g. #BBAUGemma). Our tool, by contrast, attempts to measure the underlying volume of discussion (and, by possible inference, interest) in the competitors as a whole, on social media.

Going forward, we hypothesise that those housemates who the public have no interest in will be those who struggle in a ‘vote to save’ format. That said, it’s probably not advisable to bet based on this information. It may be that the Radar format serves as a better prediction of those likely to be evicted (i.e. the effort to post with the correct hashtag is correlated to the effort to vote), it may be that sentiment proves highly significant, or indeed it may be that social media is not a good barometer of the BB voting public. Whichever of these proves to be the case however, the data is sure to be interesting.

Finally, it is worth noting that one of the problems of a lack of live feed – which we have ranted about previously – and indeed this year any live updates at all is that it allows producers to largely control the message; hence, social media reaction largely follows the amount of airtime given to contestants and the plot lines developed, much like a soap. By contrast in the USA, with 4 live camera views running 24 hours a day, users are able to create and share their own storylines about the housemates — generating ‘hype’ for the show which we do not see here. In Australian Big Brother we are told what to think, and we’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader how that reflects on wider society. Finally, we’ll leave you with a running total of the housemates mentions to date, where Skye continues to lead the way:

With the purpose of trying out some new tools and ideas, I collected tweets about Toronto’s WorldPride festival, which took place this past June. It was a huge shindig and while I wasn’t able to capture every relevant tweet, the 6 hashtags that I tracked* (#WP14TO, #WorldPride, #PrideToronto, #TorontoPride, #PrideTO, #WPTO14) turned up a pretty good dataset totalling 68,231 tweets. This dataset showed some cool trends relating to participation, especially people’s awesome selfies and photo documentation of the WorldPride parade (check out the National Post’s photos if you’re lacking rainbows in your life). I hope to eventually share some of these broader analyses but today I just wanted to look at a little bump that showed up after the festival, circled in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Total WorldPride tweets over time

This little spike of nearly 1000 tweets happened when Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford – fresh out of rehab, as all the latest news stories note – refused to join in the standing ovation at a city council meeting to thank WorldPride’s coordinators. That’s right, everyone else stood up and clapped but Ford, with his history of avoiding Toronto Pride and opposing visible support for LGBTQ people throughout the city, remained seated. Apparently, to add insult to injury, all of this came alongside Ford casting the only vote against launching a study to determine if more homeless shelter space for LGBTQ youth is needed in Toronto.

So what did Torontonians do? Well, when the incident first happened, some of the city councillors tweeted about it. This is reflected in the first bump in Figure 2, when many people retweeted these preliminary expressions of disappointment with Ford’s behaviour. Figure 2 shows the volume of tweets over time for the bump that was circled in Figure 1 but here I’ve also plugged a bit of code into Tableau to show the different types of tweets. You can see that this whole Twitter event was characterized by people retweeting, often using the popular #TOpoli (Toronto politics) alongside the WorldPride hashtags.

Figure 2. Rob Ford incident over time, sorted by tweet type

The mainstream press caught wind of the story and a bit later in the day, CBC News tweeted about it, adding a photo of Rob Ford sitting during the applause. However, the real kicker in terms of momentum happened when media personality Jian Ghomeshi (broadcaster, musician, host of Q) made a tweet that resonated with a bunch of people:

It’s not the drugs/alcohol, it’s this… RT @CBCNews Toronto Mayor Rob Ford doesn’t stand for #WorldPride ovation. pic.twitter.com/Z33MFpYmhx

— jian ghomeshi (@jianghomeshi) July 9, 2014

Okay, so Ghomeshi’s tweet wasn’t an original, he simply added his own opinion to the CBC’s previous tweet. But the combination of celebrity critique with the compelling visual made this the most popular retweet of the whole debacle, raking in nearly 300 retweets in my dataset and gaining even a few more that weren’t captured during my data collection.

What does it mean that retweets dominated the dialogue throughout this whole spectacle? Does it show that mainstream media still has the loudest voice even on social media platforms, which are often lauded as being participatory and democratizing? Perhaps. Does it mean that Torontonians are lazy and would rather just press the ‘retweet’ button than weigh in with their own opinions? I think not.

Retweeting IS a form of participation (boyd, Golder & Lotan, 2010). It serves multiple purposes: it gets the word out by making a conversation more visible, it engages a wider network of participants in the dialogue, and it shows support for a particular viewpoint. Ghomeshi’s tweet hits the important points – it expresses a negative sentiment for Ford’s actions and drives it home with visual evidence of his non-participation. People who retweeted likely felt that this tweet represented their feelings accurately. It’s also likely that a broader range of people feel comfortable retweeting something fairly political when it’s led by a media personality because they may not be ready to make such strong statements independently.

A couple of the participants in my MSc research who weren’t out to their families talked about this. They explained that they wanted to show support for LGBTQ people and did so through political tweets that didn’t reflect their identity as much as personal statements. It seems that retweeting might be a way for a lot of people to get involved and stand in solidarity with a certain viewpoint without their actions implicating them beyond their capacity. Our personal situations may not always allow all of us to be highly vocal activists, but retweeting could add power to those who do speak up so that they speak on behalf of a collective – a collective of Twitter users, at least.

Personally, I might also guess that users mostly retweeted during this incident because, well, is there really anything left to say about Rob Ford?

————

Notes:

• I’ve added Tableau to my blog’s “Assorted tools” page in case you’d like to have a closer look at it. Their website allows a free trial along with some great video tutorials.
• A good resource for what/why/how to work with Twitter data is the book “Twitter and Society” edited by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt and Cornelius Puschmann.
• You may have noticed that I’ve been talking about ‘big data’ without heaps of numbers and statistics. While this speaks to my tendency toward qualitative research, it’s also a technique from the digital humanities methods that I’ve been learning about. It’s possible to take large sets of data and do a ‘distant reading’ (Moretti, 2007) of them in their entirety (like Figure 1) and then to drill down into more qualitative types of content analysis. I turned to Richard Rogers’ book “Digital Methods” as inspiration for this.
• Disclaimer: This was just an exercise (with a relatively small number of tweets!) that I’ve presented for discussion – there are of course lots of limitations to ‘big data’ analysis and the use of Twitter data. While I don’t address these here, other people have – start with boyd and Crawford’s “Critical Questions for Big Data” to get a handle on the issues.
• Opinions are my own, as this was cross-posted from stefanieduguay.com

*All of this was done with the gracious help of QUT’s Social Media Research Group, especially with Jean Burgess’ ninja Twitter data collection skills and Darryl Woodford’s crash course on Tableau analysis for Twitter data.

In text references:

boyd, d., Golder, S., & Lotan, G. (2010). Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2010.412

Moretti, F. (2007). Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.

First, a look at the week that was.  Overall, the generic hashtags are being used consistently and in true Big Brother fashion, more hashtags are being used everyday, often introduced by CBS. Just this week I had to add, #BBTracker as well as a few running hashtags, #ZackAttack (a nickname for HG Zach), #Zankie (showmance between Zach and Frankie), #ZankieFallOut (the potential end of Zach and Frankie), and #EvictionPrediction. It’s a wonder why CBS continues to add hashtags that could possibly be steering people away from using their generic ones. What’s wrong with a simple #bb16?

Being elimination night, Thursday seems to be the peak show of the week with close to double the amount of tweets of the other two days. We will look at whether the ‘big night’ remains consistent in coming weeks in the interest of finding out whether context or type of show are more important for tweet numbers.

Total number of tweets containing the generic BB hashags for the week 6 – 12 July.

Taking a closer look at the Thursday show – conversation remained fairly consistent with no major spikes, just a lot of volume.

Total tweets by minute for the Thursday show.

HG Twitter Accounts

The graph below shows us which housemates’ twitters are getting the most mentions, and unsurprisingly at the top, is Joey, the first eliminated contestant voted out in a unanimous 13/13 vote. Two down the list is the most recently voted out contestant Paola, which we are guessing will probably be the most talked about by this time next week if there is a pattern. We saw this last year when HG Kaitlin was voted out early yet continued to be one of the most talked about HGs for the remainder of the series, largely thanks to her involvement in the racial-slur-scandal and somewhat thanks to her social media presence.

Number of times contestant Twitter accounts have been mentioned; 6 – 12 July.

Something new: Users by Timezone

Something we became interested in during last year’s BB broadcast was the difference in tweeters from one side of the US coast to the other, this year also considering the top 10 timezones joining the conversation with the generic hashtags:

Top 10 timezones using the generic BB hashtags on Twitter; 6 – 12 July.

Eastern time tweet by far the most of any of the timezones which fits with the documented distribution of the US population (47% live in Eastern Time). However, people in Mountain Time are tweeting more about Big Brother than expected with their distribution being only 5.4%, but publishing 9.45% of the total tweets regarding Big Brother. We’ve established that the Quito (Ecuador) timezone aligns with Chicago / Central time, so those users who say they’re in Quito, likely aren’t.

Until next time…

Let’s take a look back at some of the bigger stories of the World Cup from social media, as well as the prominence of the event in Europe.

One widely reported research result from the knockout stages of the World Cup was how Twitter users reacted to the penalty shootouts. Twitter’s own research department put out a graph of the Greece v Costa Rica match, which was widely picked up in the press.

In particular, Twitter noted that sometimes “silence tells the story”:

Parallels can be drawn here to other events. Particularly, we looked in the past at how different forms of television spark Twitter conversation, with reality television frequently seeing peaks in discussion during the show.

This contrasts with dramas such as Sherlock, which often see their peaks at the end, with a similar “anticipation” window during the show itself.

The US (and Australia) loves football

As we discussed previously, the World Cup has set viewing and streaming records in the United States.

It seems the presence of Americans in the Twitter conversation hasn’t been significantly hit by their team’s elimination. Germany v Brazil had the highest viewing figures of any World Cup semi-final in American television history, and was the highest ranked non-US game ever on ESPN/ESPN2.

A look at tweets on generic World Cup hashtags from July 10-14 show the US led the way in number of tweets. Brazil ranked second, with locals still interested through their team’s third-place playoff (and, of course, any tourists who had changed their timezone). London ranked third with finalists Argentina in fourth place:

In Australia, SBS also reported new streaming records for its World Cup coverage across mobile and online, with users showing a large preference for “live” coverage versus on-demand. SBS’ World Cup multi-stream service (below) won many plaudits, with the only negative being that sound issues persisted throughout the final.

Comic relief

As ever, beyond the discussion of the matches themselves, social media remains a hotbed for sarcasm and humour. FIFA president Sepp Blatter was a source of controversy throughout the tournament, and – sitting next to Vladamir Putin – remained a source of amusement (and marketing) in the final, as shown in this tweet by Betfair Australia:

Also prominent during the penalty shootout that decided the Netherlands v Argentina semi-final was a mistake from British commentator Peter Drury, who was featured on the television feed that went to range of countries including Australia.

Drury has never been one of the most popular commentators, and his mistake – being ready to proclaim the Netherlands victors in the semi-final – quickly spread around the internet. See the Drury penalty call below:

The view from Europe

We started this series of articles discussing the role of brands during the World Cup, and that was one of the themes in Europe as well. In many cities you were unable to move without noticing some form of localised World Cup branding, including the following example from Cyprus (which did not qualify).

Noticeable across Europe, though, were extensive World Cup decorations: from bars in basically every city, through to the large screens that inundated public squares, and – in the case of Amsterdam – a sea of orange which descended upon the city and sat above nearly every pathway in the Centrum.

And that’s the World Cup.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Particularly interesting in the discussion of streaming figures is that such activity is able to be measured in “streaming minutes” or “data transferred” – much more specific metrics than traditional audience figures.

Accurate global TV ratings are still a way off, considering the official FIFA World Cup 2010 Audience Report came out almost a year after the tournament.

Twitter and ratings are undeniably connected, but the extent of the correlation often depends of the type of broadcast: whether it’s a live sporting event, soap opera finale or reality television show.

Indeed, a breakdown of the global tweets by timezone shows the dominance of US viewers in the Twitter conversation (including non-English hashtags):

Previous work by Nielsen has shown Sports, Reality TV and Comedy are genres where tweets have a causal relationship with viewer numbers, with Nielsen reporting that in 28% of sports programming measured, tweets had an impact on viewing numbers.

As we contended in last week’s article, it’s possible viewers tweet when bored, as well as when excited, during a game. But it is also possible that those not watching the game are also tweeting about it, so any correlation between ratings and tweets, for sporting events, needs a bit more research.

Match tweets

The US/World Cup love story continues in the graph below with the US vs Portugal match dominating match conversation for the week, and taking the lead in our “tweets by match” table.

ESPN also found that the:

USA vs Portugal contest on Sunday, June 22 is the most-viewed soccer match across all US television networks, averaging 18,220,000 viewers.

The top match in this graph has roughly a third more tweets than any match in the tournament so far, with top matches in previous weeks peaking at around 263,000.

It’s also possible from what we have discussed above that the Brazil vs Mexico match was bumped up by the large Mexican contingency located in the US timezones, as well as the enormous Brazil following on Twitter that we’ve seen in previous weeks.

The most talked-about event by far at the World Cup last week was the Luis Suarez bite.

The bite followed two other incidents of Suarez biting in the past, creating a storm of online conversation that can be seen in the visualisation of the most common words in tweets mentioning Suarez (note also the prominence of “Snickers”, a recurring example of brand impact on the World Cup):

The controversy around the bite mostly relates to whether Suarez intentionally bit the other player or just fell in an unfortunate position making it look like he bit him – as some Uruguayans have argued. Again, asking the question of whether video-technology should be more widely used in the game as recently discussed by Miguel Sicart.

Diego Maradona, the Argentinian whose hand-ball goal in the 1986 World Cup sparked much controversy said:

This is football, this is incidental contact […] They have no commonsense or a fan’s sensibility. Luisito, we are with you.

And a Reuters report notes:

The referee did not spot the incident during the match, but FIFA’s rules allow the use of video or “any other evidence” to punish players retrospectively.

Indeed FIFA did punish Suarez, announcing a nine-match ban on June 26 (the second spike visible in the graph below):

While the correlation is clear between real-time events and Twitter, the graph above quantifies just how vocal Twitter users have been around the Suarez incident, with the bite generating more than 3,500 tweets per minute at peak.

The lower volume for the announcement of the ban is also a signifier of the number of people watching the game(s) live and tweeting, versus those who use Twitter as a more general information source or discussion platform about the World Cup.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

A week prior to the premiere, we set up a Twitter collection machine to track off all of the current @mentions and hashtags for BB16, adding more as they were created as well as the contestant names and Twitter accounts.

Generic hashtags at this stage include: @CBSBigBrother, @BBHOH, BB16, bblf, bbmvp, BBkickoff, BBAllNighter, BigBrother, BigBrother16, bbhoh, BBselfie, BBAD, #HOH:

The graph above is a breakdown of tweets containing the generic hastags per minute over 12 hours around the Big Brother premiere night one of two.

Tweets peaked at just under 80k for the hour, with the first spike being a mass retweet of pop star and contestant’s sister, Ariana Grande:

everybody watch big brother tonight at 8pm @frankiejgrande we love u so much #bb16 #teamfrankie

— Ariana Grande (@ArianaGrande) June 25, 2014

 

The second (expected) peak occurred at 8:01pm, as the show began, and the largest peak was due to the hugely built up ‘twist’ reveal and another mass retweet of Ariana Grande:   Ariana Grande RT #2

we’re. shaking. watching this challenge #bb16 “how’s my hair look” @frankiejgrande crying i miss u #bbfrankie — Ariana Grande (@ArianaGrande) June 26, 2014

Controversy, again

Houseguests were revealed only a few days prior to the premiere, probably to spark conversation as well as bump up live feed subscriptions at the last minute. As we discussed around this time last year, controversy is usually no mistake in the reality context, particularly for shows like Big Brother that rely on it. The early release of HG names sparked instant controversy with the network already being under scrutiny for choosing Frankie Grande, who already has a lot of public exposure as a YouTube personality and brother of Ariana Grande. The graph above clearly argues that controversy is the best way to cause online discussion, with both peaks being due to the casting of Frankie.

CBS has also made another bold decision in revisiting the race scandal of last year by introducing another controversial cast member who has already gained a lot of support, and hate, on Twitter:

Indeed, we can track the success of CBS’s efforts in creating controversy by looking at contestant mentions across the two nights:

As predicted, Frankie Grande was the most talked about HG thanks to both the controversy of his casting and the mass retweeting caused by his sister’s Twitter following. Because contestants were released into the house over two nights, a breakdown of each night is below:

In this graph, the Twitter conversation about “Frankie” almost mimics the overall Twitter conversation in the earlier graph indicating he was not only the most talked about HG but also the most talked about thing overall.

On the second night, tweet numbers mentioning contestants was comparatively a lot lower than the first night, with Caleb being featured in a maximum of 462 tweets, and Zach, 459 tweets. Other contestants were also more likely to get mentioned, although Frankie (purple line) remains relatively high despite being introduced the night before.

Sentiment in tweets

Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is the increase in what I’ll call ‘positive intention’ tweets from last year to this year. People seem to be actively suggesting that fans  be nicer to one another and the contestants this year, using the words  ‘support’, ‘love’ and even a hashtag; ‘#beNICE’. While the sentiment is evident across Twitter and Big Brother blogs now, it will be interesting to see how #beNICE fares a week or two into the show when people start to take sides.

That being said, CBS Network and BB fans have already created a number of new or, ‘running’ hashtags for fans to use to takes sides like #BBFrankie and #TeamFrankie, as well as what will likely be temporary hashtags to talk about current alliances in the house like #TeamAmerica (which we’re not tracking as it’s widely used elsewhere) and #TheCrazy8s.

Here, we look at the shift in conversation as the tournament begins to take shape – who is excited, bored or really winning on Twitter? – but first, a taste of what’s happening on social media in Brazil.

The opening ceremony and first match, Brazil vs Croatia, were huge successes on television and on social media. Brazilians, of course, probably talked about nothing else that day – but in Brazil, much of what was said was politicised.

FIFA was massively criticised for choosing a Belgian producer over Brazilians for the opening ceremony.

Francamente ! Na terra de Paulo Barros e Rosa Magalhães chamam um belga pra fazer uma bobagem de abertura destas!

— Leda Nagle (@Lnagle2) June 12, 2014

Translation: Honestly! In the land of Paulo Barros and Rosa Magalhães [two of the most successful Brazilian Carnival producers] they called a Belgian to do a silly opening like this!
– Leda Nagle, Brazilian journalist.

Another major disappointment was the disappearance on the official FIFA images of the moment that a paraplegic gave the initial kick-off using a mind-controlled exoskeleton built by the Brazilian scientist Miguel Nicolelis.

O genial exoesqueleto usado pelo rapaz que daria o primeiro chute infelizmente se perdeu na transmissão da abertura. Uma pena.

— Fernando Meirelles (@fmei7777) June 12, 2014

Translation: The exoskeleton worn by the guy that would do the kick-off unfortunately got lost in the opening broadcast. What a pity.
Source: Fernando Meirelles, Brazilian film-maker.

E teve exoesqueleto mesmo. Lamentável o desprezo total da transmissão ao que deveria ter o principal destaque. pic.twitter.com/PqDN9MUSEI

— Impedimento (@impedimento) June 12, 2014

Translation: And there was the exoskeleton indeed. Regrettable the complete disdain in the broadcast to something that should be in the spotlight.
Source: Impedimento, popular website dedicated to South American football and culture.

Still, others strongly criticised the crowd chants attacking the Brazilian president.

Parte do estádio grita: “Ê Dilma, vai tomar no c.. “. Outros gritam: “Ê Fifa, vai tomar no c…”

— Jamil Chade (@JamilChade) June 12, 2014

Translation: Part of the stadium shouts: hey, Dilma, f* off. Others shout: hey, Fifa, f* off.
Source: Jamil Chade, Brazilian journalist.

Updating the top matches

In our last article, we noted that Brazil vs Croatia was the most talked about match on its official hashtag (#BRAvsCRO), some distance ahead of England vs Italy, which was closely followed by Germany vs Portugal, Spain vs the Netherlands and Argentina vs Bosnia and Herzegovina. The updated chart, through the matches of June 21, looks as follows:

Of particular note here is that we have a new leader, in the Brazil vs Mexico match (an otherwise unspectacular 0-0 draw), with the Argentina vs Iran fixture (a 1-0 Argentina win, which Iran looked like winning at times) in second place.

The prominence of these two matches raises questions of whether people look to Twitter to fill in boring games, as well as to comment on exciting ones. The next three are familiar fixtures from the first week of matches.

Many of those at the bottom are the result of people using reversed hashtags in their tweets. Noticing this for the England vs Uruguay fixture, we also tracked the reverse hashtag specifically (#ENGvsURU), and recorded in excess of 27,000 tweets compared to 88,236 on the official hashtag (#URUvsENG).

So, while the official hashtags are performing as some form of marker, their success is not universal. One explanation for this is that while in Europe, the standard form is “Home Team vs Away Team”, for Americans the familiar format is “Away Team vs Home Team”, and so ordering hashtags for international audiences can be difficult.

What’s being shared?

Last time, we discussed how brands were dominating the conversation on official World Cup hashtags. This time, we’ll take a look at what is being shared on the match hashtags themselves.

As with last week’s data, we again see @worldsoccershop heavily represented, with their offer to give away free shirts if you retweet and a specific event happens (such as Ronaldo scoring in the Germany vs Portugal match) drawing a massive response.

Tellingly, the other tweets are largely dominated by US related content, the top two being ESPN responses (@Sportscenter being an ESPN-operated account) to the US’s victory over Ghana.

The first non-US tweet comes from the UK’s Sky Sports, and their @SkyFootball account, asking for responses on a penalty in the Brazil Game. Sky, interestingly, are not broadcasting the World Cup in the UK.

Other notables in the top 20 include celebrities such as Piers Morgan and Kobe Bryant, the US’s Comedy Channel (also not a World Cup broadcaster), asking Americans to “RT if you think WE WILL WIN”, and a quote from an unofficial Simpsons Quote Of The Day account, but really, @worldsoccershop was the huge winner.

The limitations of the 1%

As we discussed last time, the representativeness of Twitter research by those not subscribing to data providers such as GNIP is unclear with the World Cup, as Twitter traffic continually exceeds 1% of the total amount of tweets published at any particular time.

The flip-side of that limitation is we are able to graph the times at which conversation around the World Cup; through the team accounts, tournament hashtags, match hashtags and television hashtags we are tracking, exceeds that 1%, and by how far.

Of course, at any particular time, there are also many tweets relating to the World Cup which do not contain any of the previously mentioned identifiers:

The blue indicators in the graph above are the number of total tweets per second that exceeded 1% of total Twitter traffic.

Notable is that the World Cup is generating a smaller portion of the total Twitter traffic as it continues – which may not be much of a surprise – but also that while the opener generated the most prolonged period of >1% traffic, the matches on the morning of June 14 AEST (the matches of June 13 in Brazil) were the most prolific of the tournament on a per-second basis, with a particular peak during Spain’s demolition by the Netherlands.

It has yet to be seen how the next phase of the tournament will play out, and least of all what role Twitter will play; whether as a tool for excitement or boredom.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

by Darryl Woodford & Katie Prowd

The 2014 World Cup has already seen a significant volume of Twitter conversation across a number of (English language) keywords, including #joinin, #worldcup, #Brazil2014 and #worldcup2014, as well as the Twitter-marketed international hashtags:

• #Brasil2014 (Spanish)
• #Brésil2014 (French)
• #wm2014 (German)
• #Copa2014 (Portugese)
• #mm2014 (Finnish).

And unsurprisingly, riding this wave of hashtags are the brands that look to profit from the tournament – whether they’re official sponsors or not.

With the launch of a new interface designed to promote World Cup discussion, Twitter is actively encouraging users to flag support for their national team and to participate in World Cup discussion through Twitter.

On the opening day of the games Twitter presented a new layout, as well as a step-by-step process encouraging people to tweet their support for their team and change their profile image:

After clicking “Let’s go!” on the page above, users are escorted through a number of personalised set up pages; from selecting their national team and changing their profile picture:

… through to following favourite players, and even preparing a tweet using the #WorldCup hashtag and the account of your national team:

While these are obvious promotional tools, they have likely contributed to the increase in followers for many players, as well as the Twitter activity around the tournament in general.

While the BBC’s Gary Lineker on Tuesday described Brazil 2014 on air as “the first social media world cup”, South Africa 2010 also saw plenty of social media activity. However the impact of social media on traditional media coverage is particularly prominent in the UK at the moment.

Twitter has also been documenting the tournament through its blog and tweets from the TwitterData account. For researchers, replicating such analysis is difficult as World Cup-related tweets frequently exceed the limit of 1% of tweets that be freely accessed through the Twitter API. Despite this, there are a few notable stories from week one.

Brands seek to capitalise on World Cup audience

While it’s clear that the World Cup is a brand marketing exercise, the lead up to the tournament demonstrated how the brand is being appropriated for marketing purposes on social media, far beyond the official sponsors.

And while using the World Cup brand in traditional media may see offending companies hit with a lawsuit, using the social media hashtag appears to be a risk worth taking.

FIFA have not taken trademark infringement lightly either, officially releasing a warning in March stating that

The contribution of FIFA’s commercial affiliates is vital to the success of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and we therefore ask companies to refrain from attempts to free-ride on the huge public interest generated by the event.

Yet according to Alex Benady from PR Week:

FIFA, players, the media, the FA and other national associations, and of course brands with no contractual relationship with the World Cup, will all be working their social media networks for all they are worth.

Supporting this, the 20th most popular retweet in the week leading up to the World Cup using English keywords was the following from (unaffiliated) British company Fragrance Direct:

Other brands, sponsors and otherwise are also heavily represented in the most frequent retweets:

The top 25 tweets above contain many brands (including FIFA sponsors such as Adidas, Budweiser and EA Sports, as well as non-sponsors such as Goldman Sachs and Fragrance Direct), able to associate with the World Cup brand on social media on an equal basis.

While the brands may see this as merely interacting with a current event, for those at FIFA and for paying sponsors, this may well appear as ambush marketing.

Such trends extended into the first week of the tournament, with the top retweets over the first week notably also dominated by big brands and television networks:

Top 10 matches

With the first round underway, we can also see which matches (and teams) are receiving the most attention on Twitter:

This tells an interesting visual story of not only the top matches but also how the worldwide audience is using Twitter during the World Cup.

While the top match to date is (perhaps predictably) the opener of the tournament – Brazil vs Croatia – the presence of England vs Italy as the second may speak both to the audience participating in the hashtag conversation and the international interest in the game itself.

As the tournament continues, it will be interesting to correlate tweet volume with television audiences worldwide, as those figures become available, and to consider whether the teams with the most historic World Cup success, or FIFA Ranking, are those receiving the most attention this time around, both on Twitter and on television.

Other stories from around the web

Elsewhere on the web, analysis of both social media and statistical data around the world cup is gathering steam. Kimono Labs have launched what they claim to be the first open World Cup API, while the Regressing Blog on Deadspin features a round-up of the top prediction models on the web.

Also of interest this week is the CartoDB visualisation of Twitter activity around the World Cup opening match, and Twitter’s own visualisation of the increase in Neymar’s followers, part of their extensive coverage of the opener which also includes the Predictaroo.

We’ll be back after Round 2 with some more from the ground in Europe and Brazil, as well as the latest data from our Twitter Machines, and a look at how TV stations are using Twitter in the early stages.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

X-Factor was the clear winner of the Saturday night battle, doubling up Big Brother which was at a season low for average tweets per minute.  Masterchef however rated terribly on Twitter:

If, however, we give Big Brother the benefit of the doubt, and take a more typical show (in this case Thursday 2 August) rather than the Showdown format, it looks more competitive, able to keep pace with X-Factor and generating more tweets through airing over a longer period, with Masterchef still lagging well behind the other two, as the following graph (which timeshifts all shows to an identical ending point) demonstrates:

Finally, all three shows aired over a two hour period on Monday night, with a similar story to the time-shifted graph above:

There are a few interesting things here: the poor showing of Masterchef, the high peak of Big Brother in comparison to the other shows, but also the increase in Big Brother tweet volume as X-Factor concluded, which suggests a significant social media overlap between the two shows.

Big Brother Australia Update

Episode 4 of Big Brother Australia (Thursday night) followed much the same pattern as Wednesday’s discussed previously, with approximately 7,200 tweets over the hour of the broadcast, peaking at 164/min. It is worth noting that the array of different Australian timezones do have an impact on these totals, and because of the overlaps it is difficult to separate them as I have with the US broadcasts. However, as discussed last time the peaks do correspond to the Eastern Time zone viewing, which is what I will concentrate on here.

That said, here is the graph for Episode 4 from Thursday night:

In Australia this season, Friday Night football means a reduced 30 minute show on Friday. with the show also suffering from a major drop in ratings. While  Monday’s premiere reached 1.31 million and subsequent daily shows hovered around 1 million (1.04, 1.03 and 0.98), Friday’s show only reached 0.73m viewers.

Here is what it looked like on Twitter, with only 1326 tweets over the 30 minute broadcast (+ 5 minutes either side), peaking at 70/minute:

Saturday saw the launch of ‘Big Brother Showdown’, a re-imagined version of ‘Friday Night Live’, which seemingly did not resonate with viewers, with a new series low of 0.68million viewers. The twitter performance was similarly down, with 1,797 tweets over the 1 hour broadcast (+ 5 mins either side), and a peak of 76/minute:

Significance of a Live Feed:

While there are many differences between Big Brother in its various international incarnations, one of the most significant from a viewer engagement perspective (at the very least, this viewer) is the lack of a Live Feed during the return of both the UK (after the move from Channel 4 to Five) and Australian (Ten Network to Nine) series. Fans of the show have long made the argument that this impacts detrimentally on viewer engagement, while producers have argued that such a service is not cost effective in Australia, and that may well be true, however large numbers of viewers continue to complain each year.

Given the US (which maintains a live feed, on a subscription basis) and Australian series are currently running concurrently, I thought it might be interesting to look at the engagement / discussion on Twitter of both shows before and after  their broadcast slots. Even allowing for population / Twitter population differences (The US series is watched by almost 6x as many people, and has in-show peaks of around 2-4x the Australian broadcasts), the effect is obvious. While the Australian broadcast is lucky to receive 100 tweets/hr during the afternoon before a show, the US is hovering at 1000-2000, putting news from the show in front of a much wider Twitter audience.

The graph below takes advantage of a new TimeShift formula (utilized above to compare Australian Reality TV shows) to match Australia to US Eastern Time. I’ve also cut off the top of the Big Brother show from Thursday and Sunday nights (US Time) , which peaked at 65,000/hr and 25,000/hr respectively, in order to increase visibility at the lower end of the graph. As you can see, discussion of the US Live Feed on Twitter was greater than discussion of Saturday Night’s television show in Australia, and the two were fairly close for Friday night also:

When considering the viability of Live Feeds, such a social media presence cannot be ignored, and I continue to suggest that live feeds for reality TV shows are a weapon producers should use to their (social media) advantage.