Social media is a wonderful tool that allows us to capture the buzz and general sentiment of a snapshot in time. Using the terms: “Kentucky Derby,” “Animal Kingdom,” injury, injuries, derby, hats, horse, jockey and race – I was able to analyze the general social media sentiment around the 137th Kentucky Derby using Attensity360. (Full disclosure: Attensity is a client of ours.) Called the “Run for the Roses” and “the most exciting two minutes in sports,” the first leg of the Triple Crown of horse racing is the most watched of the three races. According to Forbes, the Kentucky Derby alone is the 10th highest grossing sporting event in the world, bringing in $67 million in 2009. As one of the world’s most watched and highest grossing events, there is understandably a lot of social media activity around the race.
The results using Attensity’s social media analysis tools were mostly positive and neutral: 38.9% positive, 38.9% neutral and 14.3% negative. The negative sentiment can be explained by the high activity of animal rights activists, who are generally very vocal around the derby due to the high risk to the horses. We all witnessed live when Eight Belles was tragically euthanized on the derby track in 2008 promptly following the race. Luckily, this year, there was no such tragedy, so the negative buzz was minimal.
Attensity360 highlighted the top trending phrases around the race, which included “National Sport,” “Grand National,” “Animal Cruelty Posing as Sport” and “Personal Injury.” Top trends also included the names of horses participating in the race, as well as Uncle Mo – who dropped out the morning of.
Can social buzz on Twitter predict a winner? According to Mashable’s Charlie White, it can’t. CBS and the Parnassus Group analyzed some 4000 tweets that referenced the Derby and found that the top tweeted horses were Uncle Mo (10.8%), Pants on Fire (2.4%) and Dialed In (2.0%). The actual winner was Animal Kingdom, followed by Nehro and Mucho Macho Man. Despite the fact that he didn’t have a chance of winning, Uncle Mo was mentioned five times more than the next most talked about horse.
As much as we’d love to be able use social media buzz to predict the outcome of major sporting events, elections and sport – in this case, we can safely say that capturing the buzz around events does not help predict the outcome.
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