Super Bowl Conversation Data – Social Media Style

Posted by Darren on Feb 10, 2010 • (Comments)

@kevinweil, a member of the analytics team at Twitter updated the corporate blog with a post entitled Super Data.  If you are a data/football nut, go check it out.

For those who do not want to click over to his post, it basically overlays tweets about the game (football related) to tweets about the commercials (ad related).   What the data illustrates is that there was a significant (at least 4x) volume difference between posts about the game than posts about the commercials.  More people were tweeting about Peyton’s interception, 4th and Goal stance by the Saints, and the Colts Touchdown amongst others.

After gazing at the chart, I also derived the following:   after the first hour of the game, the tweets about commercials lessened, even though the majority of commercials hadn’t aired.  If Google wasn’t in the back half of the game, it would have been “relatively” quiet.    There were the obvious spikes about the brands during commercial pods, but there was very little chatter after the commercial pods aired.  Additionally, after half time, the volume of game related conversation far outweighed commercial conversation.  Does this mean that the commercials weren’t that interesting?  Maybe.  Does this mean that since the game was close in score, people were more likely to talk about the actual game?  Maybe.

To paraphrase Kevin, The first @DoritosUSA ad at marker C caused the largest per-minute volume of commercial-related tweets — for the minute following the ad, related tweets were 19% of all tweets we saw, eclipsing even the chatter around the Super Bowl itself for a brief period.

Let me reiterate:  19% of all tweets Twitter saw for the minute following the ad were about @doritosusa.   Considering Doritos strategy was to crowdsource the commercial through social media, I’d imagine that this commercial hit the KPIs established by the agency/brand.

Question:  Could the amplification power of social media/communications platforms surpass the reach of the largest  US media event- the Super Bowl?  Oh wait, it did… and the Super Bowl could command $3MM/commercial?   Hmmm…

Learnings:  As a brand, if you want people to talk about you thru platforms like Twitter, be early in the program/event.

Don’t be a stranger and comment in the comments section… and come say hello on Twitter (@dherman76)

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , + Categorized as Advertising & Marketing, Technology
  • great link, and interesting to see the amplifying effect of of social media in graphical form. also the takeaways from which ads were successful must provide a good reflection on their creative.
  • colinr23
    This is a great discussion that got me thinking about the transparency between people and technology, and how the power that nation wide occurrences reflect on behavior within social communication environments. How twitter has just become a pellucid form of mass expression.

    It made me think of the most literal form of this - real environmental occurrences reflecting through social expression, and then I looked outside. Today's Doppler Radar (http://bit.ly/ahbZwa) against a Trendsmap 'snow' search today (http://bit.ly/cuaTZR). They're essentially mirroring each other.

    Communication technology is largely becoming this transparent counterpart mapping the reality around us.

    It's like a pendulum, the higher you lift the ball on the side of integrated technology, the higher it swings over towards the volume of communication being created. This line between streaming data and reality are blurring more and more each day. It’s only a matter of time before the pendulum ball is raised so high that it swings in full circle- where the web we live in, and the reality we live on, merge to create one seamless database of universal and limitless access.
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