Web 2.0

The Olympic Games is the largest sporting spectacle of the planet. The games have come a long way from the ancient Olympic Games which were held in Olympia, Greece during the 8th century BC to the 4th century AD to the ongoing London 2012 games. The London games have attracted participation from 205 countries and over 10,500 athletes. The games started on 27 July and will continue until 12 August 2012. According to The Economist, the British government's budget for the games has risen to £9.3 billion ($14.5 billion) from an initial estimate of £2.4 billion. The eleven global partners of the games are Acer, Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow, General Electric, McDonald's, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Visa. In addition there are the Olympic Partners, Olympic supporters and Olympic Providers and suppliers (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/2012/jul/19/london-2012-olympic-sponsors-list). Given the global nature of the games and the large sums spent by the sponsors, it will be interesting to understand and analyse the ground level interest and support towards the games. Since social media is proxy for end user behaviour, we set out to understand the world's social media behavior during the largest sporting event. We collected Twitter data with the hash tags #olympics, london olympics, londonolympics, olympics2012. The data was obtained from the Twitter data aggregator 140kit (www.140kit.com).

A sample of 43,048 tweets across 27,683 users were collected between July 29th and July 31st. The table below lists the overall statistics of the top fifteen measures with regard to language, source application from where the Tweet originated, location and hashtag. The network graph was created of the entire network of users who retweeted as well as mentioned one another. In the dataset, there were 16,444 nodes and 15,233 edges. There were 16,190 retweets, 274 mentions, 916 average followers, 368 average friends and 135 average favourites. The figure below gives the network graph of the network of users. The network graph was created using Gephi.

English was the language of choice for people tweeting about the games, making up about 97% of the sample. Spanish and French took silver and bronze respectively. Web based Tweets constituted about 23% of the total tweets followed by iPhone (20%), Mobile Web (13%), Android (12%), Blackberry (11%), followed by the rest. This indicates that more people were tweeting about the Olympic Games on the go than from home or work. Following a global trend, most users have not revealed their location and where the user location is mentioned, London leads the list. Analysing the hashtags used reveals that gymnastics is the most popular sport followed by cycling, basketball, swimming, equestrian, rowing, archery and judo. Finally Team Great Britain seems to be the most popular team. Are the Olympics really a global phenomenon when we examine it from the perspective of social media mentions? The initial results show concentration across the US, Europe and Australia. We will come back to the same analysis once more post the conclusion of the games.

Jai Ganesh

Sheera L. Gendzel, MBA Candidate, ESADE Business School