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We are having a book release party at Belltown Pub on 10/6 from 6-9 pm. If you can make it out we’d love to see you and will have new and old books on hand to autograph. We’ll also raffle of a book or two for free. There will be a free food spread and beverages available for purchase.  Please click one of the links below to RSVP:

If you have a Twitter account:

http://twtvite.com/2gy8te

If you have a Facebook account only:

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=180906625317307

Or if you have neither, just contact us and we’ll send you all the details!

Thanks,

Jeff and Carlos

The NFL is back in business. Though if you solely judged it’s functionality based on it’s social prominence, you probably would not have known any different since the overall volume of mentions of @nfl and #nfl have stayed consistent. Thanks to our friends at Rowfeeder, we were able to monitor the term NFL on Twitter from just after the Superbowl (in February) through Monday July 25, when both the Players Union and Owners agreed on a new Collective bargaining agreement. Supplemental data was found on Tweetstats and Twittercounter, however Rowfeeder allowed us to actively monitor each and every mention – roughly 4 million data points when it was all said and done.

We decided to look at three key things to see if we could glean any info: mentions of @nfl or #nfl in tweets, actual number of tweets from @nfl, and the follower count for @nfl. Actual tweet counts from the main account allow us to understand how active @nfl was during this period. Follower counts show whether @nfl’s effort resulted in an engagement increase. Total mentions allows us to gain a robust understanding of the effects or “social prominence” of a term such as “NFL”.

Let’s review some key dates that will give context (all of this takes place in 2011):

• 2/6 – Superbowl
• 3/4 Proposed Lockout date
• 3/5 and 3/11 extended Lockout dealines (24-hour extension was announced on 3/3 and on 3/4 a 1-week extension was approved)
• 3/11 NFL Players Association Decertifies
• 3/12 “Lockout” begins
• 4/25 Judge rules in favor of Players and temporarily lifts lockout
• 4/28 Day 1 of the NFL Draft
• 4/29 Lockout is reinstated
• 7/21 NFL Owners vote to approve a new Collective Bargaining Agreement
• 7/25 NFL Players Association approves new Collective Bargaining Agreement
• 7/26 Free Agency Begins – the NFL is back

Based on these dates, I would assume that the mention counts might look something like this:

Further down is a graph showing how accurate or (inaccurate this graph is). However to gain further understanding of the affects that the lockout might have had on the term “NFL”, we explored actual tweets from the @NFL account itself. The tweets were mostly news based tweets with links to stories about which teams might draft which player: (summing the Rowfeeder data by month)

• ~310 tweets in February (mostly during the Superbowl)
• 100 tweets in March (no football related events this month, but lots of news about the pending lockout)
• 500 tweets in April (NFL draft at the end of April, court rulings)
• Roughly 200 tweets per month for May
• Less than 100 in June and July
• 200 tweets a month seems to be the rough average throughout NFL season, not counting February (which is when the Superbowl is held) and April (which is the NFL draft) – thanks to Tweetstats for the monthly info prior to our data collection

Finally looking at total mentions, from mid February through mid April traffic for the term “NFL” averaged between 15-20K tweets per day. Peak days were as follows:

• 40K on 3/3 when it was announced that the deadline for the lockout would be extended 24 hours
• 34K on 3/4 when no deal is reached again and the deadline is pushed out one week
• 90K on 3/11 – the day that the NFL Players Union decertified
• 58K on 4/25 when a court ruling  temporarily lifted the lockout)
• 198K on 4/28 – Day 1 of the NFL Draft
• 77K on 4/29 – Day 2 of NFL Draft; Lockout is reinstated
• 52K on 4/30 – Day 3 of the NFL Draft
• 50K on 7/21 – NFL owners vote to approve the collective bargaining agreement
• 74K on 7/25 – Players Union votes to approves the collective bargaining agreement

Our prediction was a little off but was surprisingly accurate for most of the data (ok, maybe a cheated a little bit).

So what this seems to indicate is that the lockout news definitely generated social buzz and helped produce additional followers that might not have been gained had there not been a lockout. The NFL draft seems to be the biggest news interest for NFL fans, though we have no mention data for the time during the Superbowl or playoffs preceding, so we cannot say that it is the overall biggest story of the year. A follow up post might show that the days following the lifting of the lockout and corresponding signing of Free Agents/start of training camps and pre-season games will probably also show a larger volume of traffic. Also, it would be interesting to visit these numbers next year and see how the averages compare when there are no labor issues to discuss over the off season and also compare it to playoffs and Superbowl week.