More than Just a Game: The Power of Social Media on Super Bowl XLVI

doi:10.4236/sn.2014.32018

Paper Menu >>

Journal Menu >>

Social Networking, 2014, 3, 142-145

Published Online February 2014 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/sn)

http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sn.2014.32018

OPEN ACCESS SN

More than Just a Game : The Power of Social Media on

Super Bowl XLVI

Fernanda Bruno dos Santos, Jonice Oliveira

Graduate School in Computing Science (PPGI), Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Email: [email protected], [email protected]

Received 24 December 2013; revised 28 January 2014; accepted 24 February 2014

mons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work

SCIRP as a guardian.

ABSTRACT

The evolution of social media in the recent years promoted the appearance of a new category: social media based

on check-in. It enables the user to define their identity through information sharing. This paper aims to show the

evolution of the se media highlighting the effects and changes they cause in society through Super Bowl XLVI

scenario, besides indicating the important role they have for the companies and marketing.

KEYWORDS

Social Media; Data Mining; Marketing; Social Networks; Gamification

1. Introduction

Marketing is something that involves connecting clients

with services and products. Applications based on social

media develop the role of conne c tors between people and

habits as they define communities based on what their

users have in common from the info rma ti on they share

[1]. Due to the evolution in how consumers think, accus-

tome d to the interactivity of the virtual world, the way of

how advertisers planned their campaigns also demanded

change in order to continue maintaining public interest.

Companies soon realized the p ower that sharing pos-

sessed in order to build a kind user persona and began to

make use of social medi a applications and check-in to

release their new products and promote their brand.

As a way to engage users to share information such as

location and habits, companies invested on gamification

[2]. Through t he m, companies develop concepts to re-

ward their customers with a c tivities such as earning

badges and virtual stickers, even without rea l value, are

fun and create a sense of recognitio n within the applica-

tion. This kind of interaction creates loyalty to the brand

and which is very important to companies since they can

work toward retaining and attracting new customers.

This paper aims to show the factors that imply the use

of these applications by users and the impacts they have

on the way society lives and thinks. The football event

Super Bowl XLVI is used as backdrop, crossing data

provided by two check-in applications: Foursquare and

GetGlue. Twitter and YouTube are also used in order to

analyze volume of disc ussion. Using these data, informa-

tion was obtained in ord er to capture audience through

the ga me and understand where viewers were and what

was discussed during the event. This type of knowledg e

is invaluable for strategic planning and marketing in-

vestment in advertising, highlighting the importance that

these tools have on social me di a scenario.

2. Literature Review

Social Media is a type of online media that allow users

around the world to connect, share experiences and con-

tent instantly through the Internet. It is the resu lt of the

socialization process based on information represented in

recent years by the extension of dialogue and how the

information came to be organized through the w eb.

The term social media describes online technologies

and practices that people use to share opinions, expe-

riences and perspectives, and can manifest itself in dif-

ferent fo rma ts including text, images, audio and video [3].

F. B. DOS SANTOS, J. OLIVEIRA

OPEN ACCESS SN

143

The expansion of these med ia has mad e it easier to find

friends, share ideas and opinions and information, i.e., a

democratization of content where everyone participates

in building a virtual community.

With the growing popularity of these platforms, com-

panies soon realized that a good way of advertising is

using social medi a as a way to connect people and their

products. There was a transformation of acting as con-

su mers and consequently how companies build their

marketing strategies [4].

So me works, such as [5], show that it is possible to in-

fer behavior of users throug h data exposed on social

networks and that includes, for example, consumer habits

and interests in general. This information enables the

ability to identify different groups of people and create

advertising strategies for different types of consumers

heating the dispute between companies and brands.

According to [6], market power is extremely difficult

to measure and the traditional models of competition

have man y limitations, s uch as limited flexibility due to

factors such as organizational restructuring, introduction

of new products in the market and even the appearance

of new forms of work organization, such as virtual teams.

In order to meas ur e the degree of influence of a brand or

product opinion and market polls are conducted. The first

aims to accurately detect trends and positions of the var-

ious social segments while the second focuses on disco-

vering market opportunities. Allied, they help companies

to generate knowledge about the place they should take

in their business.

On these matters, [7] show that traditional methods of

survey are slow and costly, since they depend on people

via phone or letter or in person to answer questions. It

also raises issues su ch as anonymity. As for the cost,

much of it is due to time collecting data that is usually

done over the phone or on the streets, requiring an inter-

mediary between question and interviewee. Moreover,

there is the problem of reliability in the data since the sur-

vey does not only depend on the number of people inter-

viewed, but the scientific represen tativeness of the sampl e.

Therefore, social media characterize a good source of

consumer reviews regarding products and brands. They

provide information about people allowing profiling of

age, geographic location, by product type, for example.

Or even look up from the point of view of a marketing

campaign if there was a good or bad response from con-

su mers to that product. Therefore, taking advantage of

the idea of [8] which states that the great advantage of

the internet is its power to prov ide immediate access to

information, it would be possible to obtain data quickly

and objectively, facilitating the analysis to be performed.

3. Case of Study

The Super Bowl is one of the most important sport

events around the world, garnering mor e than 111 mil-

lion viewers on the United States, the host country event,

and becoming the most watched television program in

the history of the country in 2012 [9]. Because of all this

visibility, it also has great marketing appeal since its

commercials are shown during the game with a very

large number of people watching compared to the pr ime

time audience [9]. When Super Bowl is on air a 30

second commercial costs in average 3 million dollars [9]

and it is known for launching new products, so capturing

data from the audience reaction creates a valuable tool to

the companies to measure metrics as return on invest-

ment and user engagement.

One way to analyze the impact of an event can be held

through analysis of social media data, since they allow

users to share experiences instantaneously via the Inter-

net. In order to plan the analysis, th is study used Super

Bowl XLVI as a backdrop and captured data from social

media like Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and GetGlue

which were able to show where these viewers were, what

they were thinking and what they did during the event.

Using all these kind of information, it was possible to

analyze the degree of attention th at companies and their

products attracted during the event.

Data from social med ia where obtained through a

crawler using the API provided by the mentioned media,

enabling the obtaining, among others, comments and

number of views. According to data from Twitter were

written more than 15 million tweets during the ga me

compared to the 3 million in 2011 [12] showing growth

of the platform. These tweets were originated from 46

different countries, showing the extent of the event. With

regard to commercials, it was observed that 75% compa-

nies that exhibited advertisements mad e use of social

media as a way to extend the brand concept and discus-

sions on the internet. Important tools to imp ro ve the idea

are based on the use of hash tags, fan pages on Facebook

and links to the video on YouTube.

In order to verify whether these strate gies have brought

so me response from the public, the final number of men-

tions of the brand during the event was verified, as well

as the growth on the number of followers on their Twitter

pages and “Like”s on Facebook. Table 1 shows the

growth of some of the followers companies that launched

advertisements during the Super Bowl, as well as tweets

mentioning the brand. Through these data, it is possible

to note that advertisements generated some kind of pub-

lic interest, since people start to receive in their Twitter

accounts updates about products and information that the

company think its relevant to users and custumers. The

fact that the companies are able to attract consumer’s

attention is of great importance since they are responsible

for spreading the brand related information through en-

dorsements and retweets from his followers.

F. B. DOS SANTOS, J. OLIVEIRA

OPEN ACCESS SN

144

Table 1. Data from twitter.

dnarB

oFllowers

before

ewolloFrs

after

oitneMns worGth

Bridgestone 687 3.852 23.789 %461

E*Trade 4.437 11.006 43.783 %148

ispeP 5.968 7.148 14.494 %20

sotiroD 2.761 3.217 47.223 %17

Volkswagen 10.992 12.348 32.689 %12

As regards to social medi a based on check in, Fours-

quare that has 10 million users, ma de available for those

who performed check in at bars and restaurants during

Super Bowl a badge called “Super Swarm Sunday”. Ac-

cording to the [11], 350,000 people earned the badge

performing check ins at 2.500 different places in 117

different countries. 3000 of them performed check ins on

the stadium where Super Bowl was held, which had the

capacity of 68,000 seats. Therefore, it can be concluded

in relation to the this group of users that the event, seen

as typically American, attracted considerable attention

from foreign people showing how American culture has

spread around the world.

GetGlue, according to the [12], who owned about 1

million users, registered 160,000 check ins during the

event. The high number of check-ins can be explained by

the existence of exclusive virtual stickers for the event,

one for each stage of Super Bowl, which when collected,

could be sent to the user by snai l mail in physical copies.

23,000 comme nts generated by the check ins had men-

tions of brands that were advertising, representing 15%

the check ins made. Beside s stickers, companies launched

contests through GetGlue encouraging discussion about

their products and number of check ins.

The advertisements that aired during the event were

provided by advertisers on YouTub e . The strategy was

used by brands to launch extended versions of the com-

mercials during the Super Bowl, encouraging viewers to

broaden their experience accessing social media. When

comparing the total views of the mos t viewed video on

YouTube at the time, which had 457 million views

(YouTube Charts, 2012) and the videos aired on Super

Bowl it is possible to infer that in just 3 days on average,

18 million views, representing 3% of the video most

viewed. Taking into account that the video took 21

months to get to this pos ition, Super Bowl commercials,

with the average of 6 million page views per day, they

would take only 2 ,5 months to reach this level.

All these data demonstrate how companies can use so-

cial media to obtain advantages in ter ms of marketing,

maximizing discussions about their products and brands,

not only restricting the television media. As presented

her e, users have proved to be receptive to new ways of

marketing, and attracted to new and creative strategies of

advertising. They were also involved by the atmosphere

created around events and increasingly willing to shar e

their opinions, preferences and even their habits and rou-

tines with applications they trust.

4. Conclusion

In order to mak e marketing and social medi a applications

to express its full potential is still important to invest on

game mechanics, so as reinvent products and services are

produced, consumed and how consumers interact with it.

To mak e it possible, it is necessary that these applica-

tions can be smarter, connecting people to move simple r

and delivering valuable content and contextualize d the m.

Besides that, it is important to improve the ability to at-

tract more users. In order to achieve that, these applica-

tions need to be mo re intuitive and capable of offer even

richer and essential experiences for its users. From the

point view of business, they have to reach opportunities

to increase the number of consumers. However, to get

there, they need to educate them about the pros of using

these applications and cr eating and disseminating new

strategies.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank CNPq, CAPES, and FAPERJ for

their support, specially by the support provided by the

projects “INCT para Contro le do Câncer” (CNPq 573806/

2008-0 e FAPERJ E26/170.026/2008) and “Projeto Uni-

versal: CLOTO: Composição, Mineração, Análise e Pre-

dição de RedesSociaisUtilizando Dados Liga dosAbertos

e Contextualizados” (CNPq 487239/2012-1), by the grants

“JovemCientista do Nosso Estado” (Young Researcher

of Rio de Janeiro, FAPERJ: E_23/2013) and “Produtivi-

dadeemPesquisa-Nível 2” (Productivity in Research-Lev-

el 2, CNPq: 308219/2010-4).

REFERENCES

[1] C. Ververidis and G. Polyzos, “Mobile Marketing Using

Location Based Service,” In International Conference on

Mobile-Business, Athens, 2002.

[2] J. Lindqvist, et al., “I’m the Ma yo r of My House: Ex-

amining Why People Use Foursquare—A Social-Driven

Location Sharing Application,” In Conference on Human

Factors in Computing Systems, AC M, New York, 2011,

pp. 2409-2418.

[3] B. Solis and D. Breakenridge, “Putting the Public Back in

Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the

Aging Business of PR,” FT Press, 2009.

[4] K. Zhang, “A Competitive Analysis of Web 2.0 Com-

munities: Differentiation with User-Generated Content,”

2011.

[5] C. Tang, et al., “What’s in a Name: A Study of Names,

F. B. DOS SANTOS, J. OLIVEIRA

OPEN ACCESS SN

145

Gender Inference, and Gender Behavior in Facebook,” In

Proceedings of DASFAA Workshops, 2011, pp. 344-356.

[6] C. Pleatsikas a nd D. Teece, “The Analysis of Market De-

finition and Market Power in the Context of Rapid Inno-

vation,” International Journal of Industrial Organization,

Vol. 19, No. 5, 2001, pp. 665-693.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0167-7187(00)00088-6

[7] J. Zhu, et al., “Aspect-Based Opinion Polling from Cus-

tomer Reviews,” IEEE Transactions on Affective Compu-

ting, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2011, pp. 37-49.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2011.2

[8] C. Shapiro and H. Varian, “Information Rules: A Stra-

tegic Guide to the Network Economy,” Harvard Business

School Press, Boston, 1999.

[9] Reuters Website, “Super Bowl TV Audience Reaches Re-

cord 111.3 Million,” 2012.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/06/us-superbowl-

tv-idUSTRE8151Q020120206

[10] B. Stelter, “A Super Bowl Where Viewers Let Their Fin-

gers Do the Talking,” The New York Times, 2012.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/a-sup

er-bowl-where-viewers-let-their-fingers-do-the-talking/?_

php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

[11] Foursquare Blog—Avaiableon, 2012.

https://www.facebook.com/foursquare/posts/2920634241

81556

[12] GetGlue Blog, “GetGlue Guide to Super Bowl”, 2012.

http://blog.getglue.com/?p=10388

[13] YouTube Charts, 2013.

https://www.youtube.com/charts