Trades, Controversy and Gold Medals: What Gets the Most Buzz?
Brett Favre and Manny Ramirez made headlines and generated buzz in July/August 2008 via high-profile trades. Since these two athletes are still making buzzworthy plays - Ramirez is a key player credited with helping the Dodgers advance to the playoffs, and Brett Favre continues to give record-breaking performances with the Jets - I was curious to see how much buzz they were generating.
Clearly, nothing has been quite as buzzworthy for Favre since he shunned retirement and made the move from Green Bay to New York. Smaller buzz spikes in September indicate online enthusiasts have been talking about his performance in the first few weeks of the NFL season.
Discussion volume for Ramirez - who has been hitting home runs, making incendiary comments about his time with the Red Sox, and generally engaging in typical “Manny being Manny” behavior, is surprisingly low. I thought more people would have been talking about some of his accomplishments and controversial behavior since he was traded from the Red Sox to the Dodgers. His overall skill, evident in his contributions to the Dodgers’ advancing to the NLCS championship playoffs, is duly noted in more recent but smaller buzz spikes. However, he still falls short of Favre in terms of buzz volume.
There is another athlete that recently made a big splash - literally, as well as figuratively - with Olympics-related buzz. This athlete is Michael Phelps.
Though Phelps did not generate as many messages as Brett Favre on a single day, buzz about his record-breaking performances in the 2008 Summer Olympics was more sustained. More recently, his hosting an episode of Saturday Night Live in mid-September generated an additional buzz spike.
Not only did Phelps win many gold medals as well as the hearts of many Americans, he also edges out Favre in terms of overall buzz volume since June. Maybe it’s the swimsuit…
I hope this question isn’t too terribly basic, but could someone explain to me the operational definition of “buzz” that is being used in this post? I understand the concept in general (i.e., the amount of hype or publicity generated by a particular event or person), but I don’t understand exactly how it’s being measured for the charts presented in this post.
In particular, the y-axes for the first two charts are labeled “% of… buzz” (which implies that there is some total quantity of buzz), and during the week of 8/10/08, for example, Favre at one point possessed approximately 7.5% of the total buzz; however, when the buzz for Favre, Ramirez, and Phelps are all charted, Favre’s buzz percentage for that same week falls to 4%.
It appears that each line chart represents only the total amount of buzz generated by the graphed players for the time period in question. If this is the case, the use of the pie chart along with the line chart makes things a little clearer, though I still have my question about how exactly you’re defining (and measuring) buzz.
Many thanks for any clarification,
Lance, thanks for your question. I am using the term “buzz” to define the total number of online messages from blogs, discussion boards, and Usenet forums collected via Nielsen Online proprietary tools and technology that include mention of these athletes. The base number I used as 100% of buzz in each graph/chart comes from that total volume of messages within the June 1-October 14 time period, including references to the sports figures analyzed in each. Your understanding that the dataset changes between the first and second graphs is correct. -Jennifer