Since it’s SuperBowl XLIV today I worked that into my “editorial schedule” (chuckle) and decided to do a post focusing on what chatter I could pick up from other NFL Players who might be blogging and tweeting and offering their own predictions (or just expressing their sentiment).

However, Radian6 teamed up with Mullen to do some of it’s own predicting – and real time following

Mullen and Radian6 today announced BrandBowl2010 (http://brandbowl2010.com/), a Twitter/Super Bowl experience that combines tweeting, ad reviews and a host of metrics that will let viewers see close to real time ratings of the TV commercials running on the big game.

“This is a perfect opportunity for us to showcase our capabilities and functionality when it comes to measuring online conversation and brand sentiment.”

Users can log on to BrandBowl2010 using their Twitter ID, tweet directly from the page, view tweets using the hashtag #brandbowl and see how the Twittisphere is responding and rating Super Bowl commercials and the brands running them.

The site will provide an overall ranking of the brands advertising on the game based on a composite score that takes into consideration both volume of tweets and sentiment (positive or negative). The Top 10 most popular brands will be featured on the site, with second tier brands displayed in a sub-section called the Locker Room. In addition, a simple click will display the volume of tweets over the duration of the game, the sentiment breakdown along with a word cloud that highlights what people are saying about a commercial.

So, along with my analysis – you can check out what Radian6 is doing, directly.

Note: by the time I got to the end of this post – I was unable to find any players that were chiming in on predictions – I’m sure some have – but I didn’t have a good list to work from.  However, the data file is contained in a link at the bottom of this post – please share your insights here if you have come up with something with this data.

Since I don’t follow football and am not really a sports fan – I don’t have subject area knowledge of the details that most fans have, so I’ll just use the tools and let them speak to/for me.   What I share here is me – my ability to dream up and use platforms and tools – I don’t care if I share the recipes, and someone else does something even better with it, as  I can always dream up more.  So if you see something in the data I uncover, run with it (all the way to the finish line, if you want).

Having said that – used three tools – Radian6 to pull the last 3 days of data ( a lot of data – attached at the end of this post for your own analysis, if you wish – I limited myself to the latest 10,000 records – there are volumes of data just for the last few days)  from the River of News, TweepSearch – to find NFL players that aren’t on the Colts or Saints team – and Sysomos Map, to get a better sense of the keywords to enter into Radian6 – using it’s “popular phrases” report (I wrote about this a few days ago).

Many of the profiles haven’t been updated recently – still, I’ll use the twitter accounts to search out if there have been comments about the game taking place today – and this post is written several hours before the kickoff.

The Popular Phrases uncovered by Sysomos (for Twitter, shown below) are a perfect example of why we need multiple platforms and tools – Sysomos MAP as a capability to uncover popular patterns of words that I have not seen anywhere else).  Using these platforms together is a superior setup and I believe agencies currently need to have access to multiple tools – this is one example of why.

The popular phases picked up by Sysomos were pumped into the Radian6 Topic profile  to improve it’s accuracy, while TweepSearch was used to identify NFL players who have an online presence and qualify them by influence (crude – in this case – just followers).

If you download the data I provided you’ll be able to filter on media type

In fact, using Radian6 and looking at the last 3 days (again, if I downloaded all the data – I’d have a massive file that no one would want to download and would take me way too long to analyze).

Half  of the activity in Social Media round Superbowl XLIV is on Twitter – not surprising – but simply, amazing!

And if we take the combined Twitter followers of those who are tweeting in the last 3 days, there is a potential to reach 206 million accounts (though there is currently no de-duplication in Radian6 – these are not “unique accounts” – consider this more like an “impression” or “pageview”).

Potentially, there’s 206 million messages that could be streamed just by Twitter along, in the last 3 days, around the Superbowl – but if even 1 or 2% actually saw the messaging – that would still equal a few million message – yes, Twitter is Mass Media, more than any other Social Media, right now.

So, let’s get down to the meat at the table, so to speak – who is saying what?

First, I could not find any player that tweeted about the game in the last 3 days based on the TweepSearch list – that tells me two things.

1. I need a better list – tweepsearch isn’t updated often enough for this kind of event (need a list of players who have updated in the last day or two on Twitter).
2. Most NFL players might have been warned not to tweet about their own predictions before the game.

So, I did the next best thing and took the tweets of anyone who has a million followers or more – about the game – here it is.

And here’s the tweets of Twitter accounts that have between 100,00 and 1 million followers.

what I’m suspecting it the “interesting stuff” is not coming from the accounts with the largest number of followers.

How about predictions on Twitter (see above) plus one for Comscore…hmmm

Well … Comscore’s survey does predict the winner – most thought the Colts would win.

When asked which team they expected to win the Super Bowl, the Colts were selected by 54 percent of respondents compared to 34 percent who thought the Saints would win (with 11 percent undecided). However, when asked which of the teams they would prefer to see win, the results were reversed with 52 percent selecting the Saints and 33 percent selecting the Colts (with 13 percent undecided).

Respondents were also asked to choose the most likely candidate for Super Bowl MVP. Not surprisingly, Colts quarterback and league MVP Peyton Manning was the overall top choice, garnering 50 percent of the vote. Saints quarterback Drew Brees ranked a distant second with 15 percent of the vote, followed by Saints running back Reggie Bushat 8 percent.

The upshot is – I think Social Media tools could be very helpful in handicapping sports events – but I need better information than TweepSearch can provide for a sports event – if we had that – I think I could have found someone who is NFL player now – who tweeted who they thought would win.

And I just want to say – I got this idea for the approach while at dinner last night with a group who attended Eventcamp here in NYC.

Here’s the data – SuperBowl last 3 days River of News Radian6 -  you can analyze it if you really want to – but bear in mind the file is almost 7MB in size, so don’t bother unless you think you can add value.   Radian6 provides the most complete data feed of any vendor – if I had unlimited bandwidth and resources – plus the time, I could have done something very nice with this data.