Globalspeak Blog
After Lockout, NBA Aims to Lock Up The New Season
2 December 2011
The anxiety of pro basketball loyalists during the 149-day NBA lockout drama certainly didn’t flat line social net sentiment, with the languishing hope of fans running high at rumors of an end to the season shutout.
According to NetBase analytics, net sentiment sunk to -4% the second week of November, rebounding to 26% by end of month, but well below the league’s 36% net sentiment number this time last year.
NBA Net Sentiment – November 2010-11
This Thanksgiving NBA loyalists finally got their wish—there will be a basketball season. Contrary to expectations, however, the lockout’s end was not greeted with an uptick in sentiment. In the week that followed the cheery news, net sentiment was benched at 18%, compared to the full court press of 36% as of December 1, 2010. This low net sentiment prompted Localspeak to look deep, delving into the reasons behind the lackluster cheering section.
Some might cynically call the NBA lockout fuss a tremendous marketing ploy for the NBA brand; many B’ball fans concur. Not without some nostalgia for 1990s league play, the brand had become overrated and lacking in entertainment value of player prowess and overall league excitement compared to the former decade. Many posters even linked archived YouTube videos of 1990s power games to underscore their sentiment.
While the protracted league lockout prompted some fans to explore interests in other sports—deriding a league they felt had gone stale with no real team action or competitive spirits, and one comprised of several self-promoting superstars—others were turned off entirely by the sport’s arrogance and display of greed implicit in the lockout.
We used sound bites from social conversations during the last week of November—all pulled from NetBase Workbench analytics engine— to map the predominant positive and negative themes presented. Tens of thousands of high precision sound bites noted were contextually analyzed using deep computational NLP engineering.
@KingJames NBA is irrelevant . Rivalries don’t exist anymore. NCAA much more entertainable, accessable and affordable. Fans r leaving you source
@wagner620 NBA is garbage. Buncha overpaid jokers that break all bball rules. The game isn’t REAL anymore. source
The irony of our current economic climate, which is plagued by underemployment, wasn’t lost on this poster:
Fuck you NBA . U throw a ball @ a hoop u couldn’t calculate the circumference of
This post reflected the ire of a presumably lapsed NBA enthusiast for the brand’s seeming disregard of loyalists and actions favoring a purely commercially motivated end to the lockout.
So it takes ABC , Pepsi, Mcdonalds and other sponsers to get the NBA back, but not the fans… Fuck you NBA … im boycotting this season. source
Predictably on the positive side, fans were pleased the season’s draught was over. As the chart below reveals, the NBA enjoys a high entertainment value among fans of the brand, with many considering it a more superior league, often rooted in local team loyalty. Several more media savvy league players deftly used their time off the court to build personality brand equity—even creating a Twitter trend of sorts, according to some posters—and to promote their non- NBA business endeavors.
As a non- NBA follower myself, and after reading a Wall Street Journal item about impressive commercial and charitable interests pursued by several players, I even found this to be an enterprising self-branding use of social media.
While some NBA fans were happy to escape the virtual world created by the successful Take-Two blockbuster game NBA 2K11 or watch live action TV or arena games, others underscored the escapist value that the league represented.
I think I’ve reached gender/social equality fatigue. It’s about time to be a caveman again. NBA is gearing up. I’m growing this beard back.. source
NBA saved my life. I was almost deciding to be in a relationship. Whew, I dodged a bullet. source
While sentiment points are low in the game opener, we wait to hear if the NBA scores a big win this season, or not.
Insights
• Astute players using social media for self-branding may have gained adherents to their entrepreneurial pursuits, while the NBA failed to stem sliding sentiment and brand loyalty.
• If the NBA hasn’t looked at its social analytics trend line lately, it should.
• Adopting a social media strategy that includes critical-timed monitoring is an invaluable tool for crisis management and in mitigating brand equity erosion or irreversible brand loyalty loss.
• Aptly used strategic social media monitoring can inform brand messaging, helping effectively to avert or altogether reverse irreparable competitive brand equity damage.
• The NBA theme charts we analyzed were calculated with a Confidence Level of 95% and a Confidence Interval of 5%.
• Social analytics are ideally produced with such high precision, enhanced recall engineered tools as NetBase.
