Best of Enemies – @mrdavidhaye Vs @Audley_Harrison

In the lead up to Saturday’s World Heavyweight title fight at Manchester’s M.E.N arena – Haye Vs Harrison, there has been a tremendous amount of coverage on both fighters.  Whilst reading Ben Dirs’ blog post on the BBC this week, discussions within 4Ps Marketing began to grow around which fighter has the most conversation surrounding them online in the lead up to the fight that has been dubbed ‘Best of Enemies’.  To gather this data, I took to the World of social media with the help of the fantastic monitoring tool Radian6.

Assuming you can all gauge the sheer amount of online content and conversation which surrounds such a fight as Haye Vs Harrison, I thought my research would gain the best results if I only looked at the last seven days of online conversation.  Radian6 gathers its information through various key words, for this particular research I used the fighter’s twitter handles – @mrdavidhaye & @Audley_Harrison – as these are where a significant amount of the conversations are found.

Getting straight into the statistics, since November 5^th there have been 565 conversations around David Haye, and only 238 for Audley Harrison. (I must remind you that only conversation which uses the keywords @mrdavidhaye or @Audley_Harrison are collected)  From these stats it is clear that there is a significant difference in which fighter people are talking about online.  However, things become more interesting when we look at the daily conversations.  At the start of my research, (November 5^th) people talking about Audley Harrison online outnumbered his opponent massively, notably on November 5th when Harrison had 47 conversations and Haye only 13.  Yet as the fight drew closer, there was a dramatic increase in the amount of people talking about David Haye, peaking at 82 posts on November 9^th. (Harrison only had 6 on this day)  This change in conversations can be seen easily in the graph below.  I do not have the knowledge or experience in gauging pre-fight public sentiment to give a reason for this change, so I will let the reader come to the conclusion of why there was this change in which fighter the public were talking about leading up to the fight.

It would be a big task to analyse the sentiment of all the individual posts in more depth, but whilst briefly looking at the posts for both fighters, the trend seems to be that when a user writes directly to a boxer’s Twitter handle, they are generally showing their support.  Going on this, my conclusion to why more people have been talking about Haye in the last seven days is that across the board, he has more public support than Harrison.

Lets hope the fight is as exciting as everyone hopes…

http://www.skysports.com/bestofenemies

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bendirs/2010/11/there_are_those_who_think.html

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