19-02-2014

The Sanremo Song Festival has created quite a buzz in the social sphere, producing comments, interactions and debates on the topics and personalities centered around the live show

Rome, 19 February 2014 – The Sanremo Song Festival has created quite a buzz in the social sphere, producing comments, interactions and debates on the topics and personalities centered around the live show.

During the first evening of the program, on 18 February, the real-time monitoring by Almawave on Twitter, as part of its “Social Analysis Sanremo 2014” survey, produced the following results:

• the show generated a total of 318,660 tweets, with hourly trends peaking between 9 and 10 pm, in particular, in connection with the appearance of Luciana Littizzetto and then Arisa’s performance
• among yesterday’s heavyweight performers, Arisa generated the most online buzz, totaling no less than 17,868 tweets on her performance, followed by Frankie Hi-NRG, with 9,398 tweets, and Raphael Gualazzi, who stopped at 9,296 tweets. The other contestants – Perturbazione, Giusy Ferrero, Antonella Ruggiero and Cristiano de André – ranked fourth to seventh, in this order 
• in terms of sentiment Antonella Ruggiero ranked first for positive comments (about 31% of all interactions about her), distancing Raphael Gualazzi (29.9%) and Perturbazione (28.9%). At the bottom of the league table is Frankie Hi-NRG, with only 21.9% positive comments and the record of negative comments (41.9%)
• generally speaking, the Twitter sentiment is dialectic, given the high frequency of negative or, at the most, neutral, comments. This also applies to the presenters, with Fabio Fazio totaling 25,538 tweets, almost 44% of which were negative. Luciana Littizzetto generated less buzz (8,770 tweets) “only” 38.5% of which negative.

The hot topics of the evening:

• the top hot topic of the evening was the sudden and unexpected protest by two distressed workers at the beginning of the show, which attracted the attention of 53% of the social media world, outperforming the statements by Beppe Grillo on the Italian public broadcaster RAI, which featured in only 23% of all tweets. The other two hot topics received only marginal attention: Raffaella Carrà’s duet with Luciana Littizzetto (18% of tweets) and Laetitia Casta’s look (6%).

Almawave, AlmavivA Group’s innovation company, will be conducting from today a Social Analysis of Sanremo 2014 to provide a real-time insight into the social network sentiment – of Twitter users in particular – on the forthcoming Sanremo Song Festival, to be aired starting on Tuesday 18 February.

The survey, carried out in partnership with the Ugo Bordoni Foundation, aims to pick up the buzz in the social media world about Italy’s most popular TV program, as part of a broader joint project for the development of cutting-edge innovative solutions in this field.

Social Analysis Sanremo 2014 focuses on the chatter in Twitter about the presenters, the singers and the guest stars (based on mentions, hashtags, related terms), and analyses the sentiment about the characters and the topics of the Festival, through a statistical estimate of the tweets with a positive, negative or neutral opinion.

Social Analysis Sanremo 2014 meets the need to measure an increasingly widespread phenomenon – the so-called second screen – enshrining the progressive (conceptual and operational) integration between conventional television viewing and Twitter, the second screen on which to comment on television content and develop interactions between users regarding the content.

The method used – based on the continuous real-time analysis of tweets created from 8 pm on each evening of the show, with the real-time processing of the results – consists of three steps:

• retrieval of the data from Twitter, on the basis of a set of key words;
• management and smart filing of the data, according to a storage capacity suited to the amount of processed information;
• social business intelligence, consisting of a statistical survey of the emerging concepts, DB querying and analysis of both data and sentiment.

Almawave has analyzed the Twitter accounts of the main contestants, in terms of their popularity (number of followers) and Twitter activity (number of tweets generated).

Who are, then, the contestants generating the most social media buzz? Number one, among the “heavyweights”, for number of followers, is Giusy Ferreri (313,035), followed by Arisa (221,106 followers) and Frankie Hi Nrg (129,995). Fourth and fifth, for popularity, are Francesco Renga (102,854 followers) and Noemi (67,975).

From a different perspective, the most Twitter-active among the contestants is undoubtedly Frankie Hi Nrg, with 209,677 tweets posted on his account, followed by Noemi (67,975 tweets) and Sarcina (44,566 tweets). Sarcina is also the heavyweight contestant who follows the most people on Twitter: in excess of 216,000.

Among the “young” contestants, number one is unquestionably Rocco Hunt, for both number of followers (31,937) and number of tweets created on his account (125,952), followed at a distance, in both league tables, by Veronica De Simone (3,787 followers and 17,157 tweets).

The announced guest stars are all social media celebrities, such as Ligabue, who has over one million followers (1,161,631 to be precise), Belgian singer-songwriter Stromae (757,492), Italian performer Enrico Brignano (219,292), Paolo Nutini (199,805) and astronaut Luca Parmitano (118,652).

Lastly, the presenters: Fabio Fazio is very popular in Twitter, with over 346,000 followers, compared to the approx. 36,000 followers of comedienne Luciana Littizzetto, who doesn’t tweet much either with only 80 tweets on her account, compared to about 16,000 by Fazio.

“Almawave has been investing for years in its semantic laboratories for investigating natural language as a lever for the real-time understanding of Web opinions and sentiment” says Valeria Sandei, CEO of Almawave, who continues: “By integrating our cutting-edge technology and the retrieval solutions and scientific methods developed over the years by the Ugo Bordoni Foundation we are now able to achieve absolute excellence in the analysis of television content”.