American runner Meb Keflezighi crossed the Boston Marathon finish line this Monday afternoon, earning himself a first place medal and the honor of being the first American athlete in thirty-one years to bring home the hardware at the event.
Happy Patriots Day.
Amidst all of the excitement and emotion, People Pattern was curious to get an idea of who was engaging in the conversation.
What happened next was right in our wheelhouse. We used the People Pattern audience Intelligence platform to created a project on the platform and let it run for a few hours. No pun intended. Within a short time, our team had a nice sampling of over 50,000 portraits to take a look at.
That’s when the fun began.
Who were they?
I went for a little run and while I was out the platform took all of the collected portraits and broke them down so that each one comprised all of the open information about the individual. As this was just a quick analysis, we opted to use Twitter as our main source of information. Normally, we would pull data from many sources, including CRM systems, email lists, and customer loyalty databases.
What we found was a diverse crowd of over 52,000 people with a variety of interests, perspectives, and opinions about all sorts of things.
Naturally, we wanted to know more.
What were they talking about?
Using complex algorithms and machine learning, the platform made sense of unstructured conversations- those informal things that people say online- in order to derive patterns and trends that might be helpful for us to learn more about the audience.
For kicks, we pulled followers of the Boston Red Socks and compared Sox fans to marathoners. Whatever presumptions you may have had about runners and food, or sports fans and education, the data doesn’t lie. Based on the babble of information online- the posts, tweets, comments, shares, etc- those passionate about America’s favorite past-time talked a lot about education and sports, while runners were more focused on food and family.
As for standouts in the brand space, Nike dominated the conversation. Meb’s sponsor, Skechers, flew below the radar. It will be interesting to see how the conversation goes after the win.
Boston Strong
Regardless of where you’re from, Boston holds a special place in many people’s hearts. It’s been an emotional year for those who call the city home. One year after the bombings that rocked the finish line, we’re reminded again that it’s the people that make for a powerful story.
As for Meb’s win, well, we couldn’t have predicted anything better.
To see where we derived these insights, check out our platform with a demo.
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