Here at Blurrt we’re all really excited about the Blurrt Score; our own metric that we believe truly measures impact and effectiveness on social media.
We’re not quite in the dictionary…..yet!
The Blurrt Score itself has been a part of us since the very beginning – providing a way to give a resulting score that measured a combination of how many people were talking about something and how they were feeling about it.
The score works for almost anything. It could be an individual footballer, a supermarket brand, a tv channel or even the entire banking industry – regardless of the topic, we capture all the data around it, analyse and understand the content, combine the overall volume and sentiment, and then apply it to our Blurrt Score indices.
But we weren’t content with having just a really, really, really good method of combining volume and sentiment; we wanted the very best metric possible.
So we went back to the lab, scribbled all over the walls for hours and broke the Blurrt Score apart into lots of tiny pieces, tweaked them all, then put it back together.
The result? A Blurrt Score that now looks separately at the volumes of positive and negative sentiment and how strong each of these are as well as factoring in the volume of neutral sentiment bearing posts.
We ran some tests with the Formula One World Championship in Germany this past weekend. Here’s how the drivers placed by Blurrt Score:
What this shows is that the top 4 ranked by Blurrt Score were the same as the actual top 4 who finished the race – which you may think would make sense as the better the placing, the more positive the audience response and the higher the volume of posts.
However if you look at the 3rd and 4th place – you can see there is a rather large disparity between the volumes of tweets; with Rosberg not only the second most tweeted about driver overall, but actually having nearly 10,000 more tweets than the 3rd placed Verstappen.
Just as the Blurrt score factors volume into its final output, it also considers the amount of positive and negative sentiment along with the strength of expressed sentiment into the final calculation.
44% of Verstappen’s 8722 tweets collected (so 3872 in total) expressed positive sentiment, whilst only 22% of Rosberg’s 18,241 (4032) did. However there were only 1050 (12%) negative sentiment bearing tweets around Verstappen, but a huge 9868 (54%) around Rosberg.
It’s also worth us pointing out that the average negative sentiment expressed on our scale of -1 to -5 (have a look here to find out more about our sentiment scale) for Rosberg was -2.9, whilst Verstappen’s was only -2.7.
Clearly Rosberg’s very poor start, coupled with the fact he was penalised for forcing Verstappen off the track at one point, was recognised by viewers who took to social media to voice their disappointment and disapproval.
One look at all the emotion bearing tweets for Rosberg tells you everything you need to know as 42.2% were made up of anger!
Just making it into the bottom of the Blurrt Score Top 10 is Felipe Massa, who was forced to retire early into the race after first lap contact damaged the car.
The 35 year old veteran clearly has a supportive fan base though, as 19% of the 2,022 tweets collected expressed highly positive sentiment with positive messages to Felipe regardless of the fact he was pulled from the race.
Blurrt also were able to see that 33% of all emotion bearing tweets expressed sadness at the driver’s early exit.
Don't know how much bad luck @MassaFelipe19 can have but we never give up on him, stay strong champ and never lose your sunshine smile ❤️💪🙏
— Magdi #FM19 | #KM20 (@Ivyleaf_19) July 31, 2016
We love you and are proud of you @MassaFelipe19 no matter what. ❤️💪
— Michael #19 (@michael_fm19) July 31, 2016
Over 32% of all emotion bearing tweets about Massa displayed sadness.
The full details of the Blurrt Score will soon be added to this lovely website along with examples of how it can be used and why it’s a valuable metric. But don’t hesitate to get in contact with us if you’d like to know more about it right now or have any other questions about how it works.
*Tweets were collected over a three hour period on the 31st July between 12:30 and 15:30, corresponding with the live tv coverage on Sky Sports F1. This factored in tweets posted in the immediate pre and post-race coverage.
**Please feel free to share the leaderboard image, or this entire post – just let us know when and where you do!