What are athletes saying about…Sports Nutrition?

As you can imagine the topic of what to eat and drink is a hot one among athletes.  RelevantMind looked at what over 400,000 runners, cyclists, skiers, triathletes, climbers and more had to say. We looked at a number of different dimensions and here are some of our top-level findings.

This is the leader board showing percentage mindshare of conversations over the last 3 months:

 

The list of companies includes top brands as well as companies with a full page ad in one of several magazines including Bicycling, Runner’s World and Rock & Ice.  Gatorade is the clear leader, with Gu, Clif, Powerbar and Hammer Nutrition all having over 10% mindshare.  Met-Rx, Myoplex, Twinlab and Nature’s Path all have full page ads in one or more of the magazines we looked at, but as you can see they aren’t getting a share of the conversation.

We also wanted to look what things the community talked about when discussing nutrition.  We looked at a specific set of terms related to nutrition:

 

 It is clear and not too surprising that “Taste” and “Natural” aren’t nearly important to athletes as the more performance oriented characteristics.  This is the kind of data that can be really helpful in crafting campaign messaging targeted at a specific consumer or community type.

 This is just a small slice of the overall data RelevantMind has.  We also dive into trending over time, sentiment, influencers, specific conversations and more.  We’ll include some of our other reporting in upcoming posts.

Introducing Sector Reports and White Papers

In the coming weeks we will be launching a series of white papers and sector reports.  These look at the active dialogue going on regarding specific types of products. What are teens saying about denim, cars, TV shows and movies?  What do athletes say about sports nutrition, bicycles, shoes, and heart rate monitors?  And so on…

Our blog will cover high-level findings on which brands have the highest mindshare, and which trends or keywords are most important.  Our white papers will go further in depth, including sentiment, trending, conversation and influencer analysis plus a lot of useful insights from the data.

What we think is special about these reports and papers is that the source is so broad.  When we say “athletes” we don’t just mean popular bloggers or small samples intended to represent the broader demographic.  RelevantMind means the whole community, tuning into literally hundreds of thousands of people.  These people don’t just represent a market, they are the market.

Are they talking about me?

Well, the question we usually get is more along the lines of “Are they talking about my brand? How about specific products?“. 

At RelevantMind our emphasis is on user communities (primarily forums and discussion groups) as opposed to other forms of social media like blogs and micro-blogs, wikis, photo and video sharing, etc.  There are many reasons for our focus but a big one is the sheer volume of conversations.  More volume means more data points and that can make all the difference, especially as you get to the product level.

Let’s take a quick look at the difference in blog versus community volume at the brand and product level.

First we looked at the topic de jour  - the iPhone.  We know it isn’t a brand but it is about the most blogged about topic over the last 3 months.  Here is how things stack up:

The volume advantage is about 3:1.  We see similar results around other hot topics like the presidential election.  Next we looked the brand level for Garmin, maker of excellent GPS units:

Now the advantage is 5:1.  If your brand doesn’t have a big base of professionally reviewed/blogged products like consumer electronics does this difference can be a lot higher.  

 Finally, let’s look at the product level.  Here is the new Garmin 705 cycling GPS unit (high on my personal “want” list):

 

Here the difference is a whopping 46:1 – now that is significant!

Social media engagement is all about connecting with your market in a positive way.  If they aren’t talking about you then it is important to look at why not, and what you can do to change things.  But it is also important to look for the conversation in the right places.