Week 10 NFL Picks via Social Media

Written on November 10, 2011 by Espo in 2011 NFL Picks

Hi there, thanks for stopping by. If you like this post, you might want to sign up to have my posts delivered to your RSS reader or sent to your email.

The second half of the NFL season kicks off tonight. Over the next few weeks the playoff field should start to settle itself out and we’ll find out if teams are contenders or pretenders. Like many of you cheering on your teams, I’ve also been picking the winners of each game to some success using a series of social media generated formulas from fans Tweeting, blogging and Facebook chatting up their teams. While I would like to say that my picks have been dead on, the fact of the matter is that after nine weeks, I have a 66-64 record after a 7-6 showing in week nine. Hopefully this week’s picks will put me more into the black:

Oakland 22, San Diego -6
New Orleans 10, Atlanta 6
Tennessee 22, Carolina -6
Pittsburgh 10, Cincinnati 6
St. Louis 6, Cleveland 10
Buffalo 22, Dallas -6
Jacksonville 6, Indianapolis 10
Arizona -6, Philadelphia 22
Denver 3, Kansas City 13
Washington -6, Miami 22
Houston 1, Tampa Bay 15
Baltimore 22, Seattle 0
Detroit 13, Chicago 3
New York Giants 10, San Francisco 6
New England 15, New York Jets 1
Minnesota 6, Green Bay 10

How are you picking the season’s winners? If you’d like to try your luck against the social picks, I invite you to join the ESPN Pick ‘em league where Mike Schaffer is currently leading the pack with a 90-39 mark. Winner takes home a $25 Amazon gift card.

Image - Keith Allison

HowieSPM 2336 pts

Very interesting. Thank you shellykramer for sharing. I know why your formula is not working. Without even knowing the formula. The Vegas line is often surprisingly accurate. The reason is people have to pick a winner and have to put money on it. The line moves to where the volume bet reach equilibrium. The goal in vegas is to have half win half lose and make their money on the Vig (the commission on the bet). Bookies do the same thing.

This creates the original ultimate crowd source.

But here is where social media will fail you. If a component is just chatter. Meaning more chatter is good. Your picks will be skewed towards big market teams who will have many more people chatting about their teams. The second flaw is Facebook. 70% of accounts are 100% private. You don't have a clean pool of data. That 70% of chatter you are not seeing could easily hurt your picks. But it is possible blogs and Twitter are enough to over come this. while facebook has so many more accounts that Twitter on average there is 4 tweets per person per day. On average for Facebook there is only 1 status update every 4.5 days per user and only 1 comment every 2.25 days. So the weight of influence should be coming from Twitter and Blogs.

This is similar to the Brand Bowl that Mullen and Radian 6 did to judge the TV spots for the superbowl that edwardboches helped put together last year. I also felt that was flawed only because liking a commercial and it selling a product are not aligned. I thought the Chrysler and VW spots were wastes of client money yet they were the most popular spots. Chrysler because it didn't change brand sentiment. If your cars suck a commercial ain't fixing that. For VW it was a great spot but didn't sell. All I knew from it was I could start the Jetta from inside my house.

share flag

spam
offensive
disagree
off topic

jeffespo 186 pts moderator

HowieSPM Hey Howie. I am fully aware of how the Vegas line works, believe it or not, two smaller market teams have more overall buzz week in and week out. Sure the NY teams get skewed because of their markets, but looking at overall volume this week Green Bay, Buffalo and Pittsburgh had more mentions then them. Cinncinati and Carolina were only a couple of mentions below those major markets and were ahead of Philly and the Bay area teams.

The Facebook information is on the official pages of each team, so all of that is public data. And look when it comes to picking winners it is all in fun and as you can see from my record overall its not 100 percent accurate and is just above 50 percent - so science, it is not.

jeffespo Thanks Jeff. This stuff fascinates me. Plus if it was say 80% would you be blogging vs getting rich in Vegas? LOL I was curious the source of the Facebook data. Which you answered. I am going to follow the rest of the year to see how it goes.

I recently blogged about this about the Social Media Experts/Gurus. That is their blog info or their books had guaranteed money making they wouldn't share it. And the same with the financial schemes. A friend said in 2007 - buy Iraqi currency for $250 it will be worth $100k in a few years. I have a Finance Degree and said 'What Financial person would tell you this vs buying it all for themselves and keeping quiet'.

So the minute you close this blog down I am finding you at the sports book and spying on your bets 8)

ShellyKramer 119 pts

HowieSPMjeffespo Glad to know you two crazies have "found" one another ... you will get along famously. #thatisall

HowieSPM Where did we find this @shellykramer woman at? ;)

HowieSPM hahahah... there was a time when I was 93% against the spread for a 2 year period, but was at a time when I wasn't allowed to bet on football so was more on "pride" points ;)The biggest thing that fascinates me with social is tying money back to it. The formulas I used are ones that I use on a weekly basis on measuring the social buzz metrics that can then also be applied to financial data. If you visit: http://jeffesposito.com/2011/09/08/social-medias-nfl-week-picks/, you can see the formulas. And the funny thing I see about all these experts with books is that there are little to no mention of real numbers they've helped generate, rather ones their case studies have generate :)