NHL All-Star Weekend 2012: a Star Is Born

Home , Alexander Ovechkin, Patrick Kane, Sidney Crosby

NHL All-Star Weekend 2012: A star is born

Kane, Price and Alfredsson big winners of All-Star Weekend; Ovechkin not so much

The NHL All-Star weekend is about great hockey, good times and – of course – the fans. But it’s also about something else: The personal brands of players, who each hold some responsibility of marketing themselves and the game they play.

So who were the winners and losers of this year’s festivities?

• MediaMiser used its sentiment analysis capabilities to track players who received a relatively large number of positive or negative mentions.

• Though Alexander Ovechkin had a high number of mentions (see page 2), far more were negative thanks to his skipping of the All-Star Weekend. This gave the Washington Capitals star the only negative overall rating.

• Hometown hero Daniel Alfredsson and Zdeno Chara received a relatively high level of positive tweets, but also a great deal of neutral. This decreased their overall sentiment average.

• The two highest-rated players by brand, Patrick Kane and Carey Price, earned high praise from fans for lighthearted moments during the NHL Skills Competition (Price was mic’d for CBC and Kane wore a Superman cape during the event). These two did not garner extremely high numbers of mentions, however, as shown on page 2.

© 2012 MediaMiser Ltd. 1 • Of all tweets collected with the #NHLAllStar and #NHLSkills hashtags, team captains Zdeno Chara and Daniel Alfredsson led all players in Twitter mentions. Of note is the low number of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin mentions (neither of whom attended the festivities) in All- Star tagged tweets.

• Of all tweets collected for the study, Alexander Ovechkin and Daniel Alfredsson had the most mentions. Sidney Crosby (thanks to injury-related news that broke during the weekend) also had a high number, as did Zdeno Chara.

All tweets were harvested between Jan. 25 and 31.

About MediaMiser Incorporated in Ottawa in 2003, MediaMiser is a media monitoring and For more information contact: analysis solution that provides the best-possible technology, content sources, and services to empower clients with media intelligence and Jim Donnelly, Director of content the means to share it while delivering the highest possible return E: [email protected] on investment. MediaMiser’s patented software and its customized P: 613-232-7797 Ext. 117 professional services are used by clients across Canada, Europe, the United States and Australia.