Capstone Project...

Spring semester has been all about working on my capstone project.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I will be looking at how sports teams use social media to engage with their fans and build their team’s brand for this project.  For the actual research portion of the project, I am doing a content analysis of MLB team tweets during 2017.  While the topic is obviously very interesting to me, it is a little daunting to be in the process of writing a 30+ page research paper. 

I started this project in the fall during my Communication Theory and Communication Research classes.  I wrote a literature review for my final paper in theory and looked at the current literature about how and why sports teams use social media.  There is no shortage of sources on the topic and that made writing the literature review an easier process. I also wrote my research proposal on the same topic as what my capstone project would be…a Twitter content analysis study of MLB team tweets.

Already having a chunk of my paper written at the beginning of this semester has given me more time to work on gathering the data for the research portion of the project.

The first step of the research part was to collect tweets from 2017 for all 30 teams.  The process was very tedious and I spent countless hours in the evenings and on the weekends sitting in front of my computer gathering all these tweets.

Coding tweets has been just as big of a task and just as tedious as collecting the tweets.  I was hoping to be able to code tweets from all 30 teams, but will probably only be able to code tweets from 8-10 teams because of time constraints for the project.  I knew that teams were very active on social media, but I did not realize how much they tweeted over the course of one year.  Of the teams, that I have looked at, they have each sent out between 5,000 – 12,000 tweets in one year.  I am coding every 100^th tweet, so that has been a lot of tweets to go through and code!

To analyze these tweets, I created a coding sheet that consists of different themes or content areas to look for in each tweet.  These questions range from whether the tweet includes an image or video, how many likes/tweets/replies each tweet gets and the general content of the tweet.

I had about 10-12 pages of this project already written prior to this semester and have gone through a couple of drafts already this semester.  It has been mostly adding on to what I already have written and editing it as I go.  My capstone professor has seen each and every draft of this paper now since he was also my professor for both my research and theory classes last semester.

The writing process for this paper has been challenging for me.  Every time I sit down in front of my computer, I seem to get writers block and have a hard time getting any writing done.  But as soon as I am doing something else, that’s when all my ideas come to me.

I am now down to crunch time with this project with only about a month left of the semester.  These last few weeks will be dedicated to writing the results and discussion section and doing more editing and re-writing of this project.  Wish me luck!