Identifying Sports Talents by Social Media Mining as a Marketing Instrument

Web 2.0 and social media channels have been analyzed for a variety of business purposes, especially in marketing. However, they have not been applied for talent identification in sports, yet. In this paper, the potential of social media mining and analytics tool for identifying potentially talented children in sports is explored. In a first step, social media data are retrieved based on a query, which is then processed in a second step with a natural language processing (NLP) tool, the Apache OpenNLP. The mining process results in a list of players´ names deemed as talented in the Web 2.0 space.