“Take Paris Hilton, somehow or another she became well known and now people are more likely to talk about her,” Fast says. Prominent people stay popular for longer than they ought to because they serve as conversational fodder, which in turn drives more media coverage. If this whole argument seems circular, that’s the point. But all things considered, internet mentions by non-experts had as much of an effect on voting as performance, Fast’s team found. The best players, of course, were the most likely to garner All-Star votes. A statistical analysis, however, suggested that internet conversations, particularly on message boards not devoted to baseball, drove media coverage and All-Star game votes. Players who garnered the most All-Star votes also received the most media coverage and message-board attention, Fast’s team found.
This mid-season contest pits the most popular players from baseball’s two divisions against one another. To test their theory on a grander scale, Fast and his colleagues examined the relationships between fan chatter on internet message boards, media coverage, and an objective measure of a player’s popularity – fan balloting for the annual “All-Star” game. They actually keep feeding them the information they already know because that helps establish a connection,” Fast says. “The very experts who could kind of inform everyone else don’t. Yet the same fans tended to converse about prominent players when they didn’t know anything about their correspondent. Volunteers who were baseball fans themselves tended to pick an obscure player if they thought they were emailing an expert.
More often than not, they found, volunteers conversed about popular but under-performing players like Ken Griffey Jr and Roger Clemens, rather than more obscure players who put up amazing numbers, such as Miguel Cabrera. In some cases, the volunteer was told that the person receiving the email was an avid fan. Volunteers picked a name from the list and drafted a short email to another person in the group about the player. To determine if conversation could drive fame, independent of quality, Fast’s team gave a list of eight baseball players with statistics on their previous season’s performance to 33 male and 56 female volunteers.
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