Good games, bad host? Using big data to measure public attention and imagery of the Olympic Games

Mega-event boosters frequently claim increased public attention and improved host city imagery as a rationale for public investments in major events. We design a methodology and develop an algorithm to measure both, public attention and imagery. We apply the algorithm to capture over 430 million tweets and content-analyze over 21 million tweets related to the Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee, and their host cities. Olympic-related attention captures similar to 12.5% of the global twitter discourse during the event. In the English language, Olympic cities receive a positive brand value from the Olympic Games, because positive tweets about the Games and their prior, future, and bid cities exceed negative tweets at a ratio of 4:1. The Olympics leave no long-term image-legacy on twitter to their hosts but attract significant positive attention to the future host city. In contrast, the IOC attracts more negative than positive attention on twitter.