Social Media Analysis of KCON 2018

What is KCON?

Organized by CJ E&M since 2012, KCON is the largest annual three-day festival for South Korean music and pop culture in America. Celebrating its 7th anniversary, 2018 KCON took place in New York (6/23-24) and Los Angeles (8/10-12). KCON consists of K-pop artists’ concerts at night and a comprehensive Korean cultural convention during the day. Basically, KCON offers a comprehensive “Korean” brand experience by offering chances for Korean companies to showcase their products in America while K-pop fans from all over the world enjoy their favorite artists’ performing and interacting with them during KCON. Offering a unique festival model with the focus on a nation’s cultural content widely known as “Korean Wave” or “Hallyu,” KCON has developed into a primary vehicle for Korean cultural diplomacy.

What is the Impact of KCON 2018?

Capturing the impact of KCON, a large-scale cultural festival, offers invaluable insights into organizing future events. Due to various limitations, it is challenging to measure KCON’s social and cultural impacts on the individual attendees. However, social media platforms such as Twitter allows us to take a peek into the public sentiment towards KCON by analyzing individual tweets where users’ reactions and feedbacks are expressed. Thus, we collected English tweets using a group of selected key terms (described below) from August 6th to 20th, in order to understand the impact of KCON LA.

KCON 2018 was organized in New York and Los Angeles in June and August, respectively. The total number of attendees for KCON 2018 was about 147,0002 twice as many as those attended KCON 2015.

  • KCON NY: 6/23 (Sat.) – 24 (Sun.) at Newark Prudential Center in New York, attendance about 53,0003
  • KCON LA: 8/10 (Fri.) – 12 (Sun.) at Los Angeles Convention Center and Staples Center, attendance about 94,0004

What is Twitter Analysis?

As one of the most popular social media platforms, Twitter has a total of 336 million monthly active users worldwide as of 2018, especially being popular among youths between ages of 18 and 29. On average, 500,000 messages are tweeted on a daily basis. As Twitter is a public social media platform, tweets have become a popular data source to understand public sentiment towards certain brands, topics, public figures, etc.

In general, when assessing the impact of a specific event using social media platforms such as messages published on Twitter (also referred to as “tweet”), the analysis is two-fold. First is looking at the size of the audience impacted by a specific issue or event of interest. This involves quantitative analysis of the volume of tweets, number of reach and impression of specific posts or hashtags that are tracked. In order to do so, key terms are selected to collect tweets that are tweeted during the set time period.

Second is assessing the public sentiment towards a specific issue or event of interest by conducting “sentiment analysis” of the sample tweets collected. For instance, an interpreted computer programming language such as Python, allows this kind of qualitative analysis by scoring the polarity of tweets from negative (-1), neutral (0), positive (1) and by running through words, emoticons, and hashtags. As tweets have a limited number of word counts, it is difficult to conduct accurate and in-depth sentiment analysis, especially when the issue or event involves multilayered context that likely generate sophisticated conversations that use inferences, metaphors, satire, etc. For instance, analyzing public sentiment towards the KCON would be more straightforward and simple when compared to that towards former candidates of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump.

What are the Key Findings?

o English tweets relating to KCON 2018 were collected in the following way:

  • #KCON18NY as a select keyword, tweets were collected for 15 days, beginning 12:00 a.m. June 16, 2018 to 12:00 a.m. June 30, 2018 (PST).
  • #KCON18LA as a select keyword, tweets were collected for 15 days, beginning 4:00 p.m. August 6, 2018 to 9 a.m. August 20, 2018 (PST).
  •  Using all keywords related to KCON detailed below, tweets were collected for 13 days, beginning 11 a.m. August 8, 2018 to 9 a.m. August 20, 2018 (PST).

o All of the select keywords related to KCON can be classified into three groups:

  • KCON Events, Sponsors and Hosts: kcon, k-con, kcon2018, kconla, kconny, kconla2018, kconny2018, #kcon18ny, #kcon18la, foodstreet, beautyblock, klubkcon, starlivetalk, CJ, CJ E&M, Toyota, Mnet, etc.
  • Variations of Korean Artists: wannaone, twice, dreamcatcher, etc.
  • General Korea / Korean culture: k-pop, kpopmusic, koreanmusic, k-food, k-drama, k-cinema,k-beauty, hallyu, koreanwave, etc.
  • When a tweet includes multiple key words selected above, it can be classified into all three groups.

o Total number of tweets collected by using all of the above select keywords:

5,713,250 (Size of data: approximately 36GB)

    • KCON LA: 5,697,192 (#KCON18LA + All-Keywords),
    • KCON NY: 16,058 (#KCON18NY)5
    • When compared to KCON 2015, the number of attendees in KCON 2018 increased by twice while the volume of tweets increased by six times. This indicates that the level of interest and attention towards KCON as well as K-pop culture or Hallyu has significantly increased over time.

o The total impressions for all of the 5.7 million messages tweeted during KCON LA were approximately 10.1 billion, showcasing the global impact and popularity of KCON LA.

o Major news and entertainment media programs in the U.S. such as The Ellen Show and Reuters also tweeted about KCON, reaching a large pool of the U.S. audiences. For instance, @TheEllenShow has 76 million followers while @Reuters has 20 million followers on Twitter. This not only indicates a growing level of interest and attention towards KCON but it also explains the increased volume of tweets about KCON.

o Temporal Analysis of Tweets highlights that among various components of the KCON festival, concerts that feature various K-pop artists appear to be the most popular and widely mentioned on social media.

–  For KCON LA, the highest peak in volume of tweets took place at 7 p.m.

on August 12th (PST) when the second concert of KCON kicked off. 54,306 tweets were published in an hour, among which 18,562 tweets included the official hashtag of KCON used by the host CJ E&M: #KCON18LA

–  Second highest peak took place at 8 p.m. on August 11th (PST) an hour after the first concert of KCON took place. 50,874 tweets were published in an hour, among which 11,181 tweets included the official hashtag of KCON used by the host CJ E&M: #KCON18LA

–  Similarly for KCON NY, peak in volume of tweets took place at 7 p.m. on June 23rd (EST) when the concert kicked off. 1,545 tweets were published in an hour.

o When looking at the locations of the original tweets and retweets, KCON was discussed globally, drawing attention from people in about 170 different countries and 6,600 cities. The largest number of tweets were published from the US, followed by UK, Philippines and Canada.6

o Our sentiment analysis of the collected tweets indicates that in general, the public sentiment towards KCON festival and the participating K-pop artists were positive and well-received.

o The most frequently used words in association with KCON were: twice, kpop, #kcon18la, kcon, bts, #wannaone, red, @kconusa, @bts_twt in descending order.

o KCON LA impression analysis

  • The impression number for a total of 5.7 million tweets collected during KCON LA was 10,105,347,959. Impression refers to the number of times the people reached may have seen the content.
  • This means a total of 5.7 million tweets that were published during the data collection period were likely exposed 10.1 billion times to people reached. (As impressions include counts of duplicate exposures, this number does not mean 10.1 billion people were reached.)
  • On average, one tweet mentioning KCON was exposed 1,700 times to any Twitter users that were reached. We note that in 2016, one Twitter user had average 707 followers. The number of followers determine the number of impressions or exposure of original tweets published by the account holder. Currently, the most popular Twitter account is followed by about 1,000 million Twitter users. The top 20 Twitter users have about 20 million followers on average. This indicates that these social media influencers have a significant power when it comes to impressions and reach of specific social media post or tweet relating to KCON in this case.

Below table indicates the top 10 Twitter accounts based on Twitter impressions:

Additionally, the numbers of relevant accounts for KCON LA are as follows:

o Sentiment Analysis

  • For both KCON LA and KCON NY, the public sentiment towards the event remained positive over time. Not surprisingly, positive sentiment towards KCON LA spiked during the actual event dates from August 10th to 12th.
  • We also analyzed public sentiment towards K-pop artists who performed at KCON LA by separately categorizing tweets that included the names of artist(s) or artist group(s) in hashtags. Our sentiment analysis of tweets that mention Seventeen (88,915), Twice (58,024), WannaOne (37,606), BTS (21,555) indicate that in general, they were mentioned and perceived positively.
  • However, while the sentiment towards Twice was consistently positive throughout the data collection period, that towards WannaOne and Seventeen fluctuated before and after the dates of their performance at the concert.
  • Due to the limited amount of information each tweet contains and the inherent limitations of conducting qualitative analysis through computer programming, it is difficult to study the reasons behind the fluctuations in sentiment.
  • It is important to note that as much as BTS was frequently mentioned, the public sentiment was also consistently positive, even when they did not perform at KCON LA. The searches of BTS as well as positive sentiment spiked as the concert date and time started to increase on August 11th, when the first concert of KCON was held at Los Angeles Staples Center. This highlights the popularity of BTS, who appears to have become the most influential boy band in the world.

What are the Implications?

o When looking at the most frequently used words associated with KCON, we could better understand popular K-pop artist(s) or group(s) such as Twice and BTS. This can be considered when organizing future KCON festivals. On a flip side, this also indicates that KCON has generated much conversation on social media about the Korean artists who performed in its concerts, offering effective PR opportunities.

o The official hashtags for KCON 2018, created by CJ E&M, such as kconusa, kcon, #letskcon, #kcon18la and #kcon18ny were frequently used. Also, tweets by KCON’s official Twitter account, @kconusa were retweeted much more than those in 2015. These indicate an increased level of attention and brand recognition of KCON festival, as well as highlighting the fact that Twitter has become an efficient and effective PR platform for the host and sponsor organizations.

o When looking at the top 50 most frequently mentioned words, as well as the impressions, twitter accounts of individual K-pop fans and media organizations associated with K-pop such as @soompi, @subjectkpop were ranked high, confirming their influence on social media.

o Although words related to K-pop are most common among the top 50 most frequently mentioned words, when compared to 2015, more generic words such as Korea, Korean, K-drama were also frequently mentioned in association with KCON. This implies that KCON has evolved to become a large-scale cultural event that represent Korea and its people, society and culture, not to mention being a path for foreigners to delve further into exploring various aspects of Korea.

o Our analysis of impressions indicate that all of the 57 million tweets collected during KCON LA were exposed 10.1 billion times, including the duplicates. This highlights the immense ripple effect KCON-related tweets can produce among a large number of social media users, especially teens and youth.

Works Cited:

  1. http://www.koreadaily.com/news/read.asp?art_id=6450914
  2. Korea Content Creative Agency’s 14th issue of Global Market Briefing report.
  3. https://cjamerica.com/category/entertainment-media/kcon/
  4. https://cjamerica.com/category/entertainment-media/kcon

Seon Ho Kim, Eun Jung Jung, Hyunjun Park, Miyoun Song, Heesung Shin