In spite of Starting Troubles Chennai Express Is Speeding Away To Glory on the Social Media: Sentiment Analysis of the Latest SRK-Deepika Film

When Rohit Shetty’s latest directorial venture, Chennai Express’ trailers made its first presence felt on our television screens last month, it was greeted with more flak than praise.  People, especially South Indians, took offense to the female lead, Deepika Padukone’s fake Tamil accent. The film’s styling – women dancing in lungi, men with ash smeared forehead and the general stereotyping of South Indians was hugely criticized on the social media channels.

The Hindu, Kollywood Today and Telugu Times carried reports on how the first look of the film didn’t go well with most film buffs down south. Emirates247 under the headline, Bollywood Cliches: Shah Rukh draws public fury for Chennai Express, explained in detail how the film (the first trailers) is being bombarded with heavy negative reactions on the social channels, especially Twitter.

This prompted us to dig deep and analyze the social conversations surrounding Chennai Express, especially looking at the sentiment it generated in the social. Using our Social Media Analysis software, Shout Analytics we conducted an Automated Sentiment Analysis of Chennai Express.

What was done?

We studied Chennai Express for  the social conversations it generated, number of social mentions it received, its overall social activity volume and the social sentiment that it generated, its performance on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as the topics that it started trending.

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from the written language though Natural Language Processing.

Here are our findings –

Current Activity:

Chennai Express got people talking the most on Twitter with the number touching over 2000 on 23 July, 2013. Similarly, the Share Of Voice was also highest on Twitter (73.07%) followed by YouTube (23.84%), Blogger (1.93%) and Facebook (1.16%).

In terms of Sentiment, there were a lot of neutral sentiments (49.02%). Positive sentiments accounted for 43.51% and negative sentiment comprised of 7.47%

Social Mentions:

There were 566055 likes, 37553 shares and 427 comments (need a little clarification here) on Facebook. On Twitter, Shah Rukh Khan himself was the lead influencer with a Klout score of 88, closely followed by India Today and Sunidhi Chauhan.

With an average video rating of 4.85 and 8898435 views, YouTube was the most sought after social channel. The official theatrical trailer starring SRK and Deepika Padukone had 41,57,921 views.

Facebook:

Analyzing sentiment that it generated on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we found that on Facebook, Chennai Express received 4.68% of positive sentiment while the negative sentiment was only 8.06%. The word ‘SRK’ generated the most positive buzz while the word ‘Flop’ generated the most negative buzz. 

Twitter:

The scenario was no different on Twitter with 54.89% of neutral sentiments, 39.49% of positive sentiments and only 5.62% of the Twitter conversations generating negative sentiments. Is it interesting to note that while both Shah Rukh Kahn (@iamsrk) and Deepika Padukone (@deepikapadukone) were targets of the highest positive and neutral sentiments, negative sentiments were more towards SRK than Deepika. 

                                      

What was more interesting was that words from the film’s dialogues like ‘Dictionary’, ‘Mein’ and ‘Nahi’ were some of the top five words that created the most buzz for Chennai Express.

The top three hastags were #ChennaiExpress, #CEVideobook and #K2K (Kashmir Mein Tu Kanyakumari) track. However, the tweet reach plunged from 2449 on July 23 to 105 on July 29.

YouTube:

YouTube is undoubtedly the preferred social media platform to watch promotional video clips including songs and dialogues from the movie. Our analysis found that there was more positive sentiment (55.05%) as  opposed to neutral (36.35%) or negative sentiment (8.6%) on YouTube. The top three videos that recorded the highest views were the official trailer of the film, the song, 1,2,3,4, Get On The Dance Floor and video of Deepika Padukone’s last day  on the sets of the film.

Conclusion:

Chennai Express might have started off on the wrong note, but it has been successful in creating a hugely positive buzz around it. One of the primary reasons for this we believe is that the film has Shah Rukh Khan as its lead actor. Chennai Express is cashing in on the immense popularity of Shah Rukh. Plus, we have been seeing the lead pair, Shah Rukh and Deepika aggressively promoting their films as a run up to its 9^th August,  Eid release. This too has helped the film nullify the negative sentiments that it faced earlier into extremely favorable and positive sentiments