Ahead of the inaugural SportHackTag event getting underway in North London next week, Digital Sport will be chatting with some of the event’s attendees and speakers.

Based in Rome, Davide Feltoni Gurini is the CEO and founder of rapidly expanding social analytics company Datalytics which has a broad range of clients from sports brands to entertainment agencies in Europe and North America.

For those who don’t know, what does Datalytics do?

Datalytics is a software company that analyses in real-time the sentiments around sporting brands and events such as conferences, television shows and sports matches on social media. Our dashboard collects data from social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and gives us insight about whether people are talking in a positive or a negative way about a brand or a football player for example – it also gives us insight into why they’re of this sentiment.

How does Datalytics do that?

We have artificial intelligence algorithms to understand the semantics of the text so we can identify with great precision if people are writing positive or negative text about a specific player or brand.

Does it work across all social media platforms?

We currently work across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram because they’re real time social media platforms and when it comes to working in real-time, it produces reliable and interesting information for our clients and customers. Whether it’s during the match or just after the match, information shows which player was more appreciated or whether a sports brand is growing its reputation etc.

Out of broadcasters, agencies, brands etc who are typically your clients?

Most of our clients are agencies, big brands or corporate companies that want to monitor data and sentiment around events. Some of them are also work in entertainment scenarios, such as sports brands on television.

Who are you working with?

We have multiple Italian clients and from June we will have our first clients in the United States. In Italy we work with Telecom Italia which is one of the biggest companies in Italy as well as Microsoft Italia. We work with Sky Television for events like the Oscars as well as lots of football matches. We also worked with Disney for Star Wars Day where we assisted brands in monitoring how people are talking about it on social media.

SportHackTag is fast approaching, what do you hope to get out of the event?

We have a number of products and one specifically, Datalytics Engage is for events and sports brands. With Datalytics Engage, we let companies engage with fans in real time through social media. Basically we give them real time infographics that can be shown, for example; onto big screens in stadiums during sports matches, or on television during a TV broadcast. These kinds of infographics represent the social media buzz around the specific event. For example, we can let fans vote for the man of the match via social networks and we can turn this data into wonderful infographics.

We have the ability to do a number of things like show fan selfies on the big screen in the stadium during the match, boosting a brand brand or team’s social engagement during the sports event. So we will present this product to SportHackTag as well as the technology and case studies and prove that there is ROI for companies using our product.

Is there any type of organisation you’re looking to network with?

We want to meet the sports brands because we want to understand better their needs and how we can shape our products to fit these needs. We also want to meet the agencies that work with these sports brands in order to let them use our products and eventually collaborate with them and the sporting brands.

What most are you looking forward to?

It will be interesting because of the format with the speech followed by one to one meetings with the brands and the agencies.

Digital Sport is the official social media partners of SportHackTag, the only event in Europe specifically focused on digital innovation in sports, being held at the Emirates Stadium in North London on the 24^th and 25^th of May 2016. For more information, visit them here