I found two excellent examples of how companies are using Twitter for specific initiatives to add value to sports fans' experiences of events. I wanted to share them with you and would love to hear what you think.
Sony Ericcson Twitter Cup
The Sony Ericcson Twitter Cup is a really interesting mashup of Twitter and the World Cup. It's a well-known fact that sports fans like to show pride for their teams, and like to think that they have more pride/support than fans of other teams. And soccer fans are some of the most passionate fans in the world. Sony Ericcson has created the Twitter Cup interactive website as an interesting way for fans to compete with other fans to see which World Cup team has the most support.
The concept is simple. The more tweets a specific team receives, the farther that team goes in the Twitter Cup. Fans can score points for their team in two ways.
1) Tweet team name and World Cup together (ex: England World Cup)
2) Tweet team name and World Cup with the Twitter Cup hashtag (ex: Serbia World Cup #twc)
The website includes a cool interactive stadium that automatically fills seats with fans of a given team based on the number of tweets that team receives. This is a nice effort from Sony Ericcson and one that I think fans will definitely be talking about.
Brand Bowl 2010
This one comes from Mullen and Radian6, a reputation monitoring SAAS company. According to The Lost Jacket, Mullen approached Radian6 with an idea- leverage the power of social media for one of the biggest sports events in the world.
Why do many people watch the Super Bowl? The ads.
The Brand Bowl 2010 was born from this. This site will leverage Twitter and the monitoring capabilities of Radian6 to show people what everyone is saying about each ad. In real-time. Fans will be able to see which ads are getting tweeted the most, what people are saying about them, and if it is positive or negative.
Instead of having to wait until Monday morning to see what traditional media outlets say are the "best" ads, you can follow things in real-time. Awesome.
I'm seeing more and more examples of Twitter+sports=really interesting content and initiatives. What do you think about these mashups? What other interesting mashups have you seen that you liked?
In other news, I wanted to give a quick shoutout to Dan Beeman and his company, Sponsorship Insights Group, which just relaunched their website. Dan is a good guy and has done a great job building his network/company through blogging and using his LinkedIn group to connect sponsorship professionals around the world.
Have a great night and rest of the week!