You Are Viewing Social Media

On Monday, I attended Social Fresh Tampa, a social media conference that brought marketers together to discuss the business applications of social media. The conference itself was awesome, but just getting to chat with some really smart folks between sessions and at night was probably even more valuable.

If you’d like to see my notes from each panel, you can see them here. While the event and speakers focused on more than just sports, I did get some interesting sports insights. For example, I learned that MLB teams don’t have full control over their Facebook pages. The league can post things they want, which may or may not fit with what the team has in mind for its fans on Facebook. This isn’t good…teams need to have full control over their social media strategy and outreach. There has to be a balance between engagement and promotion. Teams know their fans best, so they should control this.

Enough about that. I want to share a few video interviews that I did at Social Fresh. I asked 4 guys – Marc Meyer (Director of Search and Social at Digital Response Marketing Group), Chris Barger (Director of Social Media at GM), Jeremy Hilton (VP  of Media and Technology at Mindcomet) and Chris Moody (Social Media Marketing Manager at Bandwidth) – to share their thoughts about the future of online metrics and measurement.

Check out the videos below to see what they think:

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!

2009 has been a breakout year for sports and social media. Athletes, teams, leagues, coaches, media and sponsors have finally started to take note of how social media impacts sports and fans. There have been some really great executions and ideas as well as some missteps.

It is my pleasure to present the ebook, Sports and Social Media Predictions 2010, which features 16 smart people and thought-leaders who have graciously shared their opinions, thoughts and predictions for sports and social media in 2010.

Feel free to download this, read it, blog about it, and share with your friends and coworkers. I hope you find it interesting.
Sports Social Media Predictions 2010

Thank you all for your participation. It’s been great connecting with you this year!

Special thanks to Ash Read for helping with the design/layout of this.

There’s more to creating community than Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc.

Participation and engagement are the easy parts. What you do with it is the challenge.

The free social media platforms can be great for teams, but they each have their limitations. Let’s look at Facebook pages.

I’m not trying to say teams shouldn’t have a presence on Facebook. Clearly, teams must be there, so they can reach some of the 325 million+ people there now. I’m just saying that if you care about any of the above items, you shouldn’t make Facebook your home base. You should probably be thinking about taking things in-house and creating your own community website, like the Colts have done with MyColts.net.

This applies to brands outside of sports, too.

What do you think?

HOWDY!

Hope yall are doing well. Now that the Tar Heels have started playing basketball and are still doing some exciting things in football, I couldn’t be happier as a sports fan.

I just wanted to let you know I’ll be speaking at the Triangle Social Media Club this week on Thursday night at Twine Interactive. If you live in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and are even remotely interested in social media (who isn’t these days?) you should check out this club. The Triangle Social Media Club chapter was first launched in October 2007 by Ignite Social Media. As the chapter has expanded, it has partnered with other companies and individuals to continue hosting events in the Triangle, NC region.

I’m planning on talking about purpose-driven communities and maybe even discuss some ways companies can extend the reach and engagement of their existing loyalty programs by adding a community aspect. Karlie Justus, a PR office for the NC State Fair, will also be speaking about how she helped implement the Fair’s first social media campaign. I’m really looking forward to hearing about this, and I’m sure it will be very interesting.

If you’re interested in the event, you can RSVP here. Hope to see you there!

Last night I had the pleasure to interview George Junginger, who is working on a new startup called Group Story, along with his business partner, Geoff Hamrick. Group Story puts a new twist on photo books for groups of people who have been at the same event, on the same sports team, or share some other common bond. Instead of having one standard book for the entire group, Group Story enables people to pick and choose photos and customize pages so their books match their own experiences.

Since Group Story is an NC-based company and since I’ve known George for a little over a year now, I thought it’d be fun to do an interview with him. I also think sports fans and athletes will be a good audience for them, and you can hear George explain why in the video. This is actually the first interview George has given about Group Story–he claims he’s camera shy, but if you watch the video, you’ll see why I don’t believe it. (hint: I think he gives a good interview).

Interview With Group Story Co-Founder George Junginger from Jason Peck on Vimeo.

Group Story has been chosen to demo at the Internet Summit in Raleigh on November 4-5. Check them out and drop me a line if you’re going to be there so we can meet up.