Twitter – Page 6

NFL signs promoted tweet deal with Twitter

September 30, 2013 by Greg Quick 1 Comment

In a deal that will likely make its rivals sit up and notice Twitter has signed a deal with the NFL that will feature hosted Tweets that include embedded video, highlights and analysis from NFL games and programs.

The NFL will create a dedicated team to produce content for Twitter not just on game days but seven days a week including in-game video from the Thursday Night games and will feature reports and video from all of a week’s games after they have aired, regardless of which network is showing the game.

The deal’s timing is interesting as it comes just before the expected IPO for Twitter, which was already top of mind for investors prior to this news.

The deal is interesting for a number of reasons. Twitter already has a partner that has an Amplify deal in Verizon, but apparently that only pertains to the Super Bowl. ESPN is also a partner, but it cannot broadcast NFL video in its tweets, even from its NFL broadcasts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The agreement is part of Twitter’s Amplify service that enables broadcasters to show video clips and other programming, and ads, which is synchronized with programs that are currently airing, giving users a second screen experience that shows content that might not be available on the broadcast. The two share ad revenue that is generated from the tweets.

You may not be familiar with the Amplify service by name but if you watch sports, or other outlets for that matter, you have most likely witnessed it in action. Twitter already has deals with a number of major players including Turner Sports, the NCAA, ESPN, BBC America, Fox and the Weather Channel.

Hopefully this is a trend that other sports leagues will follow so that when fans are not in front of their screens that can still get more than just a taunting text message from their friends about the state of their favorite team.

(Editor’s note: Interestingly, the video doesn’t work in embedded tweets but redirects you to a Twitter page. Sample video tweet below. Follow @NFL for sponsored video tweets.)

Brady passes for over 300 yards and the @Patriots improve to 4-0 to start the season. #NEvsATL Highlights – http://t.co/LwNL8gRCY2

— NFL (@nfl) September 30, 2013

Filed Under: Apps, BBC, ESPN, Fox Sports, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, Monday Night Football, NFL, Sunday Night Football, Twitter, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: ESPN, Fox, NFL, Twitter, Verizon

Ever wonder how adept your NFL team is with social media?

September 11, 2013 by Greg Quick Leave a Comment

The news from earlier this week that the aptly named AT&T Stadium that the Dallas Cowboys play in had a record amount of Wi-Fi traffic for the teams’ season opening game , 3x over last year, is no surprise to the people at social marketing firm W20 which has rated all of the NFL stadiums for their social media prowess and the Cowboys come in second.

Now this is not just a barometer of Wi-Fi traffic by any means and judges teams on a variety of metrics, but when it is all said and done you need the hardware and networking infrastructure to have a solid approach to social media and AT&T Stadium had 25,000 Wi-Fi connections using up 1.3 million Mbytes of data.

W20 has attempted to rate all 32 NFL teams on their ability to use social media to connect with their respective fans. It used use a proprietary algorithm that indexes social engagement scores from a wide variety of social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Even with a spanking brand new stadium it had to be upgraded during the off season to meet expected demand. The interesting thing is that the 49ers, who play in an old, dilapidated stadium, are number one. However the 49ers, being adjacent to Silicon Valley are quite aware of the importance of social media and are in a place where all of the expertise needed to support it is near at hand.

The team’s new stadium, slated to open next season, is expected to be a state of the art wonder including its wireless infrastructure that it claims will be state of the art.

The interesting thing about the poll is how quickly teams drop in the ratings. The 49ers rate a perfect 100, yet the #5 team, the Washington Redskins, has only a 66.87 rating while the last place Cincinnati Bengals have a 26.91. I think my high school would rank higher!

The NFL is only now catching on that Wi-Fi and other associated social media apps are now a basic component in fans lives. They take pictures from tailgaters to post on Facebook and Instagram, check fantasy results, trash talk friends and a host of other activities.

However they do not just create social media data, they consume it. The teams have a captive audience that is obviously receptive to looking, reading and participating. An Instagram effort to get fans pictures posted, Facebook contests at stadiums, best Twitter commentary, all help to engage fans and are functions teams could be doing, but for the most part are not.

There are a number of other rating systems that have judged the same thing for the NFL, but as we reported earlier the league badly lags in developing and delivering the hardware, networking and apps needed to be at the forefront of the convergence of sports and media.

While the NFL is king of the hill in American sports , the league has been worried about the slow erosion in attendance. New stadiums often push old time fans to poorer seats, expensive parking, seats and food and beverages add on. A big screen at a friends house and NFL Red Zone each weekend might cost a fan just a six pack as the rice of admission. By providing access to social media and the greater world outside the NFL can in some ways make the stadium experience more enjoyable for fans and so help keep them in the parks.

Something to think about next time you are sitting at a game with 5 bars and no connection.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apps, AT&T, Cisco, DAS, Facebook, Google, Market Research, NFL, SAP, SEAT Conference, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data, Twitter, Wi-Fi Tagged With: DAS, Facebook, Instagram, NFL, Social Media, Twitter, Wi-Fi

PGA Tour Develops Social Media Hub in time for FedExCup

August 22, 2013 by Greg Quick Leave a Comment

Two-year-old startup Mass Relevance has teamed with the PGA to create the PGA Tour Social Hub, a website that will serve as a central aggregation point for a wide variety of social media content that pertains to the PGA tour.

The Hub is being launched in time for fans to use it to follow the action for the FedExCup Playoffs, which begin today with The Barclays at Liberty National in New Jersey City.

The website, which can be located here, will use content filters that seek out relevant content including keyword and hashtag searches. Among the media sites that will be represented at the Hub will be Twitter, Facebook, YouTube videos and Instagram photos and videos.

The PGA said that one of the driving reasons was that fans often used different hashtags or terminology when tweeting or communicating about events and that by creating a single unifying site it will make it easier for fans to follow events as well as comment on them in real time.

For Mass Relevance, founded in 2011 with almost $2 million in seed funding from Floodgate and Austin Ventures it is the continuation of the SaaS developers rise as a leading partner to a wide and growing set of clients.

The company has partnered with experience developing golf-focused social hubs, having previously created one with TaylorMade-adidas Golf Partners earlier this year and developed worked on a program with Callaway Golf to bring social media to serious golfers. Other partners include the Washington Redskins, Twitter, MTV, Pepsi, Campbell’s, GE, Target, Walgreens and Microsoft.

Filed Under: Apps, Facebook, Golf, Instagram, PGA, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data, Twitter, YouTube Tagged With: Facebook, FedExCup, Instagram, Mass Relevance, PGA Tour, Social Media, Twitter

On Deck for MLB: The Chatting Cage

May 29, 2013 by Greg Quick Leave a Comment

I spend a lot of time on Major League Baseball’s various sites and use one of its apps when traveling to listen to ball games but I was surprised to find that it has a whole level of social interaction with fans that I was unaware of until this weekend.

When looking around its video section for a highlight from a game last year I came upon an online chat with Mat Latos of the Cincinnati Reds that had been recorded earlier this month. It is part of MLB’s continued effort to use social media as another way to engage fans and is called The Edward Jones Chatting Cage, online video chats that has fans talking with players, coaches, managers and team executives.

The program was started last year but if you missed it that is understandable, (I did) it debuted without a great deal of fanfare in late September. But it is going strong now and you can view old conversations as well as participate in future ones although it is not entirely intuitive.

Going to the MLB page and you can find a section for videos. In videos you can find the Edward Jones Chatting Cage link. Click on that it takes you to the archives. There you can find past episodes where a variety of players and management answer fans questions. However there are no instructions on how to participate that I could find.

However if you follow MLB’s Facebook page it does alert users to when the next Chatting Cage will be held, although you might need to search for it since they do not occur very often. You have to scroll down quite a bit to before the Latos interview to find out about the last one. No special section highlighting the event or mentioning when the next one will occure. You can submit questions via Facebook for the chats. Looking elsewhere I found that you can use Twitter with @MLB using the hashtag #chattingcage.

When you watch one of the archived shows it is obvious that fans can also log in using a web cam and ask live questions to the players and how they do that is not obvious, or if it is I am completely missing it.

However I like the concept a great deal. Of course it leaves itself open to trolls, as can be seen in some of the Facebook comments, but is a great way for fans to ask real questions of players and management, something they cannot do with any real chance outside of this program. If other sports pick up on this idea, and it’s hard to see why they would not, it could spell the death of all of the independent apps.

Filed Under: Apps, Athlete to Follow, Baseball, Facebook, Live Sports Video Consumption, Major League Baseball, Sports Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: Chatting Cage, Facebook, MLB, Social Media, Twitter

A Foodfight comes to Minor League Baseball

May 20, 2013 by Greg Quick Leave a Comment

For fans of minor league baseball there is now a contest for them to sink their teeth into, a competition that will seek to judge which MiLB ballpark has the best concessions in a social media driven contest sponsor by Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media arm.

The MiLB.com #foodfight contest will include 160 minor league ball yards and will have four different, and pretty clear, categories. They are: Gut Busters, Hogs ‘n’ Dogs, Local Legends and Scrumptious Sandwiches and voting can be done via Twitter or at the MiLB.com web site.

For Twitter users use the #foodfight and include the nickname of the team that is selling the food that you are voting on. You can also visit MiLB.com/foodfight to vote for their favorite food item in each of the four categories.

You can vote early and vote often since there is no limit to the amount of times that you vote. But do so soon since the first round of voting ends next week on the 29th. The next day the final round of voting will start and run for one week with the winner announced on June 6th.

There is the potential for participants as well with a sweepstakes that includes all of the voters. The winner gets a trip to the ballpark with the winning food item and includes roundtrip airfare, accommodations, game tickets and other prizes.

If you like ball park food, visit the MiLB site to see some of the offerings that are eligible for votes. It sure has gone a long way since hot dogs and cracker jacks were the standards.

Filed Under: Apps, Baseball, Contests, Major League Baseball, MinorLeagueBall.com, Twitter Tagged With: contest, MiLB, Twitter

San Jose Sharks Enlist Wayin for Twitter Hub

May 15, 2013 by Greg Quick 1 Comment

ESPN’s deal with Twitter the other day was an expected development as there is a growing desire to hook into social media by sports franchises and broadcasters and another that is following on that same path is the San Jose Sharks Hockey team.

The Sharks have teamed with a Denver-based startup called Wayin using that company’s social media engagement hub to create a Twitter hub for fans of the team and of the National Hockey League.

The Shark’s Wayin hub, called the Sharks Game Day Hub, is more than just a central depository for all of the twitter activity that naturally follows a team when it is in the playoffs. It serves the fans a central site where they can gain a degree of control over what they are following.

The hub features both team generated content as well as a variety of other information including tab on Tweet volume, Twitter activity from players, coaches, broadcasters and Sharks staff, imbedded broadcast video interviews, and fan Tweets. The hub also supports Instagram so that fans can also follow along on images and photos posted by others.

While the casual fan may not have heard of Wayin, in part because it’s a startup and secondly by being located in Denver it is off the beaten paths for most new tech companies. However it has a prestigious foundation starting with co-founder and Chairman Scott McNealy, former top honcho of Sun Microsystems. Anyone from the Bay Area could tell you that McNealy is a huge hockey fan and that once for April Fools played hockey with former pro hockey players with Sharks players in attendance.

It will be interesting to see how a hub such as this will compete with the emerging class of apps that put fans in connection with athletes. A number have emerged over the years in the app space but none seem to have caught the attention of the mainstream. By bringing a team into the mix fans might be able to connect more directly with players using this type of hub.

Filed Under: Apps, Athlete to Follow, Instagram, NHL, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Stanley Cup, Startup, Twitter Tagged With: Instagram, NHL, San Jose Sharks, Scott McNealy, Twitter, Wayin

NFL signs promoted tweet deal with Twitter

A Foodfight comes to Minor League Baseball

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