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Want to Spout off About the Draft? CBSSports Wants to Hear From You!

April 25, 2012 by 1 Comment

Have you ever watched some talking head spout some nonsense on television, say about the qualities or lack thereof in a football player being drafted? Well CBS Sports is grabbing hold of social media and will allow you to have your say- within reason of course.

CBS Sports has set up an interactive 2012 Draft Day program, rather than fill the airwaves with two days of people explaining why Team A was wrong in selecting Player B because on this expert’s mock draft the player is not even a 3rd rounder, and so on and so forth.

While it does have the usual suspects, NFL insiders, draft experts and college football mavens, it has a number of systems in place to allow you to comment about the events as they unfold. The show will include two sets, one that is dedicated to following social media such as Twitter feeds and Facebook, and highlighting the current hot conversations. The set will also have live interaction with fans and have snap polls to get instant feedback on events.

Manning the social desk will be moderator Lindsay McCormick along with CBSSports.com’s Senior NFL Columnist Pete Prisco along with Senior NFL Blogger Will Brinson.

On the second set will be what viewers have become accustomed to over the years, where we see the draft as it unfolds, hear commentary and analysis from the experts on the picks and listen to prediction on who each team will draft to fill important voids in their lineups.

The more mainstream set will feature Jason Horowitz as master of ceremonies along with CBSSports.com College Football Insider Bruce Feldman and NFL Draft expert Rob Rang, and former St. Louis Rams General Manager Billy Devaney. If you are away from your television during the draft CBS Sports Mobile iPhone users can watch live streaming coverage of CBSSports.com Draft.

This is a great way to use social media to your advantage. The huge growth in the draft just highlights how interested fans are in their teams and the moves that they make. My allowing them to have a say simply makes them even more involved.

Filed Under: CBS Sports, Facebook, Fanatic Fans, NFL, NFL Draft, Social Media, Sports Social Media Tagged With: ,

ESPN Gameday Contest Draws Fan Interest — Maybe Too Much Interest?

April 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Any but the most casual college football fan has seen the throngs at the ESPN College Gameday sets, with fans in the background hoisting all sorts of signs, occasionally ones that are risqué or outright rude, and during the course of the week we see lots of ads for the program.

Now fans can influence where the ads will be shot in a clever little contest that ESPN and Facebook are hosting that enables fans to vote once a day for their school of choice. The winning school will have a Gameday ad shot on campus and it will include students from that school.There are a total of 120 schools involved and you can vote over at Facebook or ESPN GamedayVote.

I really like the contest on a number of levels. It should generate a great deal of attention between rival schools and rival contests. A quick look at some of the blogs out there already have battle cries that call for votes or else.

For ESPN it just brings additional attention to its football programming, and at a time that it is not usually on the minds of fans. It seems to have already taken off since the ESPN Vote page, and the Facebook one, as of this writing, has been overwhelmed and are down while it verifies the votes. I suspect that it will just get busier before this is all over.

The one flaw seems to be that the powers that be underestimated the popularity of the program. Looking at some of the posts on the Facebook page I noticed both accusations of cheating and complaints that votes were credited to the wrong team. I have to say that if I was in school and knew a hacker I might be so inclined to see if I could ‘rock the vote.’

I would really love to know where the votes are coming from, not in terms of schools and conferences, but are more voters coming from the Facebook page or the ESPN site? ESPN’s Facebook page has one million followers and so can be a tremendous force in this contest.

Filed Under: Contests, ESPN, Facebook, Fanatic Fans, NCAA Football, Social Media, Sports Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Cleveland Indians Open Suite for in-Game Twitterers

April 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

A special section for Twitter users? Well that is the plan for the Cleveland Indians who already have a strong following in the twittering crowd apparently. The team will now cater to this market segment by creating a social media suite.

The effort actually has been an evolutionary progress, dating back to 2010 according to ESPN, which also once labeled the Indians as baseball’s most Twitter friendly team.

Fans can get invites to the suite, which are available on a game by game basis and then enjoy not only the view from the seats but also chat online from the Wi-Fi enabled suite with friends not in attendance and ones that are present.

This is part of a greater trend in baseball to make the ballpark experience much more social media and online friendly. There are already 4 stadiums that have in-house networks that enable fans to use mobile apps from Facebook to YouTube with a great deal more ease than in the past when network overloading often shut them off from connections.

Anything that helps boost attendance will be appreciated by the team. With a huge amount of rain last month the team suffered from poor per game attendance, but has seen it shoot up by more than 10,000 a game as the weather has dried and warmed. Who knows maybe the twittering masses can help shoot that number even higher.

Filed Under: Baseball, Cleveland Indians, ESPN, Facebook, Major League Baseball, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

London Olympics Creates Online Social Hub for Athletes and Fans to Mingle

April 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

If you are looking to follow your favorite athletes at this year’s Summer Olympics, the governing body has just set up a system that will enable you to do just that with both famous and those that hope to soon to be famous.

The International Olympics Committee has set up a site called the Olympics Athlete Hub, an effort that hopes to enable fans to make connections with the athletes that are participating in this year’s games as well as past performers.

What the hub does is simply aggregate the Twitter and Facebook feeds of the athletes and provide a single unified spot that brings them all together. A quick look over at the page shows that currently three of the five players are American NBA players.

Once you sign up you can search the athlete directory by athlete name, country, sport, discipline or event. There already 1,000 athletes in the hub and this will grow as qualifying for events is ongoing and as athletes qualify they will be added. There are also former Olympiads such as Mark Spitz, Nadia Comaneci, Edwin Moses, Yelena Isinbaeva, and Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, who pass along tips on training.

Users of the service can post photos and also win prizes for liking athletes on Facebook and following them on Twitter, and the site is expected to roll out a number of additional award programs leading up to the games, including one that can send the winner to the games.. During the games the site will feature a section that will feature real-time chats with athletes that will take place from within the Athletes’ Village.

It really seems that the Olympics as an organization truly understand the advantages of social media as well as the reach and power that a major on-line presence brings. With its broadcast partners making all events online and highlights that can be followed on YouTube it is certainly much easier to follow the contests easier than possibly any other sporting event in the world.

Filed Under: Athlete to Follow, BBC, Contests, Facebook, NBC Sports, Olympics, Social Media, Sports Social Media, YouTube Tagged With: , , ,

JockTalk Gets Pub, Plans to Enter Crowded Sports Social Network Field

April 19, 2012 by 1 Comment

Since we haven’t yet talked to the folks behind JockTalk it’s hard to surmise exactly how their proposed sports social media network is going to be better than anything out there today. We read some of the stories, we get the basic idea — create a space for athletes and fans to hang out, and monetize on the traffic — but so far we have seen nothing in any of the stories in the media rounds the company has made that sets JockTalk apart from the crowd.

The idea that athletes should find a better place to monetize their social media presence other than just Twitter or Facebook isn’t exactly new. Here at MSR we have been closely tracking three such efforts, including PlayUp (which regularly hosts pro player “hangout” rooms online), Viva Vision and Gridiron Grunts. The leaders of Viva Vision, ex-NFLers Joe Tafoya and Kerry Carter, have been especially vocal about seeking to help individual players build their own online interaction centers, either for profit, charity or exposure. The Viva team is working on a prototype app for Dallas Mavericks star Jason Terry that is comprehensive, with lots of multimedia hooks and commerce opportunities.

And the Gridiron Grunts team, led by ex-NFLers Jeb Terry and Ryan Nece, already have an extensive crew of “grunters” contributing in a unique fashion, by simply calling in their takes on their phones so that fans can listen in a like fashion.

If JockTalk is able to create some kind of top-athlete commons that attracts a lot of traffic, it might be able to grab some space in the market. But from a fan standpoint when it comes to aggregation we like the approach taken by Bleacher Report, which curates the best content from anywhere on the web and presents it segregated by teams, which is how we think most fans still follow sports. So good luck to JockTalk, which we are excited to see. But do note that this game has already started.

Filed Under: Apps, bleacherreport, Facebook, NFL, PlayUp, Sharing Sports Media, Sports Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Volvo Ocean Race Coverage Brings Excitement to Sailing Event

April 19, 2012 by 1 Comment

An odd thing happened last night while searching for a baseball game on television, I found a boat race on Root Sports (who came up with that name?) and actually became engrossed in what was happening and the outcome.

The event was part of an event called the Volvo Ocean Race 2011-2012, formerly called the Whitbread Round the World Race and the current race started last October with a departure from Alicante, Spain and finishes this July with the conclusion of the race at Galway, Ireland.

There are six teams involved and each has 11 members on board. Any type of sailboat is allowed in the race. You can get the same type of information from the web site as you could from a more mainstream sport- live video updates, pictures, information on teams and boats and positioning of where all of the boats are when they are out on the water.

The leg of the race I saw was a rerun of the segment that was coming into Auckland, and had them sailing amid the Solomon Islands, site of the WWII battle of Guadalcanal among others, and the sailors were worrying about the wind being blocked by the islands etc…

I am not sure how many people are interested, and aside from a very occasional glance at the America’s Cup I have never watched yachting before, but found there was a good deal more in terms of strategy and tactics than I had believed there to be.

On Saturday the boats depart Itajai, Brazil on Leg 6 and will head out towards Miami, a trip that is expected to take roughly 20 days. From Miami the race will head to Lisbon, then Lorient and end in Galway. Even if you are not that interested the documentary on the Leg 5 segment, through the Southern Ocean, the roughest in the world, is very interesting, and convinced me I am not set to be a sailor.

Filed Under: Contests, Sailing, Sports Social Media, Volvo Ocean Race Tagged With: ,
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