Digital Media Cafe Blog – Featuring Glasgow 2014, Oculus Rift, Brazil 2014 & more – David Granger

Hello and welcome to this week’s Digital Media Café. Today we’re taking a look at how English cricket teams fare online, how one brand is looking to avoid any social slip-ups during the World Cup and what links English Rugby to the latest Facebook acquisition. You can find all the links to the stories below.

Commonwealth Games: The Write Competition

We begin with the competition to find bloggers to cover this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Hashtag Team Fourteen is a great way to engage aspiring and established writers to cover the culture, sport and news in Scotland for the duration of the games. The proof of the scheme’s success will, of course be in the quality of the content produced and how much of it is consumed and engaged with. If you’re thinking of entering, you’ll need to get your spikes on – the deadline for applications is 5pm, April 10.

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Social Marketing: Time to Listen Up

With each global sporting event, the digital and social marketing increases in complexity, content creation and – being mostly real-time – potential for controversial or even damaging posts. Interestingly, one major brand has decided to bring what it calls a level of restraint to its World Cup marketing, largely due to its campaigns for Brazil 2014 being reactive and real-time, rather than pre-planned. So, while it’s being billed as using social data, essentially the brand will monitor fan feedback and conversation across its platforms. Their official position is that the World Cup will be used as a learning platform to shape future real-time marketing strategies – displaying the right promotion, on the right media, to the right consumer group, in a specific country, at the right time. That’s using quite a lot of words to say they’ll be listening to what their audience says as well as pushing out content; but it is where things are going, especially on social.

World Cup 2014: ESPN’s Dating Game

The relationship between fan and football is compared to a dating game in ESPN’s latest ad campaign for the World Cup. Using no shortage of football puns, the broadcaster’s lead commentator Ian Darke brings all the drama you’d expect from the tournament including own goals, deft touches, the potential of a red card and a nail-biting conclusion.

Technology: Rugby’s in Facebook’s Sights

The latest shopping spree from Facebook included buying Oculus Rift, the headset technology which gives wearers 360 degree experiences, which clearly has sporting potential. Back in January O2 announced its Wear the Rose campaign where fans could virtually become part of the senior English rugby team – from getting a team talk from captain Chris Robshaw to being tackled by hooker Tom Youngs. Initially slated for the Six Nations, the launch has been put back to June this year when O2 customers will be able to be almost part of the team. 

While the English Cricket team has always demonstrated a keen interest in social media, but sadly a lack of consistency on the field, the English domestic game is in pretty good shape online. In a recent report by RadiumOne it’s Surrey County Cricket Club which is outperforming its county rivals in social at least. RadiumOne split the clubs into two leagues with Surrey, Worcestershire and Kent all bettering their on-pitch performance in the digital arena. One interesting fact is that within Surrey’s rank is cricket’s one-time controversial king of Twitter, Kevin Pietersen.

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