Digital Media Cafe Blog Featuring Wimbledon and Brazil 2014 – David Granger
July 2, 2014
Welcome to this week’s Digital Media Cafe blog, the place where you can find all the links to the topics discussed in this week’s show on iSportconnect TV. With Brazil 2014 entering the knock-out stages, it is unsurprising that this week we have a lot to cover on the FIFA World Cup.
Wimbledon
We start though in the UK, rather than Rio and the other major sporting event currently being contested: Wimbledon. A very traditional tournament with a long heritage but which is incredibly progressive when it comes to helping tennis fans get the most out of the fortnight. Heading up the content and communications management for the All England Lawn Tennis Club in SW19 is Alexandra Willis. Alexandra spoke to the UK Sports Network and explained how despite barriers such as the other sporting contest being played out in South America and how the concentration of their time in the global spotlight is limited to just two weeks, Wimbeldon is aggressive in its uptake of new technology and creating great content.
From careful monitoring of conversations via its IBM Social Media Command Centre to being one of the first European events to embrace the real-time video sharing platform Grabyo to mapping out 52 weeks of content, Wimbledon serve up a variety and depth of digital content to ensure even when they’re head to head with the World Cup. It’s well worth checking out the full interview on The UK Sports Network
Digital records broken at Brazil 2014
The World Cup this year has been an amazing footballing spectacle. But its digital match day performance has been pretty impressive too. Pretty impressive? Well, record-breaking in fact. Twitter themselves have gone in hard with this tournament and what has emerged is game-changing. The consumption of football and sport more widely is not going to be the same after this. We’ve gathered up a few stats and facts to demonstrate just how important and wide-spread the social and digital aspects of consuming sport has become.
To date the match between Brazil and Chile broke all Twitter records. A total of 16.4 million tweets were sent during the game, making it the most-discussed match of the tournament so far. It became the most tweeted about sports event ever with Gonzalo Jara’s missed penalty generating 389,000 tweets per minute which beat the record previously set by the Super Bowl in the US.
The tournament is now the most tweeted about ever, its 300 million tweets beating the previous title-holder the London Olympics by more that 150 million.
Based on mentions so far, the most talked about players are Lionel Messi, Neymar Jr, Suárez, Christian Ronaldo and England’s Wayne Rooney. While the top five teams in the tournament are Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Croatia and the USA. More of the latter later in the programme. For the fans as well, social has become their way to voicing their opinion during the game with one in three commenting on social while watching.
But perhaps the most interesting social media fact is that Luis Suarez decided to officially apologise to Chiellini for taking a chuck out of his shoulder on, yep spot-on Twitter. There were also some great guerilla marketing and memes to come out of that particular incident as well. Click here and here for more.
Teams Getting It Right
It does seem that football has finally taken off in the United States this year – on an international level at least – helped by some great performances including the narrow defeat by Belgium. And, as you’d expect the national team is getting social right and if you want to see how to execute a slick, engaging, but similarly entertaining social platform then check out @ussoccer. Their manager’s also in on the act with Klinsmann sending out an excellent tweet asking all employers to give workers time off for the Germany match.
Check out this week’s episode of the Digital Media Cafe and past editions on iSportconnect TV and let us know who we should be covering next week through the comment box below or on Twitter @iSportconnectTV
Having spent eight seasons in Formula One managing the digital channels for world champions Red Bull Racing, David Granger now runs Fact 51, a social and digital content agency.
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