Manchester City Partner with Mass Relevance to Introduce New Social Initiatives

Manchester City Football Club have announced that they have teamed up with Mass Relevance, the technology leader in social curation, to unveil several new social initiatives for City fans attending and watching matches during the 2012 season.

Following a few successful trial integrations during matches against Newcastle United and Norwich City in 2011, the club plans to expand these initiatives throughout the year.

City’s social enhancements include the use of Twitter to engage and entertain fans who tune into the TV broadcasts at City Square, a dedicated fan area near the club’s shop. They also integrate real-time fan Tweets on Etihad Stadium’s video boards, jumbotron and other stadium distribution channels. City is the first Premier League club to use the popular social media platform as part of their in-game displays.

The initiatives are powered by Mass Relevance’s social engagement platform that allows the Club to instantly aggregate, curate and deliver the best fan content into stadium displays, TV broadcasts and mcfc.co.uk.

To date, trials of the integration have seen tremendous results. In a December match against Norwich, the club leveraged Mass Relevance to deliver social content on match day screens throughout the stadium and create dialogue with and between fans, pundits and announcers before and after the game (hashtag #blueview). The strategy resulted in more than 1,500 #blueview Tweets in just six hours from more than 965 unique Twitter authors, providing the club with message and brand reach of nearly 400,000 Twitter users and nearly 2.5 million impressions.

Richard Ayers, Digital Playmaker for Manchester City, said: “At City we have always believed that home games at the Etihad Stadium are not just exclusive to the 47,000 fans in the stands. They are an opportunity for City supporters from around the world to connect with one another and feel part of the match day experience.

“Mass Relevance enables us to empower our fans and add a new dimension to our pre-match build up by being able to broadcast their Tweets in real time around the stadium big screens. This partnership continues our strategy of innovating with digital media in order to give fans more access to the club — to increase engagement and improve their experience.”

Mass Relevance CEO Sam Decker, added: “Football fans are some of the most dedicated and vocal fans on the planet and real-time social content continues to play a key role in enhancing the experience whether you are at the match, watching on TV or following on your mobile device. We’re very excited to work with Manchester City to kick off a new era of fan engagement and momentum moving into the 2012 season.”

The Mass Relevance Platform, which powers the team’s strategy, uniquely combines a cutting-edge social technology that can instantly aggregate, curate and deliver the best content for any context with an enterprise SaaS infrastructure to meet the needs of the Fortune 500 at a scale of tens of thousands of Tweets per second and less than a second to publish to a real-time experience.

Mass Relevance has powered successful integrated social content strategies for media, entertainment and consumer brands such as Cisco, Dick Clark Productions, E! Online, ITV, MTV, NBC Sports and Pepsi. The company partnered with Twitter to power President Barack Obama’s July 2011 Twitter Town Hall.