Archive for the ‘sports’ tag
TakeFive with TweetReach – Jim Kneer
Welcome back to TakeFive with TweetReach, our ongoing interview series with influential members of the Twitter measurement universe. This week, we’re happy to highlight Jim Kneer, New Media Specialist for the NBA Champion Miami HEAT basketball team. Coming off a terrific championship season and an Olympic gold medal for Team USA player and Miami HEAT forward Lebron James, we thought it would be a great time to get Jim’s views on Twitter measurement.
TweetReach: Welcome Jim! Can you describe your role in the HEAT organization? How have you used social media, specifically Twitter, as a part of your social media strategy for the team?
Jim Kneer: Our New Media team is the eyes and ears of HEAT fans around the globe. Our job is to connect with as many HEAT fans as we can. We create relationships with our younger fans that will evolve into a strong brand loyalty. We view Twitter as the first true means of establishing two-way communication with our fans.
Our franchise is just entering our 25th season, so we are a relatively young franchise. We are just starting to see our first generation of life-long HEAT fans reach fiscal maturity. It is our goal to take advantage of the amazing team we have to build our fan base and social media, and Twitter specifically, allows us to reach out and communicate with fans.
We use Twitter to provide real-time coverage of all HEAT related news and events. Our New Media team covers all HEAT practices, games and provides behind-the-scenes coverage of HEAT related events.
TweetReach: How important is measurement of engagement on Twitter to your strategy? Do you have specific goals and campaign metrics that you use to measure performance and success?
Jim Kneer: Measurement of social media engagement is key for us. While we may not have specific goals for each initiative we undertake, engagement metrics play a key role in our future initiatives. We like to look at the performance of our tweets and use that data to tailor our coverage to the areas we get the most engagement. We always want to deliver the content our fans want the most.
We also like to use this data to determine time of posting. We want our posts to generate a lot of replies and we try to provide as many answers as time and scheduling allow. Conversely, pictures and posts that will generate a lot of re-tweets are often made during our “off hours” since less attention is required.
TweetReach: Has your social media measurement strategy changed as you’ve gone from the regular season, to the playoffs, to the champion series, to the off-season?
Jim Kneer: During the season, we utilize a lot of the measurements to build our strategy. Each regular season, we find a different tweeting “sweet spot.” Some years we see more interactions of pictures, some years it may be statistical information that gets the best response. Our job during the regular season is to perfect our strategy. Socially, we do not want to be become a nuisance.
I come from an email marketing background. Email marketing has always been referred to as “permission-based marketing.” Moving over to social media, I always treat it as “privilege-based marketing.” We have been lucky to earn a spot in our fans’ timelines and newsfeeds. We treat this as a privilege. We try to avoid straight sales pitches, instead offering exclusive first looks or first opportunities to buy. This gives our sales pitches a more exclusive, offer-based characteristic.
Once we hit the post-season, we intensify our social media efforts. We know that our fans’ appetite for information increases and we begin traveling to away games to help provide coverage to which they may not otherwise have access. This coverage increases each round, as fans want more and more information. During the 2012 NBA Finals, we sent two staff members to Oklahoma City to cover everything, and we were rewarded with a really comprehensive behind the scenes look at the team during our title run.
Our off-season strategy is to provide relevant content when it occurs, but more so to focus on increasing our interactions with fans. We try to reply to as many relevant mentions as we can, while also increasing the amount of interactive tweets we send out.
TweetReach: What’s your opinion on the “second-screen experience” during televised games? Have you seen more consumers actively engaging via Twitter during games and how do you make the most of that for the team?
Jim Kneer: During the regular season, we work very closely with our broadcast partner, Sun Sports/Fox Sports Florida. Last off-season, we had a series of social-broadcast meetings and were able to develop a very interactive broadcast. We developed a Facebook Friday component to help draw viewers to our broadcasts, especially when our local broadcast is up against a national broadcast of the game.
We also got our broadcasters Eric Reid and Tony Fiorentino on Twitter and they were able to interact with fans and answer some questions live during all broadcasts. Additionally, we created a dedicated hashtag to track all comments.
Fans were also actively engaged in twitter polls for the pregame spotlights as well as the poll question for games. We wanted to create a very social feel for our broadcasts and are very happy where they stand after our first season.
TweetReach: Can you describe one of your more successful social media efforts? Were there specific measurement goals you wanted to achieve and how did the campaign perform? Any lessons learned you can share with our audience?
Jim Kneer: I think one of our most successful efforts this year was the unveiling of our new “Black is Back” uniform. We knew this would generate buzz, but the scope of the appeal was amazing. We were able to reach over 4.5 million unique accounts and generate almost 17 million impressions.
We also made a big social media push for the release of our Miami Floridians throwback jersey. This effort reached over 5.8 million unique people and total impressions reached 13 million.
I think the most important thing we took from these campaigns was that we needed to be ready and able to take advantage of these situations the moment they arise. Once we noticed the feedback, the posts, and tweets we were receiving, we really ramped up our efforts. We learned that by monitoring early reaction to a post you can really ride the positive public sentiment and stay ahead of the curve.
TweetReach: Thanks, Jim!
Olympic sponsors on Twitter – the final tally
We’ve monitored and analyzed Twitter activity for the 11 official worldwide sponsors of the 2012 London Olympics for the duration of the games and have been posting summaries of their performance along the way. Now that the games are over, how did the sponsors stack up?
After leading the race for mentions on Twitter since we started tracking on July 27th, McDonald’s has run away with the gold with almost 35,000 tweets mentioning them. In the race for silver, Coca-Cola continued their lead over Team Visa from last week, accumulating over 20,000 mentions. Team Visa, with almost 19,000 mentions on Twitter since the games began, picked up the bronze.
Congratulations to the sponsors! Check out the results below. Click the image for the full-sized version.
Overall, the 11 official worldwide Olympic sponsors had more than 100,000 mentions on Twitter during the games. The most retweeted tweet mentioning an official sponsor was from gold medal winner McDonald’s at over 1,000 retweets:
Order from our Favorites Under 400 Calories menu while cheering on TeamUSA! RT if u want 1 of these favs!
#WinWhenUSWin yfrog.com/gzddypnj— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) August 3, 2012
The next most retweeted tweet mentioning a sponsor clocked in at 686 retweets and was from bronze medal winner Team Visa:
Retweet if you’re proud of
@teamvisa athlete@michaelphelps for becoming the most decorated Olympian ever! bit.ly/OBErOW#VisaGoWorld— Visa (@TeamVisa) August 1, 2012
We hope you have enjoyed our analysis of tweets from the 2012 Olympic games! If you are interested in doing your own analysis of Olympics tweets, we’d be happy to help. Just let us know!
Olympic sponsors on Twitter – week 2 leaderboard
Welcome to another installment in our coverage of the 2012 London Olympics on Twitter. Last week, we posted the Sponsor Leaderboard, looking at how the official sponsors of the games had performed on Twitter after week 1 of the games.
We started tracking mentions of the 11 worldwide Olympic sponsors’ official Twitter usernames when the Olympics began, and now after two weeks of tweeting, how are they stacking up?
McDonald’s continues to lead the pack with almost 29,000 tweets mentioning them since the games began. But, look out for Coca-Cola, who has come from behind this week to surpass Team Visa and grab the silver medal place for now. Also notable, Procter & Gamble, who moved from eighth to sixth place with a 240% increase in tweets and a 29% increase in followers over the past week.
With only a few more days of Olympic activity, who will win the gold for Olympic sponsor Twitter activity? Stay tuned to find out! And, if you are interested in doing your own analysis of Olympics tweets, we’d be happy to help. Just let us know!
Check out the results below. Click the image for the full-sized version.
Ambush marketing at the Olympics – what does Twitter say?
Continuing on our Olympics theme, last week we took a look at how the official worldwide Olympic sponsors were performing on Twitter with our Olympic Sponsor Leaderboard. Over $1 billion has been invested by sanctioned companies to sponsor the games and the International Olympic Committee has been adamant in cracking down on ambush marketing at these games. The rules are clear – if you’re not an official sponsor, then don’t try to advertise using any connection to the Olympics. The London Organizing Committee and the British Parliament have even criminalized ambush tactics with fines of up to $30,000 or more according to the New York Times. With “brand police” actively searching out rogue advertisers who haven’t ponied up what in some cases is close to $100 million each, how are non-sponsors taking advantage of Twitter over these few weeks to rise above the Olympic social media noise?
We took a look at the Twitter activity around four of the official Olympic sponsors and compared them to their main competitors who are not official sponsors. We tracked all mentions of the official Twitter usernames for each of the brands from July 27th through August 8th. The high level results are below. If you’re interested in more detailed analysis of the Olympics, just let us know!
To start, we looked at Adidas, an official sponsor of the Olympics and compared them to Nike, who surprising to many, is not a sponsor. Instead of spending the money to sponsor the Olympics, Nike instead has focused its efforts on its #findgreatness campaign featuring the Find Your Greatness video and TV spot highlighting aspiring athletes in cities named London from around the world (excluding the one in Great Britain). That video has now seen in excess of 4.4 million views on YouTube and continues to climb. Of course, many of Olympic athletes are sponsored by Nike (have you seen the yellow shoes?), but even with the subtle brand awareness afforded by these efforts, Adidas has used the Olympics to their advantage and outperformed Nike in terms of Twitter engagement. Since the Olympics began, Adidas has seen 50% more tweets than Nike and 100% more retweets from only 5% more Twitter users who mention them. Advantage: Sponsor Adidas.
Next up, beverages. Coca-Cola, an official sponsor of the Olympics for decades has performed quite well on Twitter this year, and was ranked 3rd in our Sponsor Leaderboard last week. Pepsi, not a sponsor of the games, has not focused on the Olympics at all, instead concentrating their Twitter promotional efforts on Summer music with their #pepsimusicnow campaign. With that and their other non-Olympic efforts, total tweets about Pepsi since the beginning of the Olympics are 62% higher than those mentioning Coke. Pepsi has seen significantly higher engagement on Twitter with almost 3x the number of replies to their tweets than Coke and 37% more Twitter users mentioning them.
Of course, follower count may have something to do with this. Pepsi has seen a 41% increase in Twitter followers over the past 3 months preceding the Olympics and now sits at over 1 million followers compared to an 8% growth in followers for Coke. Advantage: Non-sponsor Pepsi.
Moving on to fast food, long-time Olympic sponsor McDonald’s has topped rival Burger King in terms of Twitter engagement with almost 10x the tweets since the Olympics began. McDonald’s, who held first place in our Sponsor Leaderboard last week, beat Burger King in virtually every aspect of Twitter activity including tweets, retweets, replies, and Twitter users mentioning them. Burger King’s Twitter efforts over the period of the Olympics has been focused on promoting their menu items without targeting a specific campaign effort. Perhaps their strategy has been to sit it out and let the Olympic storm blow over? Their one attempt to subtly mention the games resulted in a grammatically-challenged tweet. Advantage: Sponsor McDonald’s.
Finally, we took a look at financial services. Team Visa, an official Olympic sponsor, created a new Twitter username especially for the games and has used it to their advantage to promote their sponsorship. Despite having 3x the followers on Twitter, rival Mastercard’s participation on Twitter has been dwarfed by Team Visa in every aspect of Twitter engagement. Rather than focus on the Olympics, Mastercard has instead focused its social media efforts on promoting the #dineoutday campaign, a fund raising event targeted to raise money to fund cancer research. While a great cause, in terms of Twitter engagement over the past few weeks, advantage: Sponsor Team Visa.
Overall, three of the four sponsors we tracked significantly out-performed their competitors in terms of Twitter engagement since the Opening Ceremonies on July 27th. Only Pepsi, with their massive Twitter effort, beat out Coke based on our Twitter tracking data. Of course, Twitter is but one part of a marketing campaign and these companies are spending millions of dollars outside of social media to promote their brands. And, some surveys indicate that consumers don’t even know who is sponsoring the Olympics. But, in terms of Twitter engagement specifically during the Olympic games, the sponsors’ investments seem to be paying off when compared to their direct competitors.
Olympic sponsors race for the gold on Twitter
We hope you’re enjoying our series of posts about the 2012 Olympics on Twitter. Next up, we take a look at how the official sponsors of the games are performing. Some of them, such as Coca-Cola, have supported the Olympics for decades. Coke first got involved in 1928 when a freighter delivered the United States team and 1,000 cases of Coca-Cola to the Olympic Games in Amsterdam. McDonald’s famously airlifted hamburgers to homesick American athletes in Grenoble in 1968. Other sponsors are newer, having joined since The Olympic Partners program was first introduced in 1985.
While not without controversy, the monetary effect of the sponsors on the games is massive. Olympic sponsors, partners, supporters, suppliers, and providers have invested well over $1 billion in the 2012 games. How’s that investment paying off? Clearly, these companies will measure results through increases in brand awareness, athlete mentions, and revenue. But in this, the first Twitter Olympics, how are they performing on our favorite social media network?
We’ve been tracking mentions of the 11 worldwide Olympic sponsors’ official Twitter usernames since the Olympics began, and the results for first week are below. So far, McDonald’s leads the pack with more tweets, users, and retweets mentioning them. But, Team Visa is close on their heals and relative to their smaller follower count, is outperforming them all. Click the image for the full-sized version.
We’ll take another look at the leaderboard at the end of week two. And, look for more detailed analysis about the sponsors on Twitter after the games have completed. Interested in doing your own analysis of Olympics tweets? Just let us know!
________________________________________________________________________________
Interested in learning more about TweetReach? Take a look at our website or contact our sales team for more.
The 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in tweets
On Friday during the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, 6.32 million tweets were posted from 2.65 million unique Twitter accounts* about the London Olympic games. Click the image below for the full size version.
The most retweeted tweet of the night was from @TeamGB, which received more than 30,000 retweets. The most buzzed about country was the United States, the most buzzed about athlete was British diver Tom Daley, and the most buzzed about sponsor was Samsung. The #openingceremony hashtag was used in more than 873,000 tweets.
As we continue to track tweets about the 2012 London Olympics over the next two weeks, we’ll be posting lots more Olympics Twitter analyses. So check back soon for more!
*These tweets were collected from 20:00 UTC July 27 through 07:00 UTC July 28, to include the live UK broadcast of the opening ceremony, as well as the time-delayed East and West Coast US broadcasts of the event.
Snowmobiles, snowboards and skis: A recap of tweets about Winter X Games 2012
Last weekend, we worked with ESPN to track tweets about the 2012 Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado, held January 26 through January 29, 2012. It was a big event, accumulating 171,373 tweets over the four days of competition!
During last summer’s X Games, we tracked 188K tweets from 97K contributors, for an overall reach of 37.7 million. This year’s Winter X Games generated 171K tweets from 100K contributors and an overall reach of 37.9 million. Two days into these games, here were the stats:
Sadly, freeskier and X Games gold medalist Sarah Burke died a week before the games. ESPN aired a tribute for Sarah on Thursday night and the #CelebrateSarah hashtag was used in more than 3,500 tweets during the games.
Sunday, January 29, was a big day for the games, featuring the final competitions for two fan favorites – the Snowmobile Best Trick and Men’s Snowboard Superpipe. Athletes like Heath Frisby, Shaun White, and Justin Hoyer generated a lot of Twitter buzz, and Heath’s first-ever snowmobile front flip resulted in the highest tweet spike of the entire games (1,634 tweets per minute).
By the end of the Winter X Games, the most retweeted tweet was from @espn and referred to snowboarder Shaun White’s perfect score in the Snowboard Superpipe Final. It got 1,428 retweets and generated 3.3 million impressions.
It was a great four days! We’re already looking forward to next year.
Extreme tweets: How ESPN’s X Games social strategy paid off
We worked with ESPN to measure Twitter’s reaction to this year’s X Games 17, held in Los Angeles, California from July 28-31, 2011. Hundreds of athletes from 17 countries competed in sports like skateboarding, motocross, BMX and rally car racing. And over the four days of the X Games, 97,200 people tweeted 188,813 times, generating an impressive reach of 37.7 million*.
How’d they do it?
“Our goal going in was to make the event as social as possible,” says Mick Kelleher, Associate Manager of Multimedia Content Strategy for the X Games. This was a big, integrated effort combining all the ESPN teams responsible for producing the X Games. The TV production team showed the #xgames hashtag frequently during the telecast, included athlete Twitter accounts in on-screen bios as well as showing athlete tweets on air. The social team used the @XGames Twitter account to keep their followers on Twitter up to date on all the events. The social integration even went all the way to the event site, where they encouraged fans attending the Games to tweet.
The results
ESPN used TweetReach Pro Trackers to comprehensively track and analyze all mentions of the X Games on Twitter for the week leading up to the event and during the event itself. As you can see below, the strong results of their social strategy speak for themselves.
The most retweeted tweet about the games was from @LilTunechi, which received 905 retweets and generated more than 3 million impressions. 
One of the biggest stories to come out of this year’s X Games concerned Travis Pastrana, who broke his ankle and leg in the Moto X Best Trick competition on Thursday, but later competed – and placed fourth – in the RallyCross final on Sunday.
We analyzed tweets about several events in detail, including Moto X Best Trick, Skateboarding Big Air, BMX Park Freestyle, Rally Car Racing, Skateboard Street, and RallyCross. At one point during the RallyCross final, viewers noticed something strange; 200 people tweeted that they spotted The Stig from Top Gear walk behind Brian Deegan during an interview. Here are the big moments from one our favorite X Games 17 days. Click the image for the full size version.
Congrats to all the athletes who competed this year! Thank you for an exciting and action-packed four days at X Games 17.
*Read this for more on how we calculate reach and other metrics. And, are you interested in this kind of analysis for your media event? Let’s talk.
Our full analysis of tweets about Super Bowl XLV advertising
During this year’s Super Bowl, we monitored Twitter conversation about the 26 major brands advertising during the game. From those tweets we compiled an in-depth report on Super Bowl XLV advertising. Below is a summary of that report.
The full 62-page report is based on 374,987 tweets about 26 brands and 47 commercials. The report includes brand by brand comparisons, metrics such as tweet volume, impressions and share of voice, as well as detailed discussion of successful advertising strategies. You can purchase the full Super Bowl tweet analysis report here.
Super Bowl Twitter Analysis Summary
how to earn money fast
Chrysler Imported from Detroit ad wins Super Bowl XLV
As always, this year’s Super Bowl ads generated lots of conversation. We posted an analysis of overall Super Bowl ad winners based on tweets, but we wanted to have a more in-depth discussion here about some of the individual ads.
One of the most-buzzed about Super Bowl ads was the Groupon Tibet ad. Many people are discussing this ad, debating whether it was offensive or hilarious. No matter what you think of it, the Groupon Super Bowl ad got people talking.
But for us, the big Super Bowl ad surprise was the Chrysler Imported from Detroit commercial. Not only was this one of our personal favorites of the night, but it seemed to be Twitter’s favorite, too. We tracked more than 38,000 tweets about this ad during the game, making it the most-tweeted about ad of Super Bowl XLV, even beating out those Doritos and Bud Light commercials. In the minute immediately following the ad, conversation about Chrysler peaked at 2,816 tweets in a single minute.
As soon as the game was over, I asked around about what people thought about the ads. Overwhelmingly, people loved the Chrysler ad. Here are a few of their thoughts:
As a former Detroiter and someone who has much love for the city (hopes to end up there one day again), and has made no secret about her love for Eminem, that Eminem/Chrysler ad just made the “Superbowl commercials” for me. I felt it – it made the hair on my arms stand up – you know he loves the city. It just reminded me of the spirit and heart in that city! -Maegan S.
I have to say overall American Car companies stepped up their advertising. Fewer Midwestern guys in trucks and more “stuff I’d like to buy”. -DJ S.
The Detroit commercial was amazing – such a wonderful depiction of the city. -Kelly R.
We also generated a word cloud from tweets about the ad. We removed the words related directly to the commercial (Chrysler, Detroit, Eminem, Super Bowl, and so on) to surface people’s opinions of the ad. As you can see, the overall opinion of this ad was very positive.
The Chrysler word cloud speaks even more loudly when compared to the Groupon commercial’s word cloud. Take a look:
Tweets about Chrysler often included words such as like, great, love, good, awesome, nice, and want, while tweets about Groupon often included words such as offensive, bad, fail, taste, and kenneth (in reference to a recent controversial tweet from fashion designer Kenneth Cole). And maybe this is a case of any publicity is good publicity for Groupon, as the ad has certainly caused quite a stir. The Groupon ad is steeped in humor and irony; CEO Andrew Mason claims the commercial was intended to make fun of themselves at Groupon. But Chrysler’s ad was far less ironic; it seemed to take itself and the audience seriously. Maybe this is why people responded so positively. The Detroit ad certainly stood out from the other commercials shown before and after it, both in terms of the commercial itself and the tweets about it.
Stay tuned, as we’ve got lots more analysis of the Super Bowl tweet data coming up later this week.