Why is social media being blamed for Aussie athletes’ poor performances at the 2012 Olympics?

by Brad Keeling @bradatslice - Head of Marketing at One Small Planet

Whose fault is it that our athletes are not coping with their social media activities at the London 2012 Olympics? Is it the  Australian Olympic Committee? The AIS? Who?

It’s all very well that the AOC and the AIS and any other sports management body blame Twitter and Facebook. But it’s not Twitter and Facebook’s fault. Maybe it’s time to outsource some social media management support.

In tears at only getting a silver medal, swimmer Emily Seebohm said straight after her swim that she had spent too much time on Twitter and Facebook,  that she’d stayed up too late on the sites in the lead up to her swim. Later, clearly after she had been spoken to by management, sports psychologists and the like, she changed her tune saying she “didn’t think her obsession with social media had cost her the gold medal”. Almost the same words came from Stephanie Rice in an interview with the ABC. Obviously the athletes are now toeing ‘the company line’.  Read more...

Live Event Tweeting...

From a quiet book store in Beaumont Street, Hamilton, Newcastle in New South Wales came a tweet from @onesmallplanet

Live Tweeting a Book Signing

Case Study

One Small Planet reported the goings-on at a book signing event by live tweeting on the night. It was in a suburban book store in Hamilton, Newcastle, NSW. There were about 30 people in attendance at the store. However, using Twitter, live, the audience expanded to more than 25,000.

The Price Of Life is the story of Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan who was abducted in Somalia and held for ransom. His ordeal lasted over 400 days.

The book store runs a Twitter account - @Macleansbooks - and the store owners understand the potential of Twitter and the real-time web. The book’s author has a Twitter account called @thedirtyhostage which is ably assisted by Kimberly Ramplin who is @KimboRamplin on Twitter. Together with One Small Planet this team set out to expand the reach of the book signing on the night with live tweeting.

Before the event a look at the reach of the term “priceoflife” in tweets showed that there were no tweets using that term and there hadn’t been in the three days prior to the book signing on 1 September 2011.

 

The event got underway at 6.00 PM. It was an interview format in which the ABC, 1233 Newcastle’s Afternoons presenter, Carol Duncan (@CarolDuncan on Twitter) interviewed Nigel Brennan (@thedirtyhostage) and his sister and sister-in-law, the other two co-authors of the book. It was anticipated that the interview would last about 30 minutes but this is a fascinating story and with questions from the audience both in the store and on Twitter it was over an hour before it reluctantly wrapped up.

This sort of format lends itself to a live Twitter reporting, enabling  Q&A type tweets, Twitpics (like @CarolDuncan with @thedirtyhostage), and quirky and compelling facts. This snippet from Nigel’s sister, as a tweet was retweeted.

The next morning, following the event, we saw, that from a standing start, with zero use of the term’priceoflife’, the reach grew to more than 25,000 and generated over 65,000 impressions. During the evening the term #priceoflife became a trending topic on Twitter, in Sydney – meaning it was one of the most viewed and mentioned subjects at the time.

 

The activity increased the mentions of @thedirtyhostage dramatically on the day. And sentiment towards the author, @thedirtyhostage and the book, Price of Life, was positive. Does this equate to selling more books? Maybe. But the use of Twitter and other real-time web tools such as Facebook, Blogs and so-on can’t be ignored in today’s general marketing mix.

The inaugural Newcastle Craft Beer Week ran November 21st to November 27th 2011 

Over the two weeks from November 17th through to November 30th talk about the event was amplified using Twitter by One Small Planet driven primarily through its @AusBeerFestival account.

The exposure for #NewcastleCraftBeer week exceeded a million impressions on Twitter and reached 123,775 people. 

A Case Study 

Originally published on the One Small Planet website on December 1st 2011. This is a summary with some background to how it worked.


Newcastle Craft Beer Week was a series of events held throughout the week which was coordinated by Corey Crooks, the licensee of The Albion Hotel and culminating with The Craft Beer Festival at Warners at the Bay Hotel, run by Mark Mead, Bottle-shop Manager at Hotel. The significance of these two venues is this: The Albion Hotel has the widest selection of craft beers on tap of any pub in Newcastle and the bottle-shop at Warners at the Bay stocks over 1000 imported and Australian beers including over 400 craft and boutique beers. 


While several participating pubs in Newcastle have Twitter and Facebook accounts only three of these venues chose to use social media as part of their overall promotional mix. The team at One Small Planet assisted The Prince of Wales Hotel, The Clarendon Hotel, and The Albion Hotel. Each applied slightly different strategies to the same end. 


One Small Planet also assisted some of the brewers attending the festival events. 

#NewcastleCraftBeer 

To focus attention on the Twitter conversations about the event we created the hash tag, #NewcastleCraftBeer. The One Small Planet Twitter account, @AusBeerFestival commenced posting tweets around November 17th. Each Tweet carried in it the #NewcastleCraftBeer tag. For the first half of Newcastle Craft Beer Week through to the Thursday several hundred people had attended events at various venues and there were 537 Tweets bearing the tag #NewcastleCraftBeer. These Tweets reached 57,566 people – close to one hundred times the number of people who had attended events. 

The Strategies and implementation: 

Throughout the week there were tweets posted about subject matter relevant to Newcastle Craft Beer Week, pictures, links, quotes and occasionally promotion about events and venues. The idea was to keep the conversation alive all week both during the day and into the evening while events were in progress. Again, the hash tag is an important component to keep people easily informed and interested. This is particularly important for those who were not attending events or not even in Newcastle. This way, twitter word of mouth about the venues, the brewers, brands and in fact Newcastle City is being talked about 


During some events One Small Planet via @AusBeerFestival tweeted live. More about 'live tweeting' at an event coming ...

bradatslice on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

One Small Planet

Live Video streaming by Ustream