Danny Whatmough.com

I’m a huge sport fan. So this week is pretty busy – the Monaco Grand Prix and French Open tennis at the weekend, the Champions League final tomorrow, culminating in the FA Cup on Saturday.

So it’s with much interest that I’ve noted a few new ventures in the social media space that mix two of my passions – sport and digital.

At the weekend, TEAMtalk – that great bastion of football news and gossip – announced that it was fully embracing the Twitterevolution by starting to cover key events from live football matches through @TEAM_talk. And it seemed to work very well (though I wish they would have separate handles for news and live updates. Better still, have different accounts for different teams etc., otherwise the information overload reaches epic proportions…).

Then today, I learn that ITV are set to capitalise on the feast of football on offer this Saturday by fully integrating a range of social elements on its football website. According to reports, the broadcaster will display recent Twitter chatter through a Twitterfall (let’s hope they’ve learnt from the Telegraph) and use AudioBoo to allow fans to upload audio comments.

This all makes total sense to me and I’m amazed that sport websites haven’t made more use of these channels already.

Sport, by its very nature, is incredibly social. Both watching and playing – just ask gym or pub owners. And its big business for the media too.

Fans are passionate, vocal and vehement in their support. And social media is a perfect melting pot for this. My own team – Hearts FC – have been active on Twitter for a while now rounding up around 500 followers. But I can’t happen to think that more effort could be made. Twitter is more than pushing out news articles.

So it’ll be interesting to see how TeamTALK and ITV explore these new services and embrace social technologies to increase support and enhance the experience both on and off the pitch.

Poor old ITV. Just when it looks as though they might be getting it together, it all goes wrong.

Today’s announcement is hardly surprising considering the nature of TV, TV advertising, advertising in general etc. and, of course, the ‘economic climate’.

I don’t really watch ITV – only really the football (and even that is in trouble) – and rarely rarely rarely visit the website.

Over at the Guardian, Jemima Kiss has a nice analysis of exactly what today’s ‘restructuring’ will mean for the company:

“With a share price already at a rock bottom 23.75p, ITV has been forced to take some drastic action. But ditching digital and abandoning investment in the most innovative parts of its business is extremely short sighted. If you think of a business as a family, these young digital businesses are the children that haven’t yet achieved their full potential, and ITV has given up on them already.”

And for the most part I agree with this viewpoint, although getting rid of portals like Friends Reunited is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that ITV has simply failed to find a niche in this new fangled digital world.

The local video arena that Jemima mentions is an interesting one and is certainly ripe for the taking. Especially with the demise of local media in general. Over in the US, the NYT is launching a new blog network to try and capture local news. In my mind, ITV are ideally placed to do the same here in the UK. But can they? Will they? Doesn’t look likely after today.