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.