Wimbledon has been underway for a week and the major Tennis tournament has been a platform for some very exciting social activations. ESPN has rights to the tournament for the first time, and it has a robust strategy to use their social footprint throughout the event. We spoke to Emeka Ofodile, ESPN’s Director of Marketing overseeing Wimbledon about their strategy.
Launching Wimbledon using social:
Last Monday, in honor of the beginning of Wimbledon, ESPN orchestrated a mob of tennis players, dressed in their Wimbledon whites (including #WimbledonWhite T-shirts), commuting and walking around NYC to surprise fans on their way to work, a smart way to generate buzz. They also worked with grassroots agency Awestruck, to hire more than sixty ambassadors to dress in white and travel around NYC in the morning. The height of the stunt was when the group watched Wimbledon on the ABC Supersign in Times Square.
ESPN’s social TV strategy for the big event:
Lost Remote: How is ESPN using social to promote the telecast of Wimbeldon?
Emeka Ofodile: Social media is a huge part of what we do for all of our big events on ESPN. This is the first time we’ve had Wimbledon for the entirety of the tournament, which presents a great opportunity to leverage social media to drive ratings and make sure fans understand that ESPN is the home of the event, from the first ball to the finals. The social platforms we’re focused on include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare.
Some of the tactics we’ll use include Preview/Tune in posts, where we try to drive tune in to the telecast by setting the stage for the event to follow. We’ll often ask a social question as a way of stimulating engagement and interest in the upcoming event. We’ll also do reactionary tweets and posts around major moments in the tournament and try to generate buzz for the key storylines. Often, fans are most excited to talk about a match at the immediate conclusion, and we want to take advantage of that.
On Foursquare (above), specifically, we’ll use the check-in function to post photos and text tied to a physical location – it’s a way of telling our fans that “ESPN is here.”
LR: How are you working with Twitter for this?
Ofodile: All the tactics I mentioned apply to Twitter. Additionally we’ll utilize hashtags and we’ll retweet posts generated by the edit side of the house (reporters and analysts) that might help continue the conversation with fans.
Livestream offers extra content:
The NYC-based live streaming company has partnered directly with the tournament to offer “Live @ Wimbledon” where they will be streaming exclusive behind the scenes content for the web. We spoke to CEO Max Haot about the partnership. “Livestream.com has a live chat for fans moderated by Wimbledon’s social channel so they can build a conversation around the matches, ask questions live to media covering the event and more,” Haot told Lost Remote. “All the content is easily sharable and synced up to both Wimbledon and Livestream’s social feeds encouraging fans to tune in wherever they are – work, sitting outside using tablets or catching up on a match on their phones,” he added.
Haot further described how social will play into this partnership. “The partnership enables both us and Wimbledon to extend our audiences socially through all the great features the platform offers – live chat, photos, text, and social media integration,” he explained. “Each photo and text update on the feed can be easily shared by fans to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, which both drives up conversation and viewership across the web,” he added.