Crowd Riff Makes Sports Tweets Interactive

Ever want to figure out which fans are super influential about your team (or brand) on Twitter? You know, those fans that talk the talk, providing insight that rivals the sportscasters? Fans that know how to create a Twitter frenzy? Or are you one of those fans described above? Smartphone in hand during every game, sending out tweets from your couch or from your season-pass-holding seat? Either way, you'll want to check this new tool out. It helps teams find superfans and helps superfans cash in on their savvy. Did you know that Twitter mimics what happens in the stadium? Well, it does - just check out the graph below. As you can see, the winning team's fans are MUCH more vocal than the losing team's fans. But, so what? There is just SO much noise on Twitter and if you’re a brand trying to make sense of it all, what can you do with this information? You can use #hashtags to solicit conversation, those are popular. But #hashtags are almost immediately hijacked by spammers, making it difficult to track meaningful interactions. You could also set up alerts for specific keywords using various programs – but the results will likely still be overwhelming and tiresome. Or you can "crowd riff" (yes, I just turned the tool's name into a verb) and take those interactions to the next level. Kind of like extreme sports. For data geeks. What does Crowd Riff do exactly? It "engages more fans through a highly interactive next generation second-screen experience." And more specifically: Crowd Riff is a second-screen platform that provides fans with direct access to the social conversation of an event in real-time. The curated streams and interactive visualizations deliver highly relevant content that encourage participation and can be fully customized for any event, league or brand. Crowd Riff can also naturally incentivize meaningful social media activity within an audience by tracking and rewarding specific behaviors (and the people producing them) over time. Let's break this down and explain it further: Fans connect with a team (or brand) site and can view tweets about the current game in real time, with spam weeded out. Crowd Riff places the best, most relevant content first. That's a welcome addition for any sports-tweeting fan. And there is a gaming element to it, a leaderboard, that ranks fans over time according to the relevancy and content of their tweets, giving them a Klout-like score. Here's a leaderboard in action, from Raboscore.com, focusing on Rugby: The fans' "scores" will be determined by tweet elements. Teams (or brands) determine which tweet elements are the most relevant and assign values to these elements to make up unique score components. Let's say a tweet using the #team hashtag is worth one point, a tweet from the stadium during the game is worth 2 points, and a tweet from the stadium during the game with a picture attached is worth 3 points. The scoring can be a combination of any attributes of a tweet: links, photos, hashtags, times, location, team and player names. The more elements, the better: And then it's up to the team to assign rewards various rewards to fans based on their leaderboard standing. As you can imagine, the possibilities there are endless. So, not only is the marketing intelligence this tool provides top-notch, providing both overarching info as well as snapshots of fans . . . . . . it also improves the experience that the audience is having and helps them engage in the event (or with the brand). Seems similar to Klout, you might say? Well, if Klout is like using a chainsaw, this is like using a scaple. It's VERY exact. And it also adopts the best elements one would find in Foursquare too - giving location-specific social networking the kick it needs to make us sit up, pay attention and say "Oooo." Oh and there are mobile and iPad versions as well, of course. So what do you think? Are you ready to Crowd Riff? (International sports fans photo from Shutterstock)

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Crowd Riff Makes Sports Tweets Interactive - And Informative

Mary C. Long

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Mary C. Long