Final Thoughts on the Superbowl's Social Media Command Center [Infographic]

A final follow-up on the Superbowl XLVI’s Social Media Command Center

If you recall, I shared my experience of the time I spent at the Superbowl’s Social Media Command Center – giving a deep dive into its strategy, goals and a complete tactical rundown of the technologies used. Below is a great post by Ryan of Bacon Social Media which further describes the overall strategy and why the Superbowl’s Social Media Command Center is considered a tremendous success. Again, as I noted, the true objective was to create a “Superbowl Experience” that provided hospitality to those fans visiting Indianapolis and to extend that experience online as much as possible.

During the Super Bowl, the guys at Raidious used the Awareness Social Media Hub to power the Hospitality Social Media Command Center. These are the Lessons they learned from the experience and tips they provided webinar attendees on how to strengthen their own Social Media effectiveness.

If you missed our first post covering the Superbowl’s Social Media Command Center (which is crazy cool) check it out here.

Who’s Your Hospitality for the 21st Century?

The motto for the Command Center was “Who’s Your Hospitality for the 21st Century.” They wanted to take the typical informational items that the traditional hospitality group would provide in the weeks before, during, and after the game, and provide them via social media channels.

The goals for the staff of 50 Social Media contributors were to:

• Address Public Safety Issues
• Disperse Event and Service Information such as directions, scheduling, and parking updates
• Highlight positive aspects of the Indianapolis community

The primary properties that were used during and leading up to the Superbowl were Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. While other properties were monitored, the team used these properties as their primary channels of communication.

Get Strategically Reactionary

All Social Media is basically reactionary.

You don’t know what comments you are going to get from customers online.

You don’t know what questions are going to be asked.

You can’t predict the specifics, but you CAN prepare in advance.

Brand Images should be congruent among properties. Make sure you have a consistent look and feel. It will help to get your users following on their most accessible social network site.

Provide your audience with reasons as to why they should “like” you or “follow” you. If your brand is a large and emotional brand, you may not have to be as direct and specific with the benefits of connecting with your brand pages.

Stick to Your Goals

One twitter user tweeted that she was unsure as to what outfit she should were to the super bowl village the following night. By using keyword searches on twitter (through Awareness’ software) one of the staff members was able to easily respond to the user and let her know where she could check the local weather reports. They could have taken it one step further by suggesting a locally-owned ladies’ clothing boutique or athletic clothing store if she needed to add anything to her outfit.

The Social Media staff was focused on delivering hospitality related information. They did not chat about player stats or TV coverage or celebrity sightings. Their keyword searches were created to focus on and react to hospitality, safety, and local community related messages.

They could have, though, considered creating separate twitter streams for different subjects (i.e. player injures, concession specials, etc.).

Anticipate Your Needs and the Needs of Your Customers

The creators of the Social Media command center, planned for what they needed. They knew they needed space, scalability, etc. to accommodate the humans contributing to the effort. They knew they needed a software tool that could accept and track multiple users, directly integrate with Social Sites, etc.

There were approximately 10,000 tweets per second at both the halftime show and at the final game winning drive of the Super Bowl. Can you imagine the hardware and resources needed to process that data? Wow. They planned for this prior to the game by addressing these requirements with the Awareness team who made sure enough resources were in place.

Team members were empowered to engage with fans with information that is both accurate and useful.

Some team members were assigned specific tasks (like responding to specific keywords) to reduce rework and maintain focus. Social Media users can get lost quite easily, so a definable focus helps to increase efficiency and performance.

Other team members were assigned more general tasks to help spread information and monitor responses.

Team members used the Q&A database ChaCha.com to find information for their social marketing efforts quickly and accurately.

Team members were also trained prior to the event on the Awareness platform relative to Raidious’ best practices.

Content Calendars are recommended by the team to keep users on target and focused. Your content calendar should contain actual dates to track progress and set deadlines. Include blog entries, Social Media posts, webinars, emails, etc. Also include response times (what day you will go back and reply to all of your comments.)

The content Calendar enabled the team to be proactive about collecting information, photos, videos, etc. prior to their due dates which was a valuable way to spread the work during non-peak times.

Use spokespersons and create stars of users behind the scenes to put a ”face” on your social media. Focus on users tapped in to philanthropy, night life, or other personalities connected to your cause. Feature these people in your content. Have them connect with users on the other end of the line directly. Also consider featuring a set of celebrities, not for their celebrity, but for their “human” characteristics (philanthropy, community involvement, etc.).

Use Photos and Videos when you can because they hold more weight in Search Engine and internal Social Media sites searches. They also promote engagement among users better than standard text updates.

Measure Your Inputs and Outputs

Measurement begins at the planning stage. Develop a fictional report of what your successful Social Media Campaign would look like, so you can begin to understand what you CAN and should measure. Consider measuring the following:

• Your Audience Reach (where you are interacting)
• Type of Posts (informational, reactional, fun, videos, pictures, etc.)
• Type of Engagement (what type of response your post caused)
• Number of Posts (quantify your actions)
• Click throughs (going from one page to another)

Social Media Command Center Results:

Total Audience: Original total audience goal (direct reach) was 5,000. Final reach: 49,000.

Sentiment goal was to be more than 50% positive. Final sentiment total: 3.6:1 positive to negative.

Amplification: Combination of Shares/Retweets and Favorites/Likes: 64 million impressions

Klout: Exceeded the official NFL handle’s influence based on Klout score.

Estimated total value, amplified social reach at $50 cost per thousand yielded a $3.2 Million valuation

The Command Center Team wanted to construct an apples-to-apples comparison between traditional media and their social media efforts.  They used the following info for their calculation:

The average traditional cost per thousand for adults 25-54 yrs old in Indianapolis is about $50, multiplied by the 64 million impressions they obtained during the campaign, equals a $3.2 million valuation. The average Super Bowl TV commercial costs between $3.2 and 3.5 million for a 30 second spot.

Given these numbers, we can see that the investment in the Social Media command center yielded about the same cost as a typical TV commercial, but the VALUE of the engagement, the information provided, and the access to the now connected users (if they choose to access them in the future) continue to add value without adding additional costs.

Social Media Command Center Infographic

Click Image to Enlarge

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