The 2012 NFL Draft is history, and while “Draftniks” are grading how NFL teams did, this blogger’s looking at how the NFL itself performed in social media. This blog post is both in preparation for, and will serve as kind of a primer for, a Tuesday morning radio show talk on The Tonya Hall Radio Show out of Denver Colorado, and what has to be my 15th stint as guest on the show. The show will air Tuesday, May 1st, at 8 AM PDT to 9 AM PDT, and is on live at http://www.tonyahall.net/radio.htm
Or you can listen live at KRCN – 1060AM Denver, Boulder, Ft Collins, KREL – 1580AM Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and call in at (855) 464-5905 9a-10a MT; 8a-9a PT.
This time, I have asked Dr. Bill Chachkhes, my buddy and NFL Draft colleague since 2005, to join me as a call-in guest. We’re going to talk about not just the NFL Draft and social media, but also how Zennie62 used social media at the NFL Draft in New York – that means we’re going to talk about Tout.com. And Bill, who’s covered the NFL Draft for over 30 years, is going to provide a unique perspective on how social media has impacted the NFL Draft.
But first, what happened with the NFL and Social Media.
Mashable Wrong: Robert Griffin Slightly Beats Andrew Luck In Twitter Buzz
Earlier, the social media blog Mashable reported that, using their “mrank” system, Andrew Luck has the most buzz of all NFL Draft players. But, and using http://analytics.topsy.com as a tool, I found that Mashable was wrong, and indeed, their own “mrank” system was misused – garbage in and garbage out, as they used to say.
The problem is that while Andrew Luck has one name he’s tweeted about under, and that’s “Andrew Luck,” Robert Griffin III has two names he’s tweeted about under: “Robert Griffin III,” and “RG3” – Mashable did not include the RG3 knickname, yet any NFL fan knows that the knickname used for him. Thus, on the day leading up to the NFL Draft, April 25th, “RG3” had more mentions that Andrew Luck: 59,401 versus 46,099, respectively.
And when you add the fact that Griffin goes by the two names, he actually beats Luck in the total estimates.
Because there’s no more Blogpulse, I can’t tell how Luck did versus RG3 in blog mentions. That Neilsen shut down Blogpulse in January is a criminal, crying shame. There has to be some standard online data gathering activity that’s free to all.
#NFLDraft Hashtag Performance: Soccer Game Beats NFL Draft
The “hashtag” is the way of marking conversations on Twitter (which is one aspect of social media, not the only one) using a #with a word, or words ran together. In the case of the NFL Draft, the National Football League’s chosen hastag was #NFLDraft. How did it do? Well, it and the NFL, were almost tsumanied by the Chelsea V. Barcelona Soccer Game that was played just the day before, and set a new Twitter Tweets-per-second-record for sports: 13,684 tweets per second.
The question is, could the NFL have matched that record? Given the analysis I conducted using Topsy, my word is “No.” The reason is the buzz for Chelsea alone was consistently higher than that for the #NFLDraft and even #NFL, both of which were flat compared to it before NFL Draft day April 26th. But at that point, Draft Day, the NFL actually beat Soccer: 154,000 mentions for #NFLDraft versus just over 50,000 for “Chelsea.”
But get this: the NFL did not buy a promoted hashtag / tweet for NFL Draft Day, and why that is, I do not know. But I can say that even with the purchased #NFLDraft hashtag, the NFL would not have caught Chelsea v Barcelona. Why? Because according to Google Insight For Search, the overall search volume for “Chelsea was greater over the past week than for the NFL on a nation basis.
Thus, on the day Chelsea v Barcelona beat the Twitter tweet-per-second record, the 24th, its search volume was at a perfectly intense 100, versus just 5 for the NFL Draft. On Draft Day, that picture changed, with the NFL Draft dominating at 49 versus 11 for Chelsea, but remember, the high-point is 100, and the NFL Draft did not come close to getting that.
I think had the NFL bought the hashtag for #NFLDraft for that day, it would have done much better in overall tweet mention and search intensity – maybe not enough to break the Chelsea record, but enough to make a more respectable showing.
Why is this important? Because if the NFL could show better social media intensity versus a Worldwide soccer product, it could draw overseas advertisers – an important step in becoming a true World sport.
How Social Media Has Changed The NFL Draft
This is what Bill can speak to well on Tonya Hall Radio, but the one topic of conversation was how NFL fans and the media were using television, Twitter and blogs to predict what a team was going to do before they did it. One shot of an NFL Draft prospect on the phone in the “green room” in NYC was Twitter tweeted out with some speculation which team was talking to that player – and more often than not, it was true.
That fact caused the NFL to block much of the use of cameras in the “green room” this year and to maintain more of the element of surprise. The NFL fans are really savvy and engaged users of Twitter together with television.
NFL Blogger Called Out For Blast On NFL Owner
The NFL Draft and Twitter also produced a controversy that was boosted by our friend, Indianapolis Colts Personality Julie Buehler. Julie didn’t like that Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio went off and assumed that Colts Defensive End Dwight Freeney would not be traded because Colts Owner Jim Irsay tweeted that other teams were hoping the Colts would trade him. Now, setting aside the desire of Colts fans to see #93 play for the Colts this season and beyond, Julie is correct that Florio kind of went off the chain in his Twitter-based assumption.
That, in turn, led to a great blog post you can read here at Zennie62.com.
How Zennie62.com Uses Social Media: Tout.com
The approach of Zennie62.com is vastly different than that for other organizations. Our intent is to communicate what is happening in a multimedia way, using blogs and micro-blog plaforms like Twitter and Chime.in, and micro-vlogging system called Tout.com, that allows you to make 15 second videos. Here’s an example:
And that Tout can go out as a Twitter Tweet, and to your Facebook Page, and eventually to YouTube as well – as well as be embeded into your blog post. I enjoy the Tout Social Media platform, that allows you to follow and “Retout” others, too – something you can’t do on other systems that have the 15 second limit. Plus, as you can see, it allows you to give a “taste” of the experience of the NFL Draft.
Well, that rounds out what will be our basic talk on the Tonya Hall Show in the morning. Tune in and call in too!