Sports are a natural fit for mobile, mostly because they depend not just on real time viewing, but reacting. Fans feed off the adrenaline of the community–in the case of the Olympics, it was a global one. So how did mobile play out during the games?
Well, NBC was a big winner. During the first few days after the opening ceremonies, visits to the network’s mobile WAP site doubled, going from 210,000 on August 8 to 476,000 on August 11. More importantly, nearly half of users had never viewed mobile TV prior.
Beyond content, though, the mobile conversation around the Olympics was particularly noteworthy. Much of it has come through microblogs like Twitter, where people from all over the word exchange 140 characters by the minute.
“Why am i suddenly patriotic during the olympics???”
“hangin with the fam watching the olympics”
“Nail-bighter of the olympics: USA vs. China for womens beach volleyball gold!”
“I’m over the olympics. I saw syncronized jump-roping and that did it. Oooh Cheers is on.”
Pretty mundane, but taken in sum, these messages (or “tweets”) can be seen as a collective pulse, and any mention of the Olympics as an “endorsed impression.” I might read them and tune into beach volleyball, for no other reason than to join in the conversation.
Some bloggers in Beijing even started a Twitter campaign for the Olympic around the lucky number 8. At 8:08am on Friday 8th August 2008, they encouraged users to twitter in the with hashtag#080808 to celebrate and support the opening of the Beijing Olympics. While Twitter isn’t very popular in China, tweets came in at the rate of 2/second.
More popular there is Fanfou.com, which was also a virtual nurse during the Olympics, taking the pulse of commenters 24/7. When Chinese superstar Liu Xiang suddenly withdrew from the 110 meter hurdles, thousands of people reacted on Fanfou, such as:
“Nothing in the 2008 Games could sting me more seriously than the pulling-out of Liu Xiang,”
“The hearts of millions of people were emptied by Liu Xiang’s withdrawal.”
So mobile use was amplified by the Olympics, but it can be drawn upon for any sport, any time. To promote its Wimbledon coverage, for example, the Tennis Channel not only created a twitter channel to push out news, but pulled in tennis-related tweets onto its homepage at http://www.twennis.com.
Beyond content and conversation, the experience of sports will also get mobile. We’ll see more initiatives like Adidas miCoach-a Nike+ for Samsung phones in Europe-and mapmytracks.com. Of course, you can always tweetup with your “followers” for a group run.
