Edward Kosheluk
Everything in Moderation
Real-time Sports
reporting, Engagement
and FANATICISM
Sports and real-time are a perfect match:
- - Fans want to follow the game
- - Fans want access
- - Fans want knowledge
- - Fans want interaction
- - Fans want...
-
- Fans want...
Sport enthusiasts have an insatiable appetite for information, with ScribbleLive you can satisfy it. We have to look far beyond game day.
Examples we'll look at
Prematch
Game day
Post match
Always-on
Sport brands
prematch
Tournament draws
Training sessions
Pregame discussions
Spring Training stl
Pre-season training:
- Behind-the-scenes access
- Videos of players training
- Real-time reader feedback
Absolute success, closest I have been to spring training
Tournament Draw T-online
With an event like this, fans will stay on your site until the draw has taken place so you just have to get them to your page as early as possible and keep them entertained.
- Pull in Youtube videos of previous matches
- Build anticipation by integrating tweets from official channels
- Encourage debate among readers with polls and questions.
Fans will stay on your site until the draw is made, you just need to keep them entertained.
Pull in Youtube videos of the players and teams
Gameday
Build momentum before the match
Make the most of Scribble's advanced functionalities
Experiment with multimedia
Sky Sports Football Live
Every week, Sky Sports run a live event that covers all the Premier League action and football news across the weekend. The matches take place between Saturday and Monday but they start their event on Friday morning. They know the fans don't just consume football on matchday; come Friday morning they are already looking forward to the action and will happily take any content they can get.
So the drip-feed of information - team news, predictions etc - begins on Friday morning and the page drives traffic until Monday night.
Last weekend they drove over 1.5 million uniques
The Independent Champions League
What makes for excellent sports reporting?
- Timely real-time updates
- Conversational tone
- Mix of multimedia
- Reader interaction
- Integration of social conversation
The Independent uses the Live Article to create a 'story of the match' in images at the top of the page.
Multimedia and cricket
A sport probably no-one in this room is interested in but has been at the forefront of live reporting since the very beginning. Below are a couple of interesting uses of the tool by our clients:
Sky Sports live reporters recorded
short videos every time there was a
break in play to give their readers
an audiovisual update on play.
Bridging the gap between broadcast
and digital journalism, ESPN recorded
a halftime talk between their journalists
with a Google Hangout.
Post match
Just because the final whistle has blown doesn't mean the real-time has to stop. Drive traffic and reader engagement with:
-
Polls
- Discussions with journalists
- Games
Was the referee right?
The Independent had a lot of readers following their live report of a Champions League match. In a very controversial move, the referee sent off a player, changing the balance of the game completely. Fans were fuming and debates were raging. When the match finished, The Independent created a new event to give the readers a space to discuss the action, and specifically the decision. They created a poll with a simple yes/no answer at the top. The result?
30,000 uniques
311,000 UEMs
16,000 votes cast
Sometimes it requires little more than giving your readers the space to share their thoughts.
caption Competition
Continuing with the theme of reader engagement,
Jsonline launched a caption competition after Aaron
Rodgers and Greg Jennings were photographed
together. This page got more uniques and more user
comments than a lot of their live match reports:
11,000 unique visitors
227 reader comments
0 posts by the journalist
Provide readers with a place
to speak.
Le parisien journalist Chat
Every Monday, Le Parisien a French daily organises a chat
between its readers and one of their sports journalist to
discuss the weekend's action. It is a great way to encourage
engagement, establish a connection between reader and
journalist and, importantly, drive traffic. It's at the same time
every week, only takes one hour of the reporter's time and
makes the most of his expertise.Every week this event drives:
15,000 - 45,000 uniques
No matter how exciting the weekend
was, there's always plenty to discuss.
Always on
-
Chat forums
-
Sport Gossip
Husker chat
Fan forums are all over the internet and are full of passionate, engaged readers. Journalstar decided to create their own to allow their readers to talk about Huskers freely on their site.
- Over 500 pages of reader discussion
- No work for the journalist
- The Scribble event has inline ads
- The rest of the page is heavily monetized
They have built a loyal community of readers and are now benefitting from free traffic.
Sky Sports Summer Transfer Window
Probably the most successful always-on event
by a ScribbleLive event. It was initially launched
to cover the gossip and movement during the
summer football transfer window but was such
a success that they never closed it. Essentially
their journalists publish short posts about all
the latest football gossip. Often they're linking
to articles elsewhere on their site or pulling in
tweets but readers know that if they want the
latest football news, it will be there.
The event has been running since May 2012 and
has received 54 million unique visitors!
Sport teams
Brands are content producers and story-tellers now and that applies to sport teams too. Teams have exclusive access to players, coaches and training grounds and with Scribble, they can control their story and brand-messaging in real-tim.
Case study:
The Football League
Football League
The Football League is the professional association for 90 British football clubs from the top to the lower leagues. They run the infrastructure for all these team's websites and they had a couple of problems:
- There was no space on their site for fan interaction
- So much content they produced was hosted elsewhere on the web (Twitter, Youtube...)
- The tone of the site was formal and not conversational
The solution?
The Wall
Introducing the Blues Wall - a live hub for all the breaking news from Birmingham City Football Club
- Content from their social channels
- Exclusive behind-the-scenes content from the club
- Polls and quizes
- Fan discussions
- Live match reporting
If you're a Bluenose then the Blues Wall will quickly become your first stop of a morning and the last thing you check at night.
The Wall is still is in beta stage but has been a huge success.
They are driving more traffic to their site and The Wall has a much bigger dwell time than the rest of the website.
Copy of Real-time
By Edward Kosheluk
