NFL and Super Bowl XLV Score With Social Media

Green Bay Packers! Your 2010-2011 @NFL Champions! Good game, Steelers had a chance #SB45, originally uploaded by dennis_p.

The Green Bay Packers weren't the only Super Bowl XLV winners. The National Football League scored big too, via the advertisers who purchased time to air their Super Bowl ads, and in some cases combine them with coordinated Social Media efforts.

And Social Media platforms scored big too, especially the microblogging platform Twitter and the photo sharing site Flickr. For example, this photo was posted by dennis_p using just his Blackberry directly from Cowboys Stadium after the Super Bowl. Since dennis_p left the photo available for sharing via blogs like Blogger (another platform), that opens the way for sharing of that content via Twitter and then Facebook for those Twitter users taking advantage of the use of that app as I do.

All of this adds up to a new form of media that works to deliver information faster than standard news websites. Live blogging has been replaced by live tweeting using Twitter streaming widgets. And the game has changed from using Google track events to Twitter.

In fact the game's changed so much in Twitter's direction that a new website used the popularity of the hashtag "Superbowl" introduce itself: heapr.com.

heapr.com is a site that combines Google and Twitter searches on one page, and presents both faster than either one. So fast, it's addictive.

The Top Twitter Topics Over 30 Hours, and Glee

The Super Bow's impact can be seen in the list of the top Twitter topics over the last 30 hours according to Trendistic.com: glee, green
the packers, win, game, commercial, this, they,usher, halftime show
fergie, the black eyed peas, half time, where, best, the steelers, super bowl, christina, the superbowl, she, watching, the national anthem, your.

Of the list, one one wasn't obviously directly related to The Super Bowl and that was Glee. But Glee benefited from being the lead telecast after the Super Bowl and thus the one benefiting from a lot of ads during the game. On top of that, Glee's demographic includes those 18 to 30 and most likely to be on Twitter.

In closing the Super Bowl provides the best crucible from which to grow a social media campaign. You can go the expense route and buy ads at $3 million for a minute, or you can go boostrap as heapr.com did and become the tweet of choice for Twitters using key hashtags like "Superbowl."

Not a bad strategy.