The 2012 Isle of Man TT was officially launched on the 18th April with a chat show style press conference streamed online.

The event organisers encouraged fans to get involved with the launch by asking them to post questions to their favourite riders via the official TT Twitter feed. Questions containing the #iomtt hashtag were read out by presenters throughout the night which attracted more than 15,000 viewers.

The biggest names in TT racing where in attendance at the Villa Marina in the Isle of Man’s capital Douglas, including 17-time TT winner John McGuiness and part-time TV presenter and fans favourite Guy Martin.

The idea to launch the event online was supported by the Isle of Man Government TT and Motorsport Development Manager Paul Phillips.

Speaking before the launch Phillips said; “the Official TT launch has really grown in popularity and is now part of the annual calendar with fans and journalists looking out for the date.”

“We have decided to make it available to view to our growing audience of global fans to bring them closer to the event and to set the scene for this year’s TT Races.”

Phillips confirmed the number of viewers of the event on his own Twitter feed following the event.

The Isle of Man TT festival continues to grow each year and the 2012 edition promises to be some of the most exciting racing ever seen on 37 mile plus public road course.

http://www.iomtt.com/News/2012/04/17/Watch-the-Official-2012-TT-launch-LIVE-online.aspx

@iom_tt

Today sees the UK celebrate that it is only 100 days until the Olympic Games in London start.

It really doesn’t feel that long ago that the announcement was made by the IOC and we saw Beckham et al jumping around in celebration (as well as a few thousand people in Trafalgar Square!).

There are a few different strings to this celebration to tell you about that cover YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Firstly, Team GB have launched a video asking people on the street how they felt we when we won the Olympic bid, what their favourite British moment was and much more.  Watch it below to find out what they had to say….

Tonight also sees the 1984 Olympic Decathalon champion Daley Thompson take over the @TeamGB Twitter account for a Q&A session.  This is the latest instalment in the #AskTeamGB series where a famous GB athlete gets onto Twitter to take fans questions.  IT stats at 6pm tonight so get asking your questions now!

The next part of the social activation by the guys at Team GB is the launch of their mascot ‘Pride the Lion’ on Facebook and Twitter.  You can follow his latest exploits on www.facebook.com/PrideTheLion and @teamgb_pride

Finally, the team are asking people to “Join #OurGreatestTeam” by pinning their message of support on our map: www.ourgreatestteam.com

So, only 100 days to go and a huge amount going on!  Can’t wait to see what will be happening next….

One thing we do get flagged occasionally here at UKSN is new jobs that come up in the industry that look really cool….. and this one is certainly up there.  If you live in London and are a Chelsea fan then this could be your ideal role.  The chance to talk football and be involved with the fans is one that doesn’t come up very often.

Here’s some more details from the Chelsea website;

Title:         Chelsea Community Manager
Reporting to:   New Media Editor
Department:    Chelsea Digital Media (CDM)

Function

We are looking for someone who is passionate about social media and Chelsea Football Club to work as curator and coordinator of our keyChelsea fansites, including our official presence on social media sites and develop our user generated content section on chelseafc.com. This will be a diverse and evolving position requiring an applicant able to shape and further define both the product offering and the role itself.

For more details on experience, etc you can get more details at http://www.chelseafc.com/page/Vacancies_Frame/0,,10268,00.html

After more than 2 years in existance its time to take UKSN to the next level.  Over the next few months there will be some changes to ensure it remains one of the best resources for social media and sport information out there.

During our history we’ve been lucky enough to have input from some great writers who have contributed their thoughts and ideas to the site.  If you think you’re up for the challenge and would like to contribute to the site with either a one off article or on a more regular basis then get in touch!

You dont need to have had previous experience of writing for sites or had work published and there are many benefits of being involved;

• exposure to an audience of around 10k people a month - many of whom, are regular visitors to the site and are influential in the industry
• no deadlines or rush, whatever you can contribute to the site is great (we all have day jobs after all)
• can lead on to other assignements writing for other online (and offline) magazines
• increase your profile – especially important if looking to build your brand or break into the industry
• and much more

So if you want to get involved, have a great article just sitting around or know someone that does, email me or get in touch on Twitter at either @UKSportsNetwork or @DanielMclaren 

Samsung have invited people from 20 countries across the globe to apply via MSN for its Samsung Global Blogger (SGB) programme.  Hopefuls are then asked to submit film auditions demonstrating why they should be selected as an SGB for the London Olympic Games.

Those who get through to the second phase will then have to take part in a video report challenge at the end of April, with around 100 bloggers being selected to be an SGB by celebrity judges in each participating country.

Winners will blog and produce a daily show across the entire Olympic Games period using Samsung products, including the Samsung Galaxy Note, which the company wants to position as the perfect blogging device.

Content will be hosted on MSN, social media sites and a Samsung Olympic hub page, while content will not be editorialised, but will be monitored to see if it is appropriate.

Jamie Oliver was selected last month in order to be the ambassador for the programme and was chosen for his global fame and mentor reputation, and ability to motivate people to get behind projects.

Sunny Hwang, vice-president and head of global sports marketing at Samsung, said: “Utilising social media is the most effective and efficient way to deliver our marketing programmes.

“The Olympics is the centre of our brand marketing. Through the Olympic sponsorship we have succeeded in increasing the brand awareness and preference, but we are still trying to increase the brand preferences more, and our brand mission is to make Samsung an aspirational brand.

Samsung is hoping to consolidate its position in the UK market through marketing, while there are strict regulations in place to prevent rivals carrying out ambush marketing during the Olympics.

Samsung’s marketing share for mobile phones doubled in China from 11% to 21% as a result of its sponsorship of the Beijing Olympics, according to Hwang.

Hwang believes the Olympic activity will give Samsung the edge in its increasingly intense battle against Apple.

He said: “We have better technology, better design and better products [than Apple] and we are the Olympic partner, not Apple – that’s a big difference.”

The mobile brand will base its Olympic marketing activity around an ‘Everyone’s Olympic Games’ theme, while Samsung claims it is giving its tens of thousands of Olympic tickets to ordinary people through various different channels.

Hwang added: “Even those who don’t have the tickets can enjoy the Games through their mobile technology anywhere, so we will be inviting everyone for the London Olympics.”

Samsung will look to extend the blogger programme to more than 60 countries where it has subsidiaries during its sponsorship of the 2016 Brazil Olympics, and will open discussions after London 2012 with the IOC to extend its sponsorship beyond 2016.

Article first appeared on;  http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/News/MostEmailed/1124989/Samsung-search-Olympic-bloggers/

Vauxhall and the Football Association of Wales will score a social networking first with a live Twitter takeover event next week with Head Coach Chris Coleman.

The newly appointed Wales Head Coach has agreed to become the first Home Nations Manager to answer questions from fans live via Vauxhall’s dedicated Wales football Twitter page.

This live Twitter takeover forms part of a series of player and coach live feeds over recent and coming months.

Simon Culley, Vauxhall’s Football Sponsorship Marketing Manager said; “We’re very grateful to Chris and the FAW for facilitating this activation. It is a ground breaking opportunity for us to host a live interaction between Welsh football fans and their head coach.

“We have made a significant investment in our digital football platforms and the response to our activity has been very positive from the fans.

“As sponsor of all four Home Nations we are in a very unique position and throughout the campaign we have worked hard to give fans a behind the scenes view of International football.”

Ian Davis, FAW Commercial Manager, commented; “This is a major coup for the FAW and Vauxhall and we are delighted to be able to make it happen.

“As an association we are always looking to innovate and offering the fans a chance to interact with the Head Coach via Social Media is an exciting opportunity for everyone involved.”

The Twitter takeover will take place at the FAW Headquarters at 11am on Thursday 19^th of April, the same day that a group of Welsh football fans get the chance to play in Vauxhall’s Big Pitch game at the Millennium Stadium.

Vauxhall launched their football social media platforms in October 2011 and currently have close to forty thousand followers across all four Home Nations.

Follow @Vauxhall_Wales on twitter at https://twitter.com/vauxhall_wales

Become a fan of Vauxhall Wales on Facebook at www.facebook.com/vauxhallwales

For more information on Vauxhall Football go to www.vauxhallfootball.co.uk

The FA WSL have just announced the launch of their new digital initiative.  It’s great to see the hard work of Leigh Moore, someone I have followed for a while and was lucky enough to meet the other week.  Here is what he has been up to…

Fans of the FA Women’s Super League are to be given a unique insight into the lives of their favourite players with the launch of the new FA WSL digital player ambassador programme.

The eight FA WSL teams have each selected a player to be the digital face of their club in what the league hopes will continue its offer to be one of the most interactive in football.

Leigh said the programme was aimed at giving fans unrivaled access to players:

Whilst football fan pages are commonly used, Moore believes having a player-led approach across all teams will add something different to the WSL offer.

“There are plenty of fan pages on facebook but we wanted to give our players the lead on this, so they will be running their pages and creating all the content themselves.

“They will be giving fans a glimpse at what they get up to on and off the pitch which hopefully can inspire the next generation of top women’s footballers.”

As a part of the programme the eight players will also wear their twitter names on the sleeve of their shirts.

He continues: “The players have done a brilliant job of building a good relationship with their fans via twitter.

You only have to look across the game to see what a big part twitter is playing in the day to day business of football and we see it as a crucial part of what we are doing.

In the WSL you can get close enough to the action to see exactly what players have on their shirts, so we wanted to make use of this to further promote the players and the digital accessibility of the league.”

Here are the ambassadors and their Facebook pages…

StephHoughtonOfficial

SiobhanChamberlainOfficial

ClaireRaffertyOfficial

LauraBassettOfficial

AroonClanseyOfficial

JillScottOfficial

MeganHarrisOfficial

JulieAnneRussellOfficial

Liverpool Football Club’s official Twitter feed @LFC has been voted the world’s best by a sports team at the Shorty Awards in the USA.

At a gala event in New York which also honoured NASA for best use of twitter in the Government category and Justin Bieber in the Celebrity category, @LFC received most votes in the sports team listings to claim the prestigious award. This is no mean feat when you think of the likes of Real Madrid, NY Giants, McLaren F1, FC Barcelona, Man City, etc.

Staged at the Times Centre, the fourth Shorty Awards – known as ‘the Grammys and Oscars of social media’ – were held in front of a packed crowd of celebrities and social media heavyweights alike and recognised the best users of social media in dozens of wide-ranging categories.

With over 829,000 followers, @LFC has gone from strength to strength since its launch in January 2009.

“…we’re delighted our official twitter feed has been recognised as the world’s best by a sports team for its role in keeping supporters up to date with the latest news from Anfield.

But we don’t want to stop there and as we’re always looking at ways of further improving our twitter offering to supporters, this month we kicked off a brand new ‘Twitter Tuesday’ feature in which we give fans the chance to quiz former Kop stars in a live question and answer session online. Luis Garcia and Titi Camara have joined us over the past two weeks and we have plenty more exciting plans for the future to give our fans the chance to interact with their heroes.”

So what makes Liverpool’s twitter account better in the eyes of fans and pundits alike than any of the other sports teams out there?  Here’s 5 reasons why…

1. Fan Interaction

The club do a great job of recognising their fans and taking the time to interact with them.  When you get to over 800,000 fans on a platform it can be hard to do so in a meaningful way.  Here they retweet fans comments, which means a lot to those who follow the club on Twitter.  A retweet from a celebrity or club these days is seen as ‘the new autograph’ and really can make someones day.  They also run quizzes to test out fans knowledge and mention competitions being run by their partners that reate to the club as well.

2. Players

One of the benefits of Twitter is how it can bring not only the club but the players closer to the fans who adore them so much.  As mentioned earlier in this article, the cub are running Twitter take-overs by certain players.  This gives fans the chance to speak to the likes of former favourite Titi Camara or injured star Lucas Leiva.  Hosting these on the club platform gives access to the large fan base to the players and gives even more reason for fans to tune into the account at certain times.  The clever thing Liverpool are doing is holding this on a regular basis – when this happens then fans know exactly when to logon and join in.

3. Match News

The account is a must for club fans who want to find out what is going on in the lead up to the match.  There is ticket info for games, links to highlights of recently played games and team news as it is released for those not able to make it to the game. One thing I do prefer to the @LFC account to other football ones is the lack of a live match feed within it.  Whilst it may be ok for a few are not either at the game, listening to the radio, watching Soccer Saturday or the BBC live feed.  For everyone else it can feel very ‘spammy’ with their feeds getting clogged up with almost minute-by-minute game updates.

4. Links to other platforms

An interesting feature of the Twitter account is its use as a central platform, one that links to all the others that are being used.  Many of the updates are links out to useful or latest pages on their website, LFC TV, Tumblr and Pinterest.  With so many different platforms being used by the club it is important to have that string that binds it all together, and Twitter is that string in this case.

5. Bloggers

A nice feature which I have been lucky enough to experience here with UKSN is the openness of the club to link out to content written by others.  A recent example is a tweet that links out to a link posted by football blogger Kickette, just for the reason that they liked the article and thought their fans would also like it.  Many clubs are precious about what content is linked to and will ensure that it is only their own that appears.  Here they are showing that they value others as well as themselves and it will only help in the perception of the club with those who write about them.  With UKSN they linked to an article written about their Pinterest page (and earlier about their new Tumblr page).  Sending traffic on such a scale to smaller sites is a really nice touch – even though it crashed the site both times!

FIFA today debuts on the video-sharing platform YouTube (www.youtube.com/fifatv) to make the world football federation’s rich audiovisual content more accessible to fans.

FIFA on YouTube features tailor-made football match action from the most recent FIFA competitions, including the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ and the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2011™ Germany, top player profiles and clips from FIFA documentaries, FIFA Futbol Mundialshows and the 2014 Brazil monthly magazine show.

This content will be updated and expanded regularly and will be complemented with content from the non-competitive side, such as features on football development, social development initiatives and human interest stories, as well as video news releases and live streaming of media events.

“FIFA is keen to engage with football fans beyond our competitions by sharing our rich visual content with them, and for this there is no better platform in terms of reach and penetration than YouTube,” said Joseph S. Blatter, President of FIFA . “We want to provide YouTube users with the greatest moments of FIFA World Cup history but also invite them to share theirs with us.”

“We are very excited that FIFA is launching its channel on YouTube,” said Stephen Nuttall, YouTube’s senior director of sports partnerships in EMEA. “This new channel will allow a global audience to discover and interact with videos featuring the best footballers competing in the most prestigious tournaments. This is one more example that YouTube is increasingly the place for football,” he added.

While content for FIFA on YouTube is at present sourced primarily from FIFA Films’ voluminous archive, the aim is to further engage with fans by including user-generated content and other interactive offerings, as well as material from FIFA’s many stakeholders.

It is a shame they are not allowing the embedding of videos from the site so the governing body for football aren’t taking the sharing of their content as far as they could.  It is an organisation that likes to be in control and by doing this they are doing so.  So now we have FIFA on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube…. will they be on Pinterest next??

With the massive expansion in interest of the platform of the moment, Pinterest, it has been a matter of time until football clubs (and sports in general) start to jump on board.

Just over a year ago Pinterest had only 10,000 users.  With massive coverage in tech and lifestyle blogs that number surged to 11.7m by January this year.  Now that is massive growth!

The first football club to see the opportunities being offered was Italian club AS Roma.  They have added a range of boards covering historic iconic photography, official club videos, merchandise and every cover from their official club programme (which is pretty cool).

Liverpool and Man City have shown over the last couple of years that they are the ones that like to be the first onto a new tech.  We have seen much from Man City recently with the great work of their digital team coming to life.  Liverpool have come back into the game with their recent Tumblr page, The Reds Gallery.  Another great venture showcasing some of the most iconic photographs from the clubs history, enabling those pics to then be bought via links to commerce.

Last Saturday (18th March) saw Liverpool launch their foray onto Pinterest with an official account (pinterest.com/officiallfc).  They have started 11 boards covering;

• LFC Flags & Banners
• Retro LFC Merchandise
• LFC Videos
• His Name is Saurez
• LFC Cakes
• Liverpool Legends
• LFC: The Greatest Fans in…
• LFC Kits
• LFC Programme Covers
• Dream Team: LFC’s Best…
• Ladies LFC Fashion

As you can see, there are some similarities between Liverpool’s boards and those of AS Roma.  But both know that there is certain content they have which is highly pinnable.  The club said about the move;

“With Pinterest we’re again focusing on fantastic images to share with fans but unlike The Reds Gallery on Tumblr, which is a much more traditional and linear photo blog, we’re using Pinterest in the way it was originally designed – as an online scrapbook and pinboard where we share photos of the people, places and items that either inspire us, make us proud or make us laugh.

We’re also using our different themed LFC Boards on Pinterest to bring some of the club’s history and passion to a new audience for the 21^st century. With so much choice on the internet, we recognise that today’s young and new fans may not have time to read realms and realms of text about Liverpool’s glorious past, present and future and that’s why we’re always looking for new ways to interact with supporters online. Whether you’ve been attending matches for years, live in a far, foreign land or are just beginning your love affair with Liverpool, we aim to have something that captures your imagination.”

For some of the boards it will be interesting to see if the club manage to drive revenue through.  With areas such as Ladies Fashion and Retro Merchandise there are distinct possibilities to be exploited.  Some businesses have reported more traffic driving to commerce through Pinterest than the likes of Twitter and Facebook deliver.

Well done to Paul Rogers at Liverpool.  Here are some pics from the site…