Game Day Communications Uses New Media For The Flying Pig Marathon

Game Day Communications of Cincinnati did a great job of using new media technologies to help foster communication before, during and after the recent 10th running of the Flying Pig Marathon.  Jackie Reau of Game Day sent out an email this week detailing their effort and I thought it would be great to highlight their case study as a way for folks to see how e-mail, text messages, Twitter, Facebook & YouTube were all used in a creative and helpful way.  Here's info from Jackie:

      

E-mail Communications

For 26 days leading up to the Flying Pig Marathon, daily email alerts were sent to the e-database of 30,000+ providing race tips, updates, sponsor recognition and spectator information. Game Day also used the email database to encourage use of the technology options created for the weekend.

Real-Time Results & Text Messages

Working with Cincinnati.com, runners and their families members could view real-time results on Cincinnati.com the day of the race for the full marathon, half marathon and 4-person relay. Also, some 3,000 cell phones were buzzing with text updates with runner's split times courtesy of Cincinnati.com and Zebra Mobile.

Twitter

From Friday through Sunday, the staff at Game Day Communications provided behind-the-scenes updates from race events starting with the Health & Fitness Expo through the end of Sunday's race. Twitter is a social media networking tool that allows people to register to receive posted updates from Twitter.com. Some 70 people signed up to "follow" our alerts and we made 130 postings over the three days. (Next year, we will use Twitpic to add photos with postings.) While this is a small number of the total field, Twitter is a good tool to engage participants and to share timely or emergency information. For instance, Jackie used Twitter to announce the 15-minute delay for the race due to the fire on the course at the same time it was being broadcast on WLWT-NBC and at the Starting Line. Check it out at: twitter.com/gamedayjreau.

Facebook

Each day during the race weekend, the Game Day staff took about 20-30 photos from various events and posted them on Facebook for participants to enjoy. Click here to view them...

YouTube

Working with Silver Sun Studio, a two-minute overview video was produced for distribution on YouTube featuring the start and finish as well as course shots of runners and spectators. View the video here.

For more information, contact Jackie Reau at (513) 929-4263 or jreau@gamedaypr.com.