Even if it takes a mile of ethernet cable and twenty people working rotating shift fifteen hours a day, the Super Bowl command center is going to find you a parking space, by God.
Rowdy NY Giants fans and overly confident New England Patriot fans, plus many in between, will flock to Indianapolis in the coming weeks for Super Bowl XLVI. Since the city is expecting an influx of around 150,000 people, you have to expect that there will be some problems. Can’t find my hotel, got a flat tire, where should I eat dinner – these are all problems that might be able to be solved by the Super Bowl’s first-ever Social Media command center.
The Indianapolis Super Bowl host committee tapped marketing agency Raidous to help with the new service. Twenty people are gathering inside a 2,800 square foot hub in downtown Indianapolis to help Super Bowl attendees in whatever way they can.
Their job is to monitor the social airwaves – that means Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. – looking for fans in need. Keywords in tweets like “parking” or “restaurant” will alert the team, and they can then offer the relevant assistance. So if someone tweets “parking in this town blows,” the team will tweet at them will any help they can provide.
“Social media is just how people interact now,” Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidious told Mashable. “We felt it was critical to have some horsepower behind that aspect of the Super Bowl here, versus what you might have seen from other Super Bowls.”
This is the first time anything involving this kind of large-scale social media monitoring has been tried at a major event, and researchers have already been tapped to study the social media center and evaluate its efficacy.
There will be a lot of social data to mine through, so hopefully the tool and analytics are up to the task. People posting on Twitter will probably have the best chance of getting a response, due to the public nature of tweets. One thing that will help all of this is the fact that AT&T has improved its service for the Indianapolis area ahead of the big game.
What do you think about this concept? Could it actually make the Super Bowl experience smoother for both fans and the city involved? Let us know in the comments.