Your favorite sports team is learning a lot about you every time you watch them play. Whether enjoying a game from the stands, your TV or mobile device, you’re also engaging with the team via social platforms in real time.
Such interactions create new data points—structured and unstructured—that offer invaluable opportunities for teams, leagues and brands to improve the fan experience.
Postano is a social curation and visualization platform that helps turn those opportunities into real business benefits. Justin Garrity is a senior vice president at Postano, a TigerLogic Corporation platform. In this installment of my series on Data Innovators in Sports and Entertainment, he spoke with me recently about how Postano lets brands cull the most useful fan content from social media, displaying selected posts on Web sites, in mobile apps, at events, in stores and stadiums.
Kaan Turnali: How was the Postano idea born?
Justin Garrity: Postano was originally a simple idea of a plugin for Facebook that transformed the standard timeline into a visually exciting experience that filled the window with tiles, similar to what Pinterest looks like today. Brands, including many sports brands, quickly noticed the power of Postano. After some major upgrades to our software and services, we re-launched Postano as a fan activation platform that integrates user generated content and brand social content to deliver engaging on-brand experiences to many formats including stadium, in-store, web, mobile, and tablet. Postano enables finding, promoting, and visualizing the very best fan content to help brands, teams, and leagues activate fans with authenticity and originality.
KT: How does Postano leverage data? And how does the technology work?
JG: Even though Postano is built with advanced frameworks and technologies, the interface is very simple and requires no learning curve. It presents and organizes social streams of data from across an entire brand into a personal social command center. Leveraging data from the social web, we sort thousands and thousands of posts in real time and display them in an actionable way ideal for marketers and social media managers. The standard interface is a key part of many of our customer’s sports war rooms like Arizona State University’s social media command center, or the University of Oregon’s Quack Cave.
In our latest release, we introduced three very powerful new capabilities that leverage data in powerful new ways. First, we have instrumented our social monitoring view to include counts, trends, and comparisons for every social stream including owned, mentions and hashtags. Being able to see this trending data side-by-side the actual social posts provides context so that marketers can have a greater sense what their community is talking about.
Second, we now offer dynamic analytics dashboards for all Postano visualizations including web social hubs, web social widgets, mobile apps, event displays, in-store displays, stadium arenas, and command centers. These dashboards provide insight on many metrics such as volume, impressions, curation, geo-location, hashtag trends, click through rates, engagement counts that enables measurement and reporting for the ROI of social and user generated content.
While these interactive analytics reports are available on tablet and the desktop version, they are also designed to work for multi-display social “war rooms.” For example, a marketer might see that fans have tripled the amount of Vine posts in the last 30 days and plan a campaign to take advantage of the momentum on that platform. A team could compare their opponent’s hashtags during playoffs and develop a messaging plan to generate specific contributions highlighting their team’s strengths. This, in return, promotes visual and data-driven decision-making with true impact that fans will love.
Third, Postano created a new series of visualizations such as live hashtag polling, voting, trending and comparisons that integrate data into the experience. Some of our football clients, including ASU and an NFL team, are in the early stages of featuring these new data rich visualizations to engage with their fans.
KT: What are some of the projects that you are working on?
JG: One of the most popular features we launched earlier this year has been our introduction of attribution links and interstitials. With attribution links brands can easily attach links to social posts. For example, Texas Tech athletics has used attribution links in their ‘Guns Up’ Social Hub, featuring Twitter photos of College World Series t-shirts and directly linking them to a partner retailer.
Attribution links provides a direct connection between social and ecommerce. We worked directly with our customers to make this feature as easy as possible to implement. Related to attribution links is Postano’s ability to integrate sponsorship messaging and event schedule information right into the Postano displays for events, retail, andstadiums. For stadiums, our interstitial capabilities allow teams to directly feature sponsors alongside the social content. For example, the L.A. Kings have used this feature to enable Toyota to sponsor the Kings’ social content.
Stay tuned for the next installment of the Data Innovators in Sports and Entertainment series.
Connect with me on Twitter (@KaanTurnali), LinkedIn and turnali.com.
Data Innovators in Sports and Entertainment Series:
Overview | SyncStrength | TSG 1899 Hoffenheim | Postano | Sqor, Inc. | Fan Appz | Phizzle | Uplause
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