Making the internet real

I've always quite liked stuff that makes the internet real, making something you see on the screen an actual event or thing. I started thinking about it when I saw this talk by Russell Davies called 'Printing the Internet'

Watch live streaming video from liftconference at livestream.com

If you can't be arsed to watch a 25minute video. The highlights are as follows;

- A website that allows you to create a newspaper with as few as 5 copies e.g. to take away as a wedding memento. Lovely idea.http://www.newspaperclub.com/ I love my ipad. It kind of lets you get involved physically in the internet, but not really. That's why I still buy a newspaper rather than reading it on my ipad.

- Translating social media data into something physical. The best example is a program that calculates the amount of time that you spend on each website or Microsoft program and delivers you something real that represents that time or volume e.g. a Twitter snowman whose head corresponds to the number of followers that you have. It's a real version of this http://visual.ly/twitter Real things are intuitive and instantly make sense, like using an ipad.

I was reminded of this when I saw this from KLM. There's a series of replies to consumer's Tweets using cabin crew to display the letters. Online - offline - back online. Lovely.

Football Social Media League Table - Mainly dross

Chelski were ranked no.1 in the 'Premier League Social Meida League Table'. The Poll conducted by Lewis PR took into account not only the number of fans/followers but the number of interactions with those followers. Good. The table looks like this...

DeGea 'Kreme of the Crop' - Genius!

If you follow any/all of the Prem's top clubs you'll know that alot of the content that is posted is dross but fans still lap it up. The fact that Man Utd have 19million fans and, as is correclty pointed out in the Lewis article, they tend to push mainly broadcast, corporate messages illustrates this point (and that they have a far larger global reach than the rest of the league) United rightly take up their place in mid-table. They were slow to launch a Facebook page and are yet to launch a Twitter account which more than likely counted against them.

The coefficient is good in the sense that volume of fans isn't the overriding factor in determining success otherwise United would have the league wrapped up by Christmas. However, the number of fans does inflence the number of interactions that a club is likely to/can physically have. A club like Blackburn struggle to sell 20,000 tickets each week. They have 24,000 fans on Facebook and they offer them some great opportunities to interact with the club (The chance to meet Chris Sutton in the OneRovers store and have him sign your book - hello.) I would concede that most are broadcast messages however, they are primarily a chance for the fans to get invovled with the club in person which is no bad thing given how far removed most clubs/players are from their fans.

Chelski

Chelski were one of the first clubs to embrace Twitter and as a consequence they have been Tweeting the longest. More importnatly, their policy on Twitter looks to be, "if someone will listen let's Tweet about it." The quantity of posts seems to have been the defining factor in them taking the social media crown. The quality of what they are sending out and the consistency of their message/tone/POV isn't good. This comes back to the point that football fans will lap-up anything that a club says.

Liverpool

Liverpool have their own social media site for their fans - The Kop - which allows fans to talk with each other about what's going on with the club (loosely moderated by the club) and earn points in doing so. Liverpool's integration of sponsors into their online channels is excellent and is only pushed when adding value to the fans and they are very aware of the club's tradition and history - Their online comms on the anniversary of the Hillborough disaster were brilliant.

I think Chelski should be docked 50 points for chatting shit crowing Liverpool as Champions.

The sooner clubs start producing content that is exclusive to their followers and that they can't get anywhere else the better. I'm excited about the announcement that Man City have signed a deal with Google to broacast content on Youtube as they are the best club in the league for producing previously unseen content for their website as well as offering more than a commentary of club affairs they get into what interests their fans. More clubs should take heed of this and cease posting crap content just because fans read it - fans will read anything from a football club even if it's mainly dross.