When coaching business executives about Social Media, we’ve found one of the most attractive, yet disruptive, traits of this new form of communications is ability to share information on a real-time basis. Recently one of the CEOs in our “Social Media Executive Peer Group” was inventive with his own implementation of Twitter-based, real-time, information distribution.
Dave Ferguson of Click Engineering spotted the opportunity, and quickly set up a Twitter group for the Seattle Yacht Club’s Racing Committee. Skippers on their sail boats could “follow” the @SYCRC account on Twitter via their laptops or cell phones. With these phones all of the “following” skippers could receive virtual information via the “tweets” that reported on the conditions, progress in race, and notices of boats rounding their marks.
For the competitors, the information was coming from the eyes of the Race Committee (on the committee boat) to supplement their own real-time view. One recent weekend, the wind conditions proved to be problematic, and the Twitter notices were able to keep the skippers informed of conditions, delays, and rescheduled starts.
Since most skippers elected to forward their @SYCRC messages directly to their smart phones, most of the fleet was gathering information via their SMS (text) messages.
Dave also added streaming video for several marks on the course. He chose to use uStream for his video streaming. Follows is an example of a Twitter message that included the embedded link to the uStream URL where a video stream of the racing activity could be found.
TWEET:
Our compliments to Dave. This is an excellent example of using social media tools to capture real-time information then distribute it for free to participants in an event. Variations of this real-time broadcasting could be used for low-cost, information updates from one source to many followers. With Twitter it could just as easily be shared many to many. For us, it is rewarding to introduce Business Executives to the possibilities that social media offers to businesses like theirs.
Thanks for highlighting our solution Clay, we have had very positive feedback to it.
One advantage that should be highlighted is the outreach to non-participants. By Tweeting and streaming the live video of the event we allow people to follow along even though they cannot be there. Spouses, racers, yacht clubs, racing fans all are following the tweet/video stream. This allows us to expand our audience, build the community around yacht racing and increase chatter about the events. This drives participation down the road, which of course is the ultimate goal. The parallels to building a following for your business should be obvious.
– Dave Ferguson
CEO, Click Engineering Inc.
As a non-racing spouse, it has been great fun to follow the races vicariously over Twitter. Watching the starts, following the conditions, and having firsthand knowledge of the results has been a blast.
I'm looking forward to introducing this technology at some dressage shows this summer!
– Ann Ferguson
COO, Click Engineering Inc.