The Webchutney Blog

Synopsis

India’s first contest on Twitter, ‘Commentweeter’ (Cricket Commentator on Twitter) generated tremendous excitement and massive hype around the international cricket tournament ACL T20, and induced the TG to participate, create interesting digital ‘crowd sourced’ content and collaborate within and beyond existing social networks to win a trip to South Africa for the tournament, while tweeting live from venue.Objective

Strategy

The ACLT20 (2010) had not been one of the most successful cricketing events. In order to get people talking about it and eventually watching it, we realized that reaching out to influencers who could spread the word would give the tournament much needed buzz. The challenge was finding these influencers and almost immediately we turned to twitter. If facebook is the neighborhood café, in India, twitter is the five star coffee shop. From Bollywood celebs to politicians to tech enthusiasts, we could find them all here. But any ordinary cricket promotion wasn’t going to get the attention of the ‘twitterati’. So we put them front and centre of the action and gave them the opportunity to gain even more of the stuff they always seek – influence.

Creative Idea

The Hunt for the “ACL Official Commentweeter” was launched – a simple slogan contest that could eventually get twitterati the opportunity to be a ‘commentweeter’ & tweet live from the matches in South Africa for all of their followers. All they needed to do was get as many people to ‘retweet’ and ‘vote’ for them. The idea was seeded amongst influential tweeters in the hope that their participation would amplify the buzz for the activity + a media campaign on ESPN websites helped generate awareness for the contest.

Result & Recognition

With over 20000 tweets, influencers such as @kiruba with over 50k followers participated and won resulting in huge buzz for the activity. Live tweets from these personalities during the match created renewed interest in the ACL and helped to increase viewership.

Watch the Video Case Study here: