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Earlier this week WFAN’s Mike Francesa had an awesome rant on Twitter. Some of the top sound bites include Twitter should be illegal, one of these days someone will monetize it and Twitter cuts the middle man out of sports journalism.

Now sports radio is known for dumb things being said, but this may take the cake. I guess we can just chalk this one up to old media not wanting to admit that media is changing.

Would you want to be the grandkid or production assistant who has to educate Francesa on Twitter?

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Anyone who reads this blog with any kind of regularity knows that there are two things that I am very passionate about – sports and social media. So needless to say, when I see an initiative that mixes the two, I get geeked out.

At this year’s South by Southwest conference, Samsung caused one of these moments for me with their US Olympic Genome Project.

This initiative runs via Facebook’s Connect technology which maps users with Olympians with similar interests. So if you are interested in cats, computers and fishing, the Genome will connect you with an athlete with similar interests.

On a base level it is pretty interesting and should help spark some more attention on the US team as they head to the London Olympics next summer. This initiative could be really awesome if Samsung and the team have an engagement strategy to connect with fans. Since the Olympics are something that the vast majority of us will never experience, an insider’s look into training and the event can help draw people in and could increase overall interest into sports that fly below the radar.

I for one will be watching intently as the Genome project rolls out live and have high hopes for it. The program is currently in a beta stage, if you want to sign up to get in on the action when it rolls out, check out Samsung’s US Olympic Genome site.

A special thanks to James Price who gave me the lowdown on the program in the Samsung Lounge and took time to do a video interview on the program.

• NPS ([Positive Mentions + Neutral Mentions] – Negative Mentions/Weekly Team Mentions ) – 6 Points
• SIM (NPS*Conversation Share*1,000) – 2 Points
• Conversation Share (Total Team Mentions/Mentions for Weekly Matchup) – 7 Points
• Positive Conversation Share (Positive Team Mentions/Mentions for Weekly Matchup) – 7 Points
• Negative Conversation Share (Negative Team Mentions/Mentions for Weekly Matchup) – 6 Points

*In the case of a tie, the winner is decided by the team with the larger difference between positive and negative mentions.

Before I get into the results for this week, I would like to invite you to test your picks against the formula that I listed above in my ESPN group. The person who finishes the season with the best record will get a $25 Amazon gift card from me.

So without further adieu here are my picks for Week 1 of the NFL season:

New Orleans – 0

Green Bay – 16  

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Atlanta – 0

Chicago – 16

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Buffalo – 15

Kansas City – 1

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Cincinnati – 0

Cleveland – 16

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Detroit – 22

Tampa Bay – -6

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Tennessee – 22

Jacksonville – 0

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Indianapolis – 3

Houston – 13

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Philadelphia – 10

St. Louis – 6

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Pittsburgh – 10

Baltimore – 6

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Minnesota – 10

San Diego – 6

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New York Giants – 7

Washington – 9

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Carolina – 6

Arizona – 10

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Seattle – 1

San Francisco – 15

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Dallas – 8

New York Jets – 8* (Tie Breaker)

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New England – 6

Miami – 10

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Oakland – 16

Denver – 0

I know that this method of selecting games is untraditional, but hey it sure beats the pants off picking winners by uniform color or quarterback with nicer hair. I’d love to hear what you think about the methodology and your method of picking as well.

Image - beefy_n1

Now as with any season, there will be folks making their weekly predictions based on everything from their gut to uniform colors and cold hard football facts. This season, I have decided to make my picks based on the social buzz surrounding the teams squaring off each week. To come up with my picks, I will assign a point score  based on various social metrics. I will explain more next Thursday, but it will be very similar to my Super Bowl and NFL season predictions from last season. Each Thursday, I will post my picks to this blog and to my ESPN group..

This method may sound silly, but the numbers are just as good as picking a winner by which team has hotter cheerleaders right?

Do you think that you can pick NFL winners better than going by the social buzz? If so, I invite you to join my ESPN group. At the end of the season, I’ll send the person with the best overall record a $25 gift card to Amazon.

Hope to see you there.

Image - LostBob Photos

On July 28, I arrived at the discreet offices near Yawkey Way and was shuttled into a conference room with 10 other members of the Sox Twitter community. During the hour plus that we were sitting in the offices that overlook the 99-year old ballpark, nothing was off-limits. The Sox’ social media team asked the focus group of their Twitter community what we liked, what we didn’t and what they could do better.

One thing that really stood out to me during this group was that there was no way for social media to scale in an organization as big as the Red Sox. Unlike many companies who make it a point to respond to each and every person who reaches out to them on the social Web, the Red Sox just can’t do that. They have over 116,000 followers on Twitter, they are a Major League Baseball flagship franchise that generates a lot of buzz, and a quick search of #redsox on Twitter yielded over 100 results in a two minute span. Responding to everyone is just not possible.

The Red Sox social media team understands this, but wants to make sure that when they do connect with a member of their community that it is something that is truly worthwhile. Events like tweetups and the focus group allow them to keep a pulse of the community in a somewhat scalable method.

After the event I headed over to the ballpark with other members of the focus group including Joselin Mane, Christine Major, Dave Cutler and Stephanie Silverstein. We discussed the event that we had just attended. We agreed that while the team is doing some great things in the space, they are still just scratching the surface. It would be great to see them implement some of the changes we suggested, like more behind the scenes action, contests and facts of the day.

I know that I will be keeping an eye on their accounts over the next 12 months to see what they roll out. It will be interesting to see how a team with such a rabid fan base continues to engage and grow their social properties. I would also gladly come back in for another focus group to chat with the team on social media.

If you are a fan of the Red Sox, what would you like to see them add to their social media activity? If you aren’t what would you like to see your favorite sports team do in social media?

Disclosure, in exchange for our time in the focus group we were giving a standing room ticket to see the game on the 28 of July. No blog posts were required or asked for. This was unsolicited.

A few weeks back, pundits noted that Twitter had its moment. The 140-character service was on fire with tweets mentioning the death of Osama Bin Laden at a rate that traditional news outlets couldn’t keep up. Once the story was confirmed by President Obama, Twitterville was generally filled with messages of happiness, relief and closure from all across the country.

Then there was Rashard Mendenhall, who had a slew of Tweets that you could consider offensive and/or ignorant including this gem:

“@dkeller23 We’ll never know what really happened. I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style”

Following the Tweet, the running back had both teammates and the Steelers organization trying to distance themselves from him. The coldness has had a local columnist to suggest that the team should install a no social media policy for the team’s players.

While the team hasn’t commented, even considering such a policy would be a mistake, much like the folks at UNC making coaches monitor the SM accounts of their players. Aside from the joke notion of having to censoring grown men, installing the plan or something similar will help further isolate a fan base during the league lockout.

Sure what Mendenhall said was stupid, but why not use it as a teaching experience? The league currently has guidelines for off-field personal conduct and all players go through media training so why not look to expand the training to personal conduct in the social space?

Unlike many companies who have nobodies like me tweeting and facebooking it up, the teams and league have people that could actually increase interest and fan connection with the league as a whole.

They also have a player who could teach his peers on how to build up this bond without being offensive or deterring from the overall appeal of the NFL brand while also growing their own personal brand – Chad Ochocinco.

Do you think that the training would increase your connection with the NFL or would you rather see these guys get away from their keyboards?

Thanks to Nick Gosselin for pointing this out — RELAX.

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This post originally ran on the PR Breakfast Club.

If you haven’t heard by now, the NFL had a giant game in Dallas a few weeks ago. It brought in buco-bucks, drew the largest viewership in television history and made a lot of fans from a small town in Wisconsin very happy. So one would think that the league left the Lone Star State feeling awesome and without problems.

Well, if you haven’t been living under a rock and you pay attention to sports, or news for that matter, you know that the league is facing a major PR issue that may tarnish their image. This doesn’t concern the looming lockout of the players (a PR conundrum for another day), but rather folks who fill their coffers – the fans. You see, there were over 90,000 fans who purchased tickets to come to the game, problem was the seats weren’t available for over 1,000 of these ticket holders to be sat in during the big game. This was because the seats were not completed and did not pass the muster test of the fire marshal.

The league knew a week before the game that the seats wouldn’t be ready. Instead of alerting the ticket holders, they decided to roll the dice and wait for the fans to find out at the game. While the league did attempt to make amends, the effort was not enough.

The root of this issue is greed. Jerry Jones and the Cowboys wanted to set Super Bowl attendance records in the first Super Bowl held in the new Cowboy Stadium. You can’t blame the guy for trying, but when the seats weren’t completed, they needed to reach across the proverbial aisle to make amends. Their initial response was (via FanHouse):

“Those fans that are affected by this will be directed to the Party Plaza area while the matter is resolved. Fans who are not accommodated with seats inside the stadium will each receive a refund of triple the cost of the face value of their ticket. We regret the situation.”

Fans who couldn’t be accommodated with these moved seats were ushered to lounges within Cowboy Stadium and the neighboring stadium of the Texas Rangers- a higher priced version of the ticket holders’ living rooms

To make this PR headache a wee-bit worse, the fans that didn’t get to watch the game in the seats that they paid $900 (face value) for have now retained a lawyer for a class action suit. They are currently seeking $5 million in damages – roughly $4,000 a fan.

From an outsider’s point of view, there is little chance for the league to come out with at least somewhat of a shiner. One way I could see the NFL winning is to offer these folks Super Bowl tickets for life and use them as some kind of new legacy comparable to the never-miss-a-Super Bowl club. This group could also be facilitated with the means to discuss their experiences in the host city on a platform like NFL.com or SuperBowl.com to maximize their exposure and benefit the city.

To gauge more opinions on how the league could come up like roses, I reached out to fellow PRBC authors Mike Schaffer and Keith Trivitt.

Mike’s take:

Normally, I am a pure fan advocate.  Teams and leagues can always treat their fans better.  But allow me to defend the NFL for a second.  While they NEVER should have sold tickets for seats they weren’t 100% confident in being able to fulfill, I think they did a decent job in this situation.

The fans were moved from virtual bleacher seats to box suites, given TRIPLE the value of their overpriced tickets and invited to next year’s Super Bowl, where I’m sure they will be given world-class treatment.  Plus, they now have one of the greatest stories in sports.

To recap: They are suing for $4,000 when they get $2,700 and the ability to see TWO Super Bowls in person.  Sounds like the league as given the mea culpa and adequate compensation.  Don’t get me wrong, the league dropped the ball, but, in my opinion, they’ve responded appropriately…in this situation.

Keith’s take:

I’m not sure the NFL has many options in terms of coming out rosy in this situation. The timing, at least from the NFL’s standpoint, couldn’t have been worse, as it faces a multitude of PR challenges in the months ahead.

Let’s look at it from a macro level. The League is already starting down a potential March 4 lockout, which many in the public, fans and media have pinned on its owners’ greed and egos. Add to that the fact that the Super Bowl is essentially the world’s largest single-day economic booster. With all that in mind, the NFL simply could not afford for something of this nature and at this level to happen, especially on its most vaunted stage. This problem will likely only add fuel to the NFL Players Association’s PR playbook against the league in the coming weeks as a lockout looms.

At the end of the day we’re flacks who happen to be NFL fans and will be interested to see how this plays out. How do you think the league could get out of this incident without further PR incident? We’d love to hear below.

Image – Yvonne Shearer

The trend carried on over the past 24-hours as the Packers were mentioned nearly 9,000 more times than the losing Steelers.

Below are some graphs showing the sentiment, volume and conversation share throughout the Super Bowl and its aftermath:

Aside from the graphs it was also interesting to see a snapshot of what fans were saying throughout the event and hours following it:

Green Bay

Pittsburgh

Do you think this method of predicting is sustainable or did I just get lucky?

Unfortunately it did not. The Pittsburgh Steelers made my playoff cut, but did not make the big dance as the people’s voices translated into San Diego topping Dallas – whoops.

Instead of licking my wounds and saying better luck next year, we’re going to try this whole rodeo again. To judge the NFL champion on Sunday, we’ll look at the same metrics provided through the tool in terms of social buzz, but will look at the data going from their respective championship runs until January 31 (two weeks).

If you were too lazy to thumb through the slides and want to see who won the title from the SM space, click the video below to see.

Do you think this report will hold up come Sunday or do you think its total bunk? Either way, I will have another post on Monday looking at who had the bigger buzz levels on Super Bowl Sunday.

When the noise settles, there are two top prospects.  On one hand many folks have been arguing for Michael Vick, the reformed quarterback for the Eagles who has went from third stringer to sparkplug for the City of Brotherly Love. On the other hand, there is Tom Brady, one of the league’s golden boys who posted the best record in the league armed with a team lacking the big name of say Randy Moss.

If I were still working in sports, I would probably weigh the stats of Brady and Vick along with some film and some other variables. Since I am not in that world anymore, I decided to look at something that I live and breathe now – social media as it gives everyone their own soap box to pontificate from.

Image - Boston Herald

So who better than the social masses to crown the league’s MVP?

Using Lithium Social Media Monitoring to pull the data, I rated the two top candidates from the NFL pundits in conversation share, net promoter score, SIM score, positive conversation share and negative conversation share. The leader in each category was given two points while the second received one point (negative conversation share was given a -1,-2 respectively).

Over the past month, there were nearly 100,000 mentions of the two quarterbacks, 57.6 percent of which went to Vick. Below are how the two stacked up in the five categories:

NPS

• Brady – 97% (2 pts)
• Vick  – 94%  (1 pt)

SIM Score

• Brady – 409.42 (1 pt)
• Vick  – 540 (2 pts)

Conversation Share

• Brady – 42.4% (1 pt)
• Vick  – 57.6% (2 pts)

Positive Conversation Share

• Brady – 49% (1 pt)
• Vick  – 51% (2 pts)

Negative Conversation Share

• Brady – 28% (-1 pt)
• Vick  – 72% (-2 pts)

In the end, Michael Vick edged Tom Brady by a score of 5-4 in the battle for NFL MVP in the eyes of the social media. For a full side by side comparison report of the two, click here and here.

Despite the outcome, one thing that interested me was the frequent word clouds. In the case of the Philadelphia QB, the two most common words were Vick and Michael, while Brady’s were season and team. In some ways it is fitting because the Patriots place an emphasis on team while Vick has been the center of personal redemption stories. One thing that was interesting was that Vick’s frequent word cloud did not include dog or dogfighting in the top five.

The league will announce their MVP next week, so until then, we’ll be left to debate who the MVP should be. Who would you give the award to?

In July, one of the sporting world’s most popular brands saw its stock instantly drop with a simple decision. Now this was not any run-of-the-mill screw-up that we’re accustomed to, but rather a guy who wanted to play with some friends. Sounds harmless right?

While I would agree with you most times, LeBron James’ decision to go on an hour-long special where he told the world where he would play falls somewhere under cruel and unusual punishment. Everyone from the Cleveland owner to distraught fans and media pundits took their shot at the league’s “King.” Unlike many free agents who crush the hopes and dreams of folks by leaving their team, he made a spectacle of it and ripped the heart out of his hometown fans and franchise.

Fast forward a few months and James is starting his season in Miami on a team that many have crowned the next champs. Should be fine right?  Well the LBJ brand is still in a kind of flux, instead of being the poster boy playing for a small market team, James is disliked. He’s also part of a three-headed monster and not the centerpiece of the franchise.

In a step to find a new identity James launched a new commercial with Nike that uses the Decision as the premise for finding a new identity while asking what should I do?

Nike has always been one to have awesome commercials and putting their athletes in a new light, but this commercial kind of confuses me. To be the poster child for the league and a giant shoe company is to be in charge and confident. The commercial leaves me wondering if there is a method to their marketing message and shows a brand with no clear direction.

I am not talking Nike here, but the LeBron James brand. Will he embrace the villain role, just ignore everyone, keep keeping on, or something else? Only time will tell, but if he wins, it should be a whole lot easier.

hardware and the title World Champion.

The first pitch will be thrown on Wednesday night, but between now and then, everyone and their mother will make a playoff prediction. Instead of relying on tried and true metrics like home vs. away splits or how the teams will finish, I decided to use social media buzz.

The report was conducted similar to my report of NFL preseason buzz a month or so ago. The difference is that the end game is much sooner with the MLB playoffs and the buzz was relevant as teams chased the pennant.

So who do you think won (in case you didn’t read the title)?

If you are from the Big Apple, you can rejoice knowing that your Bronx Bombers will take home their 28^th World Championship.

Below is the full report for the eight playoff teams.

What do you think of this report? Would love to hear your thoughts below.

Madden simulations. Heck, I even know someone who won the office pool one year picking based on jersey colors. I am sure some of you have some half insane methodology as well.

This season, I decided to utilize social media to select my picks. Unfortunately my favorite team, the Baltimore Ravens, was not a playoff team, but on the bright side, neither were my wife’s beloved Patriots.

The playoff field included the Jets, Steelers, Colts, Chargers, Dolphins and Broncos in the AFC, while the NFC was represented by the Cowboys, Lions, Panthers, 49ers, Redskins and Vikings.

Want to see how your team fared or who took home the title? Check out the presentation below (click here if you are having trouble viewing) for the full breakdown.

Hope you enjoy and let me know if you would like to know more about the computations or any aspect of the report.