When New Balance acquired the sponsorship rights to the US Indoor and Outdoor Nationals - two of the premiere high school track and field championship events - in 2010, they did so with an eye towards evolving the way in which competing athletes and their families were engaged around the two events. With up to 3,000 competitors on-site at each event, New Balance approached Almighty to collaborate on activation programs that would energize both competitors and their extended network of friends, fans, and enthusiasts. Rather than create a new destination for thousands of kids, we decided to build out an entire experience in a place where our audience was already fluent. The New Balance Nationals would be the first track meet - and arguably the first national championship - to play out live on Facebook.
For the 2011 New Balance Indoor Nationals, held in March at The Armory in New York City, Almighty worked with New Balance to create an integrated experience that incorporated near-real-time event results, a LiveStream video of meet coverage, photos from Smilebooth, and a video archive - cut from the LiveStream - spanning almost every heat of every race that took place over the three day event. We executed all of this within the newly-enabled iFrame inside Facebook pages, which gave us tremendous flexibility to manage, update and deploy content. On top of that, Almighty deployed a content and engagement team that was charged with reporting live from the track on event results, goings-on, and original content developed on-site. The team also managed Facebook wall engagement - responding to more than 95% of the hundreds of questions and wall-posts made by athletes and supporters before, during and after the event. The feedback from the athletes and their supporters, which came directly on our wall, was overwhelmingly positive and frequently cited New Balance's willingness to engage and respond to the audience. We had entered the event hoping to gain 1500 'likes' for the page, with just over 2000 athletes participating. At the end of our three days, we had acquired more than 2500.
For the 2011 Outdoor Nationals, we were determined to leverage the strength and breadth of the networks of each competitor, to drive even greater engagement with the coverage of the event. This time, competitors arriving at Greensboro, North Carolina's Aggie Stadium were prompted to use Facebook Connect as part of the popular Smilebooth experience to effectively connect their on-site experience to their Facebook networks. In doing so, we were able to relate an athlete's Facebook account to his/her bib # - enabling us to add additional layers of functionality to our Facebook experience. Using the meet event schedule, we were able to auto-post reminders about the LiveStream to competitors walls minutes before their events started, encouraging their friends to watch them compete from anywhere, even on mobile devices. Links to results were posted to competitors' walls immediately following the completion of their events, as were Smilebooth photos - all affording friends and family at home a real-time view into the weekend. This view generated some remarkable results for New Balance, as well: more than 4,300 new 'likes' during the three days, more than 400,000 post views on Facebook, in excess of 40,000 views of our event videos, and nearly 5,800 Smilebooth photos posted to competitors' walls.
