Today is one of the most talked about games of the year in men’s college basketball. It’s the rivalry between Duke and the University of North Carolina. For those who follow me across the social web know that I’m a big UNC fan and even though UNC is having a rough season this year, I still believe they can beat Duke tonight. I believe so much that made a Twitter background bet with Duke fan, fellow NC resident and president of Ignite Social Media, Jim Tobin. The bet is if and when UNC beat Duke tonight, Jim has to change his Twitter background to custom UNC themed background for one week. If Duke gets lucky enough to win, I’ll have to change my Twitter background to a Duke themed background.
Hat tip to @JeffreyLCohen for idea.
The Social Media Challenge and Sysomos
While thinking about the idea further I reached out to a few social media analytics platforms to see if they were willing to monitor the conversations around the Duke vs UNC game tonight. Sysomos which provides customers with the tools to measure, monitor, understand and engage with the social media landscape has agreed to monitor the conversations online before and after the game. So, how can you participate? Easily, if you’re a Duke fan just tweet using the hashtag #Duke and a if you’re a UNC fan just use the hashtag #UNC. A few things we’re going to look at tonight is the amount of conversations around each team, conversations location and sentiment level.
It will be interesting to see which team brand will have the most conversations posted tonight and how will the conversations change do to the outcome of the game. Basically how will Duke fans react when UNC wins tonight. (Sorry I just had to say it.)
On a personal note. my wife @LaToyamSutton, a Duke fan wrote a blog post about what its like in the Sutton house when it’s game time. You can read it here: I love my husband but …
Sysomos will post the social media analytics results a few days after the game and I’ll blog about it here too.
A big thanks to Sysomos for helping out and good luck to both teams and their fans. Go Heels!
UPDATE:
Scout Labs has agreed to use their platform to monitor the #Duke vs. #UNC conversations online before and after the game tonight too.
Scout Labs is a powerful, web-based application that finds signals in the noise of social media to help teams build better products and stronger customer relationships.
Also you can already see some of the smack talking on twitter.
