Live Blog – The Cornerstone Of The European Tour’s Digital Coverage

It has been almost exactly one year since the European Tour launched their live blog feature.

I was lucky enough to visit the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth in 2013 to see how the production team was set up, get a feel for the event and a glimpse at the deltatre live blog product that had been put in place for them for the first time.

It has now become the cornerstone of their live event coverage, especially for flagship events such as the BMW. It combines a blend of compelling editorial, up to the minute photographs and video clips, social media content, statistics and fan-interaction in one easy-to-digest, visually appealing stream.

Only last month at Digital Sport London we had a panel discussion on the benefits of live blogging platforms for teams, sponsors and federations. It’s something we’re seeing a lot more on media websites, teams such as Sunderland and Man City, and federations including thePremier League, RFU and the European Tour.

So why did the European Tour put their faith in such as product? We spoke with the tour’s website editor Will Pearson. He told us that they had several reasons in mind;

“The modern sports fan has high expectations when it comes to digital coverage of live events; he/she demands ever-more sophisticated and engaging live digital content to act as either a second screen experience while watching the event on television or in isolation, perhaps on the move, on tablets, smart phones, and/or at work etc.

We understand that the live scoring/leaderboard hosted on europeantour.com is undoubtedly the pivotal asset for The European Tour in our digital landscape and the live blog, as an aggregator of content, presents an ideal opportunity to leverage that popularity in order to promote the rich array of material we produce across the site

As well as being a heightened experience for the fans, the ET Live Blog also brings with it the possibility in the future to provide greater commercial value for Tour partners”

It turns out that a mixed media live blog is a good fit for golf and for telling the story of a tournament both inside and outside of the ropes. Bringing about a more compelling narrative that may otherwise have been missed altogether.

Golf, especially during the first couple of tournament days, has much more of a non-linear narrative than other sports with hundreds of balls, thousands of shots and, despite tens of hours of coverage a week on television, there are still many hours left uncovered on traditional channels. The ET Live Blog helps the user pick out the key nuggets of action on the course while providing colour and behind the scenes ‘vignettes’ from around the venue

So does it end there for the European Tour and their digital efforts? It appears not. There are several other initiatives to engage with fans, and not restricted to being just in English. One of the hurdles for an international federation is how you best speak to fans in their native language. In Europe this can be especially complicated but moves are being made to address that.

At the Spanish Open (15-18 May) they will be running their first native-tongue version of the live blog alongside the already established English one. Following this there are plans in place to do the same around two other events this year, the BMW International Open (in German) and the Open de France (in French).

They are also running a new competition on europeantour.com where fans will be able to choose the pin position on the 14th hole for the final round of the BMW PGA Championship. Add to that social media competitions around the star-studded Pro-Am on Wednesday 21st May and the return of their ‘Access All Areas’ video series, hosted on the website and YouTube, delivering a variety of absorbing, entertaining and exclusive content featuring the likes of defending champion Matteo Manassero and former World Long Drive Champion Joe Miller.

The BMW PGA Championship promises to be one of the most digitally active for the European Tour. Their introduction of the Live Blog is providing to be a wise investment and has opened up many more opportunities off the back of it.

And with the Ryder Cup being help in the UK later this year, there will much more to come from the European Tour then as well!

 

About author

Daniel McLaren
Daniel McLaren 820 posts

Dan is the Founder & CEO of Digital Sport. Can be found at sports industry events and heard every week on the Digital Sport Insider podcast. @DanielMcLaren

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