I set out a challenge for myself for this weekends UEFA Champions League Final. I wanted to see if I could let only the internet and social media keep me up to date with the game. The TV was in the next room, but I wasn’t going to let myself off that easy, I spent the next two hours on the computer to see if I could emmerse myself in the moment

Here are the best bits.

Twitter

I logged into Twitter, and it told me straight away what was on the tip of the tongue of the sporting world. Promotion battles from the Championship in English soccer where fairytale story side Blackpool were promoted, and also the lead up to the Champions League Final.

Twitter.com Trending Topics 

Trending Topics

Next part of call was to find out the trending topics from around the world. First worldwide, then from soccer crazy Mexico, and equally crazy London.

How do trending topics differ? 

When Diego Milito finally scored the first goal of the match, it took only 5 minutes and 15 seconds to appear as a trending topic in Sao Paulo, Brazil which was the first place in the world for it to become trending.

Goooooooalllllllllllll! 

And Milito became a worldwide trending topic, 29 minutes after the goal. Without having a global superstar playing such as Ronaldo, Messi or Rooney, it hurt the ‘trendability’ of the game as those players would have easily become a trending topic. This showed in the lack of a prominent player in Twitter’s trending topic. As you can see below, Arjen Robben from Bayern Munich without even scoring a goal, was a more popular topic worldwide than the goal scorer.

Diego Milito enters the world psyche 

There is no doubt the game also suffered in it’s lack of team star power that Manchester United, Barcelona or Real Madrid would have brought. They would have brought fans from all over the world, in particular Asia, and sent the teams trending higher. By the end of the game, region specific players began trending, like Argentine Cambiasso from Inter Milan.

Argentina is near Sao Paulo… 

Even England managed to find the only thing relevant to them in the game…referee Howard Webb.

Boo Webb 

Company Promotion

Nike were more than happy to promote their stars, Nike sponsor the Inter side on the whole, but also a few individual players.

#Hashtags for all 

Search

Finally just by a quick Twitter search, you find out what’s hot. At the end of the game, after his second goal, Milito was piping hot in Twitter searches.

20 new searches every 15 seconds after the final whistle. 

Other Social Media

Both on Facebook and SocialMention I was monitoring the action.

Tweeting about Maicon, Nike took you to Facebook. 

SocialMention.com tries to find all the mentions of your search keyword across all social media platforms as well as blogs. Here were the search results for Milito

Too much info? 

Gowalla

Yep, Gowalla rose to the occasion too, getting on board with the graphic artwork for the stadium.

Go Walla-being awesome! 

Great artwork as always by Gowalla 

Web

That old Dinosaur. I used Soccernet at ESPN to keep up to date with play by play coverage, and then took that info back to social media to get the feeling of the average punter.

Two teams, one cup. 

Shouldn’t he be in Paris? 

Two Screen Theory

There is a thought in both the TV and digital industries that viewing has now becoming a multiple-screen experience. The two screens could be a TV and a laptop, a TV and an iPhone, a TV and an iPad, a TV and a kindle, whatever it may be there are two screens in your vacinity at the same time. Formerly when you watched a live sporting event you could only have a discussion with those in your room or on the phone, with social media you are now having that discussion with the world. You are watching the game, whilst doing a tweet, blog, email, MMS, whatever takes your fancy but you are interacting with two devices at the same time.

Not a glowing reviewThis is making watching live sport without a TV much easier and a more interesting experience for the end user.

Social media does give the immediacy I was looking for, with-in seconds of his goal I had tweets and Facebook statuses telling me about it, and 5 minutes after Diego Milito scored the goal he was a trending topic in some parts of the world, which was almost immediate enough for me, I almost felt like I was there…

Obviously I could have streamed the video or audio of the game, but I wanted to remove that from the game and see if I could still get involved. I was following general banter on Twitter as well, sadly most of it was negative.

So I’m almost glad I didn’t see the game, but all in all the experience was a great experiment.