Some leftover Super Bowl (actually Twitter Bowl) business

Last night I addressed some of the @superbowlads issues, including both Twitter's ability to handle the Super Bowl load and my contributions to the @superbowlads feed. However, I got so caught up in Ulrich Schnauss' "Blumenwiese Neben Autobahn" (I even posted the GMC Yukon Hybrid video on my MySpace blog) that I never got around to talk about other reactions to @superbowlads.

Let's start with Jeremiah Owyang, who pulled the whole @superbowlads thing together. First, he had a comment about the game itself:

I’m sure my many colleagues at Forrester (Cambridge, near Boston) are throwing fits, but you’ve got to hand it to all the players that was seriously a great game.

Next, Owyang talked about the quantity of responses:

The social media experiment went very well, there are over 2500 responses to the superbowlads account....

It was pretty amazing, every time I refreshed the search tools (terraminds or twittersearch), new responses would appear in rapid order. There were so many responses coming in, (about 625 per hour, or 10 every minute) it was really hard to keep track. I tried to summarize key findings (such as many folks liking X commercial or hating Y commercial), but it became difficult to track.

In the midst of all the madness, Owyang took the time to send this tweet my way:

@oemperor it's overwhelming the amount of data coming in, every time I refresh, the page moves down.

Heck, I couldn't even rate all of the commercials - I was in the middle of tweeting about a commercial and completely missed the Dell commercial, for example.

Owyang also commented on Kingman's - I mean Twitter's - performance:

The twitter application held up ok, although many of the replies did not show up on the replies page in real time, you could use the search tools to quickly see what folks were saying.

Meanwhile, Shashi Bellamkonda also shared his thoughts:

Such data is huge for marketers to judge audience reaction. What are the reactions the ads caused? I am sure the demographics of the audience , geographical location , viewpoints were varied and a treasure trove for market research. The only common factor is that the audience consists of Swimmers as Jeremiah Owyang calls early adopters.

Imagine if a market research company had attempted this by inviting people of similar profiles as the Twitter community to watch it in a place there they could instantly get the reaction. Now they just have to search Twitter and analyze this data.

And Jeff Pulver also shared:

I enjoyed "watching" the non-stop play-by-play commentary being shared by my friends on twitter. And if someone wasn't commenting on a play they just saw or a catch that was or wasn't made, friends were also sharing their immediate reactions when each of the Super Bowl ads aired.

But Pulver was thinking about the future:

I wonder how long it will be before broadcasters adopt an active social media strategy and discover ways to make their broadcasts both more interactive and a more intimate conversation.

Sometime during 2008 I wouldn't be surprised to learn when sports broadcasters create a twitter public timeline for an event and share with the public some of the active commentary being shared by passionate fans of the game.

I don't know if Pulver was aware of the NCAA's restrictions on blogging sporting events. There might be significant resistance to such a loss of control. All we need is for one tweeter to tweet something like

troy aikman just said that the redskins are the dominant team here

Recognize the red flag? Someone just engaged in unauthorized use of the descriptions or accounts of the game. League and network lawyers would be all over that.

But wait - it gets worse.

i'm at shepherd of the hills church for a big screen super bowl party

That would really cause controversy.

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