Alabama wide receiver Calvin Ridley tapes a #LockedIn video segment for Twitter. (Courtesy of Twitter)
Twitter’s sports team is extending beyond conversation curation and delving into content creation during the college football national championship game between Alabama and Georgia with new video features and, yes, an emoji trophy that will exist both in hashtags and as a physical take-home object for the winner.
Wanting to prolong the shelf life of its temporal emoji activations — #RollTide and #GoDawgs prompt the insertion of Bama’s styled A and Georgia’s G logo, respectively — Twitter is awarding is own national title trophy that will be personalized for the winner and will be triggered by those hashtags for a full year rather than just the duration of the playoffs.
“We wanted something that was more of a keepsake and something that could not only live on its own on the field during the celebration but can go back to campus and represent the year that they had on the field and also on Twitter,” said David Herman, an associate partnerships manager for sports at Twitter.
Twitter expects to roll out such trophies for all major pro and college sporting champions starting with Monday night. Social media producers can already envision fun uses for such a creation.
“We probably will have a little more fun with that one than we would with the actual national championship trophy, should we bring that back to Athens,” said Georgia’s Jen Galas, the university’s associate director of digital services.
“To have not only bragging rights and everything online but also have a physical trophy, I think it’s a great idea. I know our fans would like to see it. I think it shows a little bit of playfulness, which I think is really important in showing some of the not-so-serious side of things.”
Galas said Georgia will be deploying a team of about a dozen student assistants and university partners to convey reactions and experiences over social media before, during and after the title game. She favors those “immediate, less-polished reactions” over those that are “slick and produced.” Of course, anyone who wields a smartphone can contribute: Galas said her best friend’s father shared photos from the Rose Bowl parade that she later posted.
In addition to those more typical social media production, Twitter will be placing its own team on the sidelines of Mercedes-Benz Stadium to help produce real-time content. That material will be posted directly by Twitter as well as its partners at the College Football Playoff and the participating schools.
“We want @TwitterSports to have a presence at games like these,” Herman said. “It’s a little bit of an experiment in some ways. It’s the first big sporting event we’ve done in that capacity, so in partnership with our brand marketing team, we’re excited to use this as an example, a test case, to see how we can refine and retool to provide the most value for not only the partners that we work with but also the user base of both those partners and our followers of Twitter Sports.”
Twitter also had a presence at Saturday’s media day, constructing a set of faux lockers near the press conference podium for Alabama and Georgia players to record a video short series called #LockedIn. The player sits, staring at his phone while tweets from his athletic journey flash across the screen — the premise is show his focus amidst the noise, conversation and distraction leading up to the NCAA championship.
Twitter’s Herman said he works all year with partner schools and franchises in the NBA, NFL and in college basketball and football to help drive more conversation to a wider audience. The title game represents a more proactive role than at previous showcase events and games.
And sometimes — such as with Georgia’s 54-48 double-overtime Rose Bowl victory over Oklahoma — the game itself needs no help.
“It’s pure unadulterated emotion,” Galas said. “It’s what makes college sports special.”
