Background: The State of Origin is one of Australia’s greatest sporting rivalries. Each year, the best in NRL meet with the backing of their huge fan bases, ready to barrack for their team. Dressed in blue (for the state of NSW) or maroon (for the state of QLD), ten of thousands of fans turn up to each game with millions more watching from home.
Brief: In June of 2013 the NRL wanted to centralize the conversation around State of Origin and expand it. They wanted to give their audience a way to connect with the action as it happened and give them the tools to talk about it with their own networks. 'Mission Control’ became the social media command centre both at the NSW & QLD based games. Within Mission Control we created, responded, prioritised and enhanced the conversation across the social web, with a range of tools that allowed us to interact in real time. Teams were separated into three parts; catchers, designers and publishers. Catchers listened to the social web, looking for key conversation topics and prioritizing them based on their influence, the reach of the conversation and the buzz behind the conversation. They would then work with the designers to create unique, personalized content based on the conversation and the game as it happened. This content was created in real time from a suite of thousands of prefabricated content parts, which could be assembled at high speeds. This content was then published to the open social web, encouraging users to share and engage with the conversation.
Challenge: I had 2 weeks and a AU$100K budget in the first year (when I worked on it in 2013) to create the entire content template library, set up the Mission Control rooms in 2 states (including setting up a new internet connection for the room specifically on the side of a stadium in one case), event manage the Mission Control nights (i.e. bump-ins and outs at the stadiums), manage logistics (for example fly and put up in hotels a team of 20+ people for the QLD game for the second game with less than a week notice) and research and allocate programs to utilise for keyword searching on game night for the events. I had to be a project manager, event manager and account manager all at the same time.
Results: Year on year, they have amassed:
- 617% increase in engagement, extending the reach of their Facebook channels well beyond anything previously achieved by the NRL before 2013.
- The highest reaching post during the event went to 740K unique users through the QLD Maroon page, an amazing viral reach that extends 1.68 times the size of the pages fans.
- Just after the first game the NSW Blues page had reached 2.1 million unique users for the week, nearly half of the record-breaking TV viewership, just through a single page's content.
- The official hashtag #origin trended, not just in Australia but worldwide, receiving comments from the United Kingdom, the USA and even as far a field as Jamaica and Fiji.
- Adding over 96,415 fans to the 3 official State of Origin Facebook pages and created over 1 million interactions between fans and content created through Mission Control.
- Mission Control content created over 1.8 billion impressions across the social web, a huge impact for a game played between two states.