About this time last year, I wrote about my experience leading the social media efforts for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. I took on a similar role plus some more for the 2011 conference, which took place last weekend.
The conference kicked off with a Malcolm Gladwell moderated panel that discussed developing the modern athlete and began with research from Gladwell’s book Outliers on how it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach world-class status in sports and other cognitively complex activities. The conference quickly began to spill groundbreaking research, including Tobias Moskowitz’s presentation that declared that home field advantage is a result of fan’s influence on referees. There was tons of information to be pushed out in real time, and social media was a great tool to do it.
2010 was our first organized effort at integrating social media into the conference. Thousands of people posted to our conference Twitter hashtag, #ssac, and thousands followed our Twitter and Facebook accounts. One highlight was our hashtag becoming a “trending topic” in Boston.
For 2011, first year MBAs Mike Shafrir and Mike Chen joined the social media team and we coordinated an even more thorough approach including visualizations and displays showing and encouraging Twitter activity. The result… a flood of activity during the conference. We were one of the Top 10 trending topics in the world… even ahead of Charlie Sheen and #winning! It was rewarding to see an article published by BostInnovation titled “Why MIT’s Dorkapalooza Was the #10 Trending Topic on Twitter”. I guess we’ve come to embrace the conference’s Dorkapalooza nickname :) It will be exciting to see how the 1st years take the conference even further next year, especially with social media under Mike Shafrir’s direction.
In addition to Social Media, I also took on the role of directing photography and video efforts. I coordinated with our event photographer, with the ESPN film crews, and spent the majority of the time filming for a short video with a couple of other Sloan MBAs, Matt Lieber and Tyler Spaulding. Matt brought his NPR experience and did an amazing job directing people and Tyler did an awesome job interviewing the conference elite, including Mark Cuban (Owner, Dallas Mavericks), Michael Wilbon (ESPN Analyst), Apolo Ohno (Olympic Speed Skater), Dell Harris (Former NBA Head Coach), Mike Leach (Former Texas Tech Football Coach), and of course conference co-chairs Jessica Gelman (VP, New England Patriots) and Daryl Morey (GM, Houston Rockets). So stay tuned, and I’ll post our video on the Sports Stats Hall of Fame as soon as we finish editing!
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