A few weeks ago, we let you know about one of our most exciting new Multiply installations – College Hockey Rewards – the social action platform for the NCAA’s 2012 Frozen Four. Today, we are thrilled to share some of the impressive results of the game!
Going into this project, we knew that college hockey fans were some of the most passionate fans out there, so our objective was to harness that passion to:
- Generate unprecedented buzz about the Frozen Four on social media, in a way that was fully measurable at the aggregate and individual fan level
- Reward the most active and engaged fans for the actions they took to spread buzz about the 2012 Frozen Four online
To achieve these goals, we built collegehockeyrewards.com – the first comprehensive social media rewards program designed specifically for a single major national sporting event. Collegehockeyrewards.com was launched a few days before the 2012 Frozen Four selection show aired live on ESPNU. In the days leading up to the selection show, College Hockey Rewards members could share on Facebook that they were going to watch the event. Doing so would earn them points and the “Selection Show” badge. Once the Frozen Four teams earned their spot in the tournament, we moved quickly to coordinate the efforts of College Hockey
Rewards with the digital teams at Boston College, the University of Minnesota, Ferris State and Union College. New badges were created for fans of each team, who could unlock their team’s badge by sharing with their friends that they were supporting their respective team on collegehockeyrewards.com.
Once fans hit the ground in Tampa, they were greeted with a video of Tampa Bay Lightning Alternate Captain and Frozen Four alum Marty St. Louis personally welcoming them to Tampa Bay and the Frozen Four when they checked-in to Tampa International Airport on foursquare.
On the ground, fans earned points for checking in to their team’s headquarters, taking photos with the Hobey Baker and National Championship trophies and of course tweeting about their experience with #FrozenFour.
As fans racked up points on collegehockeyrewards.com, they earned 2012 Frozen Four memorabilia which they were able to claim outside the event at a College Hockey Rewards booth. Attendees saw College Hockey Rewards members getting incredible rewards and they were curious about how they, too, could earn rewards. We saw a significant number of fans sign-up for the site at the event via our Multiply mobile sign-up page. It was great to see fans instantly being engaged and taking action to promote the 2012 Frozen Four amongst their friends back home.
During the three week campaign, a total of 4,492 #FrozenFour tweets and retweets of the official @NCAAIceHockey Twitter account were posted by members of College Hockey Rewards. These tweets led the way to more than 31,000 #FrozenFour tweets during the tournament. College Hockey Rewards members shared 521 pieces of Frozen Four content on Facebook to 88,261 unique friends, gaining a potential 237,576 impressions. Perhaps the most compelling metric of engagement was the fact that the 619 members of CollegeHockeyRewards.com took an average of 21 actions on the site! That’s an incredibly deep level of engagement with fans that most organizations only dream to see in such a short period of time.
By all accounts, College Hockey Rewards was a huge success, taking the passion of sports fans and turning their passion into action on behalf of the innovative partners behind this project – Tampa Bay Sports Commission, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and Tampa Bay & Company.
Below is a full case study on Multiply for the 2012 Frozen Four. Feel free to download and share with your friends! And if you’re interested in scheduling a time to chat about how your organization might be able to leverage the Multiply platform, contact us here.
Multiply: Engaging College Hockey Fans for the 2012 Frozen Four
