The chips and dip are out, the chili’s on the stove, your TV is tuned to CBS, and friends are gathered ’round. The only addition to this year’s game are the laptops, blackberries, and iPhones (and perhaps iPads?), tuned to the hashtags #SB44 for the game-lovers and #brandbowl for those who watch for the ads.
Perhaps you’ve heard about #SB44 …the Twitter and Flickr world certainly has. The NFL announced the official hashtag of Sunday’s game as #SB44. If you visit their site, you can check out their "Tag the Super Bowl" page , where fans who are on Twitter can tag their tweets with #SB44, and those on Flickr can tag images with the same. The NFL then pulls the content into their page for people to watch live. Interesting considering the NFL bans players from tweeting during the games.
You can also tune in to #brandbowl , a site that aggregates all tweets about the ads that are tagged with #brandbowl, and then ranks the brands based on whether tweets are positive or negative, and how much buzz each is getting. You can even click to see a graph that shows how many mentions, and a word cloud that points out what popular words are associated with the brand’s tweets.
As a final note, we found this article on Mashable about how social media is changing the Superbowl . It talks about the typical buzz companies go for creating ads that are banned by CBS and buzz advertisers are creating on social media about their spots, but also about Pepsi’s interesting decision to forgo a Superbowl ad and instead spend $20 million on a social media campaign, the "Pepsi Refresh Project," which is giving away grants every month to fund popular ideas users have for how to refresh their communities. This project has already garnered more social media buzz than all other Super Bowl advertisers.
Happy Super Bowl weekend!