Not everyone wants to engage. For the Master’s Tournament, some just want more ways to receive.
Today, during the third round of the Masters, @The_Masters gained close to 10,000 followers on Twitter. On Thursday, followers numbered around 20,000. By Saturday evening they’d reached 37,000. So far, as would be expected, the tournament’s done nothing but issue 251 updates. And a quick look at the list of followers shows thousands of those followers have no avatar, no bio, no followers themselves and no updates. Which means the majority of them joined Twitter specifically because of the tournament. The Masters is using Twitter as a “broadcast” medium and its followers are doing the same, there for no other reason than to stay informed. Granted golf fans can be fanatical, in a quiet sort of way, but they already have access to five hours a day of broadcasts, an incredibly active website with live video and leader board, a chat feature for fans, and three active blogs. If the Masters is really smart, they’ll do something useful with and for the followers who just joined them. If, instead, the tournament (posting as an organization rather than an individual) simply disappears and doesn’t take advantage of the community they just created, it will be an awful waste. I’ll be interested to see if the good old boys at Augusta National master the new media as well as they’ve mastered the old.
OK, an update. By the end of the tournament, the Masters had 41,000 plus followers. In all likelihood this is the network handling, but a lot of brands would kill to generate this many people in four days. So, if they're smart, the folks at Augusta will: engage, ask questions, present polls, offer chances to win tickets to next year's event, conduct a trivia contest on past tournaments to identify the most loyal fan and invite him or her to Augusta for a round of golf, create customized merchandise, present offers, and perhaps figure out a way to mobilize the audience to do something for charity, perhaps for First Tee or the USGA or a caddie scholarship program. As a life long fan of the Masters and a believer in the power of social media, I'm hoping we see something positive and lasting come out of this instantly created community.
edward boches
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