BBC Sport at Social Media Week
Social Media Week, an annual event which takes place in nine global cities, took place this week, and the BBC took part in several sessions during the London leg.
BBC Sport played its part on Wednesday 9 February. There was a two-hour session in London, the first hour of which discussed sport and social media, with the second hour focusing in on the London 2012 Olympics and the part social media will play in the BBC's coverage.
Test Match Special producer Adam Mountford opened the batting (that was his line, by the way!) in the first hour, discussing the way the TMS team used social media during the recent Ashes series in Australia. The Rugby Football Union was next up, followed by the first social media London derby as Arsenal and Chelsea new media leads battled it out for the approval of an industry audience.
In the second hour, the BBC's Director of 2012, Roger Mosey, was kind enough to chair a session which featured BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, former world swimming champion and current BBC 5 Live pundit Karen Pickering, Beijing Olympics 100m finalist and 2012 hopeful Jeanette Kwakye and myself as BBC Sport website editor and social media lead.
It was very well-received by those in the audience and watching online. The hashtag #smwldn_sport trended in the London area on the night and there was lots of discussion about the event on Twitter.
If you missed it, you can re-live the whole evening here. Adam is first up, and then later, the BBC-hosted session is at 1hr 8m 30s.
If you have any questions about the way BBC Sport uses social media you can leave comments on this blog or tweet me anytime @LewisWiltshire.
Comment number 1.
At 18:21 11th Feb 2011, Gerrardswhiskers-bring back 606 wrote:Well its fairly obvious what most of the comments are going to be about in here. Basically the demise of 606 the most popular and number 1 sport forum in the UK is being slowly wound up on the way to it being closed down permanently. I sincerely hope that one of the discussion pieces title is 'Filling the gap, from forum led user submitted content to social media content', subtitle-the weaknesses of twitter. Just have a look at any of the live match streams recently to see how so few twitter comments are getting posted and those that are are by Rio Ferdinand. Many people are just not interested in Twitter and I think the decision to close 606 is going to see numbers of hits on the bbc sports pages drop massively over the next year. Hope I am wrong as don't want to see all those journos out of work.
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Comment number 2.
At 20:25 11th Feb 2011, Aarfy_Aardvark - bring back 606 wrote:Twitter has basically led to lazy journalism. Surely anything that requires you to write within a 140 character limit is simply not worth re
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Comment number 3.
At 22:39 11th Feb 2011, m1ke1976 wrote:twitter is the devil
Long live 606.
To be honest I think each has its place, but in no way can twitter even come close to replacing 606.
You only have to look at last weekends live web coverage on this site for premier league, always used to be 606 link from the main page, there wasn't but the ad hoc one created on sunday still generated more than 350 comments, not to mention the unspoken people that read 606 but dont comment.
I'm all for social media but twitter replacing 606 is a farce!!
Minor rant over
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Comment number 4.
At 00:01 12th Feb 2011, Breaking news wrote:Does 606 count as 'social media'? I think it does. Very popular and yet the BBC is closing it down; apparently it is a "threat to the private sector". Ridiculous!!
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