The Baltimore Ravens are gearing up for the division rival Pittsburgh Steelers! The Ravens must put a tough loss to the Colts behind them and focus on beating the Steelers this Sunday to keep their playoff hopes alive. Both teams will enter Sunday night's game still in the hunt for the playoffs. To help fans enjoy an enhanced football experience, R2integrated (R2i), a leading Internet marketing and technology company, in partnership with WMAR-TV, announced that the virtual brouhaha surrounding the Ravens-Steelers game will be captured and displayed at ABC2news.com via the social media platform, R2iSMASH.
Site located here: http://abc2news.com/ravens
Created by R2i, R2iSMASH drives interactivity around specific events, campaigns, or initiatives by combining feeds from popular social networking sites into one window. The R2iSMASH site for the Baltimore-Pittsburgh football game will collect fan-generated Tweets, texts, Flickr and cell phone photos, and blogs—all simultaneously, yielding a real-time gallery of content, commentary, and general trash-talk.
“Social media is changing the way sports such as football are consumed by enabling the Monday morning quarterback to share their game-time thoughts, emotions, and situations with others online as they happen,” said Matt Goddard, CEO, R2i. “R2iSMASH technology gathers these experiences from different sources on the Web and packages them for presentation, creating a compelling parallel view to the game itself.”
The R2iSMASH Ravens-Steelers site works by automatically aggregating content from Twitter and Flickr where either team is mentioned. Fans can actively contribute to R2iSMASH by sending text messages or e-mails to ravens@r2ismash.com or steelers@r2ismash.com or by including #ravens or #steelers in their Tweets. Fans with mobile devices can send photos to ravens@r2ismash.com or steelers@r2ismash.com or tag their photos in Flickr with “NFL Ravens” or “NFL Steelers.” Additionally, all content garnered by the site will be archived for instant replay.
“ABC2 News is excited to partner with R2i and bring this technology to our viewers. This is another example of how abc2news.com delivers the area’s most innovative new media coverage to Baltimore,” said ABC2, WMAR-TV’s director of new media, Dustin Wadsworth.
R2iSMASH was designed to help organizations effectively leverage social media to promote and add value to their critical initiatives. While other social media solutions require costly, time-consuming custom development, the R2iSMASH platform is proven and can be deployed in minutes. Once deployed, it requires no maintenance, and any needed changes to style or substance can be easily made.
Early this year, R2i—which has seen a 50 percent growth in revenue since 2008—deployed R2iSMASH sites to showcase the Under Armour Baltimore Marathon, the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation, and the Michael Jackson Tribute. Combined, the three sites aggregated more than 300,000 Tweets and texts feeds, and more than 5,250 photos.