Indiana Athletics Pumps Sounds of the Game into Facebook

Could you imagine if you went to a game and it was completely silent? If you were forced to treat a basketball or football game the same way our culture treats a golf match? Complete silence while the action happens? Naturally, we'd lose something, right? And I'd argue that is one of if not the biggest thing one misses by not being there, in person, to experience a big game.

It's also one of the most powerful takeaways a school can leave a recruit -- letting him or her experience what it's like on gameday in your stadium. Now what if you could bring this into Facebook, where you'll get more access to fans and recruits, after every matchup?

Indiana University puts us on that path. Let's start out on the Indiana Athletics Facebook Page, here, and shown below...




You'll see that first post on the image above, for Sounds of the Game, which I'll zoom into below. Side note - have you ever seen a longer sponsorship line? ("The Indiana Criminal Justice Institute's Traffic Safety Division's Sounds of the Game?") Wow. We'll get to that in a minute...


It's pretty easy to share this content, simply by clicking on the musical share button... Making this very scalable.




Most importantly, the content is fresh. It's tough to embed audio in a blog (or at least too tough for me), but it's worth checking out. You get a nice mix of IU announcers, bands, and crowd. Check it out by clicking here. Definitely does a great job of giving access to what the game felt like -- which by its nature brings emotions into the mix!

So given all this, how could we make it better? First, as aforementioned, I'd shorten that sponsorship line. Or take it out altogether in the post. While the audio content is packed with emotion, the post itself isn't and when we're trying to bring fans in, we can't forget said emotion! It's important that the copy keeps the focus on the team, not on the sponsor.

Then, what if we could actually release these in game, to draw more people into following the game? (What if we dropped an audio file at half time?) There's opportunity for a monstrous impact by mixing time and emotion!

I'll be back Monday with more best practices. Feel free to follow along via Facebook (here) or Twitter (I'm @andypawlowski, here)

Thanks.

Andy