Well it was fun to see AFL fans from Collingwood & Essendon join in the foursquare fun at the MCG to get the Swarm badge for #anzacswarm.

#anzacswarm success

A few takeaways from this experience.

1. It's a new world and it's shows that social media is a small but developing market.  With 90,070 fans in attendance at the G the goal was to get 50 people checking in represented less than 1% of the crowd using foursquare.  It shows that fans currently using foursquare are early adopters that have embraced the technology, they are needed to create momentum for a social network.  It is also interesting to note that the Geelong Vs Carlton game registered over 30 check-ins on Monday so I expect the swarm badge to be a regular occurrence at many sports events by the end of the year.

2. Sports is a great connector, I'm sure others were keeping a close eye on the numbers as we got closer to the magic number 50. It's a great way to find sports fans.

3. Great social media publicity for the event as the swarm badge was activated many Melbourne based twitter streams & Facebook news would have been flooded with messages like this.

Activating the swarm badge was a small success in showing how social media can enhance the sports experience as well as how it can connect like-minded sports fans.  As I stated in my last post, “Connected & active fans are the most valuable online fans as they give sports team the ability to crowd source your promotions with retweets or likes.”

Not on Foursquare yet? Get on board, here's how. I'm looking forward to this week's Row Show looking at the NJ Nets case study with Gowalla & Vanyermedia,