This week’s Harf Time segment focused on Super Bowl XLVII between the Baltimore Ravens an San Francisco 49ers.
The game was played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans and it, as well as Beyoncé's half time show, nearly broke the internet.
Beyoncé's half time show
Superstar Beyoncé performed during half time of the game and if Twitter is anything to go by, performed well. Her show generated 268,000 Tweets per minute according to USA Today.
From Facebook
Facebook published a blog that tracked all of their stats from the Super Bowl, including the fact that Beyoncé's mentions jumped an unbelievable percentage during her show.
From Twitter
Twitter released a great blog post of the Super Bowl which gave excellent insights into Tweets per minute, showing some truly astronomical numbers. Some of the highlights mentioned in the post are:
– Power outage: 231,500 Tweets per minute (TPM)
– 108-yard kickoff return for Ravens TD by Jacoby Jones: 185,000 TPM
– Clock expires; Ravens win: 183,000 TPM
– Jacoby Jones catches 56 yard pass for Ravens TD (end of 2nd quarter): 168,000 TPM
– Frank Gore TD for 49ers: 131,000 TPM
The Ads
Twitter's great Ad Scrimmage has a page where all the Super Bowl commercials can be watched and voted for by clicking on the hashtag button attached to each ad.
Until Next Week
Listen to Harf Time on Wednesdays (at 2:45pm) when Sean Callanan discuss sports digital with Daniel Harford.
Tune into Harf Time over the weekdays from 12-4pm on 1116 SEN.
Get the Sports Geek podcasts
Want to get these clips in podcast form? Subscribe here or Add to iTunes
Podcast transcription
Harf: Alright, let’s check in with Sean Callanan, our social digital media guru. You can check him out at SportsGeekHQ.com. He’s in Perth at the moment, g’day Sean.
Sean: G’day Harf, how are you doing?
Harf: Very well. What’s happening in the west?
Sean: Oh I’m just out here having a couple of workshops with the West Coast Seagulls and the Perth Wildcats, so over in sunny Perth.
Harf: You got the best job – you get to work with all the big clubs, all the big names in Australian sport. You’re outstanding.
Sean: Yeah, it does have its perks so it’s good to get around Australia and meet people IRL, in real life mate.
Harf: In real life.
Sean: You can’t all do it via Twitter, you’ve got to sometimes come out and meet the people.
Harf: Tell you what you can do via Twitter though, you could talk about the Super Bowl and tell us how good Beyoncé’s looking.
Sean: Definitely, definitely. It was a big game, and yes the highlight of the game, according to Twitter and Facebook was Beyoncé’s performance at half-time. Five and a half million tweets that were generated during half-time when Beyoncé was on stage.
Harf: Five and a half million?
Sean: Yes, five and a half million tweets, so very much, she was definitely the star of the show. It was at the conclusion of her show 268,000 tweets per minute were being fired off as she was jumping around with the Destiny’s Child reunion and everything like that. So, definitely was the talk of the show. It’ll be interesting now if she increases her tweeting, seeing as Beyoncé only has four tweets.
Harf: Four?
Sean: Four tweets. And she’s just peaked over seven million followers, so if she gets another three tweets she’ll be having one million followers per tweet.
Harf: Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.
Sean: Yeah, exactly. Interested to see if she starts using that now that everyone’s been talking about her. So the second biggest thing that happened at the Super Bowl wasn’t actually football either, it was the power outage.
Harf: Yes.
Sean: When the lights went off it made everyone talk about it, it made everyone tune in to the coverage. There was three million people watching the online stream of the Super Bowl and so that became a little bit jumpy after everyone wanted to tune in to see what was happening in the dark. And there were a few advertisers that sort of jumped on, no better than Oreo. Did you see Oreo’s tweet during the Super Bowl?
Harf: No I didn’t, I was on air at the time so I was having a bit of trouble following the Twitter action. I was trying to concentrate on my job to be honest with you. What did they say?
Sean: Well, they sent out a tweet about ten minutes after the power out went out and they said “Power out no problem, you can still dunk in the dark” with a little bit of a picture of the Oreo lighting up the picture, so it got over 16,000 re-tweets. So it was probably more effective than the ad that they paid 3 million for, just by getting that tweet right at the right time and being able to latch onto all these people sitting there for half an hour not knowing what to do, everyone turned to Twitter to find out what was happening.
Harf: Nice. Nice work. What about from a game point of view, what was the most talked about incident and moment from the actual game from the Super Bowl?
Sean: It was definitely Jones’ 108 yard kick-off return. That peaked at 185 tweets a minute, and then just behind it was when the clock expired, 183,000 tweets per minute when the Ravens won. So, you know, everyone was pretty much shouting and tweeting along with the game. CBS had, like I said, three million people tuning in to their stream. And it was pretty good that the quality was there. They even had a fan-generated camera, which the fans decided where it went. And half way through the second quarter when the 49ers were looking down the barrel and Kaepernick wasn’t playing as well as he had in previous games, the fans decided that they wanted to watch the back-up quarterback for the 49ers Alex Smith, just to see how he was squirming watching the game slip away. So, you know, so for five minutes they just had the fan-cam on the back-up quarterback watching from the sidelines. So, you know, that’s watching a train-wreck to a certain degree but that’s what the fans wanted and CBS responded.
Then the other part of the Super Bowl is the ads, which are always a big draw from the point of view of the fans. If you haven’t seen the ads they’re all now over YouTube and the like. Twitter actually set up a page, adscrimmage.twitter.com where all the ads are on, and you can go and watch them, you can vote which ones the favourite one. Twitter definitely won from a social advertising point of view, with over half the ads either mentioning a Twitter handle or mentioning a hash-tag for people to talk about it, which was a big jump compared to Facebook last year. So, from an advertising point of view the winner went to Twitter with twenty-six mentions compared to four mentions from a Facebook point of view.Harf: http://adscrimmage.twitter.com is the place to check out those ads if you want to get a chance, so thank you mate, appreciate your company this afternoon. See you back in the studio next week.