Forget who put a hole-in-one on Colonial’s famous #13 – the real hole-in-one is the technology surrounding the tournament. For years, the PGA tour and its partners have focused on leveraging technology to enhance the experience for spectators, whether on the course or on the couch. This year features even more offerings, like player updates via Twitter and Facebook and video posts on YouTube. Here’s a quick recap of the technology-packed tournament for one of the world’s oldest sports.
shot tracker
Golf fans are an information-hungry bunch who demand the latest scores and stats on things like yards covered, greens in regulation, longest drive, and putting accuracy. Using global positioning technology, laser triangulation, and dozens of volunteers who follow each player, the PGA Shot Tracker system provides a wealth of valuable information about every player in every tournament on every hole. A sleek presentation makes the Shot Tracker perfect for the office fan or couch surfer keeping track of the performance of their favorite players.
Social networks – Facebook and Twitter
While the Shot Tracker and Fanzone remain the online meeting place for PGA fans around the world, the PGA is expanding into social media to further engage its existing fans and expand its reach to a new audience. . The PGA can now be found on Facebook, where they post interesting facts about tournament news, player performance, and post photos and video links every day of tournament competition. Leveraging Facebook exposes the PGA to an estimated 200 million Facebook members, some who already know and love the PGA tour, others who are being exposed to it for the first time. Twitter, the microblogging site that instantly distributes little text messages (called tweets) to fans and the smash hit of 2009, is now tweeting PGA updates with short messages like “Singh now leads at Colonial” to fans’ cell phones. fans.
YouTube and podcasts
The PGA Tour is also leveraging already popular technologies like YouTube to post daily video highlights of tournament action and post podcasts (small audio files to listen to on iPods and PCs) on its PGATour.com website, iTunes, and other media outlets. communication.
PGATour.com, widgets and email updates
Finally, the PGATour.com website provides widgets, daily email updates, and audio and video news about the tournaments. Widgets are small “boxes” that can be embedded in websites or blogs and provide real-time tournament data in a compact format.
Information on the go with mobile versions
Now it is possible to get all the above mentioned solutions available in the palm of your hand through your internet enabled cell phone. Especially popular for mobile phones are Facebook, Twitter and the PGA Tour mobile website found at http://mobile.pgatour.com. Fans on the go or on the field will appreciate access to stats, schedules, player information, scores, and news. Ironically, as PGA fans continue to flock to mobile websites for information, possession of a cell phone on the course at a PGA tournament is grounds for elimination.
Keep fans engaged
Tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube keep PGA fans engaged. Fans follow their favorite players and truly become part of the PGA community, allowing the PGA Tour to extend its brand and offer advertising opportunities to sponsors. But it’s not just about advertising dollars. Clients are now more demanding and want more than just the main event experience – they want a multi-dimensional immersion into the action of the event, including web, mobile, social media and audio/video options.