TORONTO – With the NHL’s Stanley Cup Finals underway, CBC’s Hockey Night In Canada is experimenting with social media in some unique ways.
Through a partnership with Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft and CBCSports.ca has been using Hockey Night Pulse to track fan reaction on Twitter throughout every playoff series. It also developed a partnership with entertainment social network GetGlue.com that allows fans to ‘check in’ with Hockey Night and chat with other fans as they watch the games.
Hockey Night Pulse tracks Twitter reaction to every goal, save and penalty in real time. To date, it has crunched more than 1.2 million tweets on the playoffs and come up with a list of observations such as:
– The fans more likely to complain than cheer? Buffalo Sabres;
– The quietest fans? Nashville Predators;
– Loudest fans (in both official languages)? Montreal Canadiens; and
– The Vancouver Canucks/Chicago Blackhawks series had by far the most tweets of any playoff matchups this year, with a total of 383,923.
So far, more than 62,000 Canadians have ‘checked in’ with Hockey Night in Canada via GetGlue.com, with a social media reach (on Twitter and Facebook) of more than 14 million. The feature, which debuted during the final game of the Montreal/Boston series on April 27, allows users to collect on-line custom Hockey Night In Canada stickers every time they check-in during the show’s television broadcast on CBC. Users can unlock exclusive Ron MacLean and Don Cherry stickers just in time for the Stanley Cup Final.
