By Jackie Reau, Game Day Communications

“Love the positive energy coming from the whole city for the Flying Pig Marathon. Always nice to see cincinnatians share some love. #flyingpig” -As Tweeted by “Tranje”

The 11th running of the Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon, a client of Game Day Communications, a sports and entertainment communications firm, offered the chance to launch a social media news room inside of the traditional media center.

The “Pig” as it is affectionately called drew a record number of participants, 23,943 for the Weekend’s festivities attracting runners from all 50 states and 16 countries. Last year, GDC launched a social media effort to engage runners using Twitter (RunFlyingPig) and Youtube (FlyingPigMarathon) to provide updates, fun facts and showcase the “fun” aspect of the events.

In a recent study conducted by Nielsen On-Line, the Flying Pig Marathon ranks in the Top Five of most popular key words in the on-line discussion as it relates to “Cincinnati.” (See the attached Brand Map.) Our intention was to leverage the 2009 Race to increase this ranking to #1 using popular social media platforms to increase the on-line buzz.

Here are three tips to “running” a social media news room.

Set It Up: It is vital to set up your social media news room well in advance of your big day. Your “followers” or “fans” need to feel comfortable with your style, content and distribution method. We decided to use Youtube and Twitter to connect with our “fans.” These two platforms provided us with the opportunity to show and tell about all aspects of race—all year long to encourage participation and engagement. We set up our platforms in December, some six months in advance of Race Day.

It is also important to have the proper tools to capture content and post it immediately. In our social media newsroom, we used laptops with wireless capability, flip video cameras and PDAs with photo/video capability.

Invite Guests to Join You: The Flying Pig communicates regularly with 43,500+ runners, supporters and friends of the Marathon with its e-newsletter, “The Squeal.” Leading up the Race, we sent a message on The Squeal for the 26 days with general tips to help runners have a memorable and positive experience—everything from how to get your bib number to how many restrooms are on the course. In each e-mail blast, we encouraged people to follow us on Twitter. Using Twellow.com, we invited people to follow us based on their interests. Additionally, we posted our Twitter username on popular running forums and chat rooms.

Also, we partnered with our local newspaper and web site, The Enquirer and Cincinnati.com, to encourage runners and their family/friends to follow us on Twitter and to use the hash tag: #flyingpig to make the search easier on Twitter. In advance news stories on the Marathon, the newspaper added a sidebar on how to use and follow the race on Twitter.

Post Creative Updates: Leading up to Race Day, we used Tweetdeck.com to post Tweets, monitor the conversation and to engage with runners. On Saturday and Sunday, we had a minimum of one staff member watching the conversation from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day.

We were also fortunate to have professionals volunteer to help us including Dr. Linda Schoenstedt from the College of Mt. Saint Joseph, who captured and posted all of our Sunday race videos to Youtube.

It is also important to engage with your “fans,” especially if they have time-sensitive questions. We received numerous direct messages from runners asking about everything from race results to a recommendation on a restaurant for breakfast on race day. We answered these immediately.

We posted almost 300 updates, including some 150 over race weekend using a variety of photos via Twitpic, video via 12seconds and updates via Twitter. We had just over 1,300 people following us and we were following about 2,000. This effort makes the Flying Pig Marathon the second most “tweeted” Marathon in the country after the Boston Marathon.

We also posted a total of 14 videos including footage of each of the male and female winners crossing the “Swine Line” in the full and half marathons. We will continue to monitor the views and also link them to www.flyingpigmarathon.com.

Within seconds or as fast as we could type on our PDAs, we were announcing our race winners and their unofficial times with “Tweets” and “Twitpics.” Traditionally, we would have waited until after the entire race was over to distribute the overall event press release as our first announcement of the winners.

Conclusion
We acknowledge that many social media platforms reach only a niche audience and not the masses, but wanted to integrate this communication into our traditional media efforts to engage runners and supporters of the Flying Pig Marathon.

But we immediately saw good news: On Sunday, May 3, “Flying Pig Marathon” was the #1 keyword search on Google out pacing Jack Kemp and Pittsburgh Marathon, according to Google Hot Trends (USA).