The State of Origin is undoubtedly Australia’s greatest sporting rivalry. Each year the best in NRL meet with the backing of their huge fan bases, ready to barrack for their team. Dressed in blue or maroon, donning face pant, wigs, ten of thousands of fans turn up to each game with millions more watching from home.
In June of 2013 the NRL wanted to centralize the conversation around State of Origin and expand it. They wanted to give their audience a way to connect with the action as it happened and give them the tools to talk about it with their own networks.
Mission Control is a social media command center. Within Mission Control we could create, respond, prioritize and enhance the conversation across the social web, with a range of tools that allowed us to interact in real time.
Innovating the use of social listening and creating the most advanced real-time response unit that has been used in Australia yet.
Our team was separated into three parts; catchers, designers and publishers. Catchers listened to the social web, looking for conversations and prioritizing them based on their influence, the reach of conversation and the buzz behind the conversation.
They would then work with the designers to create unique, personalized content based on the conversation and the game as it happened. This content was created in real time from a pool of thousands of prefabricated content parts, which could be assembled at high speeds.
This content was then published to the open social web, encouraging users to share and engage with the conversation.
The results were clear. Mission control lifted engagement with online conversation through the roof. Year on year, we amassed a 617% increase in engagement, extending the reach of their Facebook channels well beyond anything previously achieved by the NRL. The highest reaching post during the event went to 740K unique users through the Queensland Maroon page, an amazing viral reach that extend 1.68 times the size of the pages fans. Just after the first game the NSW Blues page had reached 2.1 million unique users for the week, nearly half of the record breaking TV viewership, just through a single page's content.
The official hashtag #origin trended, not just in Australia but worldwide, receiving comments from the United Kingdom, the USA and even as far a field as Jamaica and Fiji. This was an amazing result for a sporting event that took place in a country with a population smaller than Texas.
We also added over 96,415 fans to the three official State of Origin Facebook pages and created over 1 million interactions between fans and content created through Mission Control. Mission Control content even created over 1.8 billion impressions across the social web, a huge impact for a game played between two states.
Even Facebook were impressed. Facebook Australia's Nick Bowditch said: “At Facebook, we were really excited to be part of the NRL's Mission Control Room. It is one of the most impressive integrations of social platforms that I have seen. “Mission Control. Mission Control content even created over 1.8 billion impressions across the social web, a huge impact for a game played between two states.
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