Will There Be An Indy 500 Social Media Command Center
One of the biggest months of the year is coming up in Indianapolis. It’s time for the Indy 500 which is going to have events throughout May happening in the city. I’m wondering if anyone with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway or IndyCar is going to step up to the plate and have a social media command center like that which was available for Super Bowl XLVI.
I think it was pretty well proven how effective and useful a resource like that can be for a large event with lots of attendees.
I believe setting up a permanent command center that could be used for a variety of events would be a good move for the city. Perhaps it could be run by a not-for-profit organization that would be in charge of organizing the staffing, obtaining the resources and managing the space for future events.
What if, as part of any large convention that came to town, the city had this offering of setting up a command center to monitor the social media airwaves and Internet to handle questions, disseminate information and promote the event and the city?
Sounds to me like a great plan! Who’s in?
The Winner of Social Media Bowl II
I’ll say that the first Social Media Bowl in coordination with the Super Bowl took place in Dallas for last year’s event. Indianapolis definitely upped the ante in that department with all of their efforts and the help of the #Social46 team. I believe we won, don’t you?
Here’s an infographic that ExactTarget put together that gathers some information about the social media activity that happened more as an event and not directly tied to the efforts of Indianapolis. I would be curious as to how the Indianapolis stats would have played into this graphic.
This infographic is brought to you by ExactTarget a leader in Email Marketing, and Social Media Marketing.
Indianapolis Ranks 44th Among List of Socially Connected Cities
In a recent link shared by Patric Welch of Noobie on Facebook, I discovered that Indianapolis is perhaps not quite as connected as I would have thought compared to other US cities. Indianapolis ranked 44th among Top 100 Socially Networked Cities in the U.S.
Is ranking 44th on the list a surprise to you?
Other cities of note to give you an idea include:
- Washington, DC – #1
- Orlando, FL – #7
- Austin, TX – #8
- Cincinnati, OH – #11
- Las Vegas, NV – #25
- Nashville, TN – #32
- Los Angeles, CA – #33
- Chicago, IL – #39
- New York City, NY – #53
Austin doesn’t surprise me too much as their the home of SXSW every year, perhaps a little lower than I expected. But I guess it shouldn’t count if everyone just connects in your city for a short period of time. With the music industry in Nashville and so many bands and musicians using social media and “networking”, I’d think Nashville would have ranked a little higher than #32.
Our friend Dr. Thomas Ho is doing what he can to further connect the city of Orlando like he did while he was living in Indianapolis, but they’re doing pretty well at #7.
Indianapolis has our tweetups, Smaller Indiana, and of course Blog Indiana. But are they doing what we need? Perhaps you’re asking yourself “Well, how did they measure the cities?” Good question!
It was a combination of determining the amount of people using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter per capita. Then they also added online advertising traffic from sites like MySpace, Friendster, Reddit and Digg. Is that enough? What better ways could they have used?
Regardless of how they ranked Indianapolis, what do you think we should do to try and improve our position? Should we worry about it at all?
