That’s the question Nike asked of their Women’s Marathon in San Francisco. Without having a phone-in-hand while running of course.
Bluewater was engaged to create this unique activation and support it on race day. To make this work our team developed a unique social automation system that allowed triggered social updates to happen.
The whole experience started with pre-registration. Racers were emailed with a link to a site where they could register and then craft social updates to be sent out on their Facebook feed as they passed through each gate.
Those messages were tied to their unique racer ID. On the day of the race, each runner is given an RFID tag. These are generally embedded into their bib, or often take the form of a small tag that’s attached to their shoelace. These tags are what capture the run times and positions. We leveraged this existing technology and tapped into the data stream. Our server would look for any participant who had pre-registered, check their gate, and release the appropriate message.
Onsite Bluewater crew deployed the temporary network, provided stations for the day of registration, and provided real-time support as required by the event organizers.