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On October 9th 2010 I sat in the waiting area of the dreaded NCT building in Deansgrange. I was pencilled in for a for 13:40 analysis of my little blue car. Meanwhile a couple of Kilometres down the Rock Road, a not so little blue outfit were about to entertain Racing Metro in the opening round of the 2010/2011 Heineken cup at the RDS.

I bubbled in anger at myself for booking the NCT without doing the relative background check weeks in advance and any effort to find a way out resulted unfavourably. So there I sat, just as my adoring Leinster team were due to kick off. Thankfully my iPhone was close to hand. Contained in my iPhone was the ‘Sky sports mobile TV’ app. It was going to eat up my data usage but I didn’t care.

Fast forward to present day. Yesterday evening I was stuck in traffic en route home. As is customary in my automobile, Newstalk is the station of choice and in particular The Right Hook. George had with him, Owen Connolly of the Connolly institute and their topic circled around the use of smartphones and how they are ruining people’s lives. Let me refer yesterday’s gentlemen to my preceding paragraphs.

Not that the two of them hadn’t some positive comments to make about the use of these smartphones, (all discussions need pros and cons) but it got me thinking.

In the impending light of a weekend littered with sport, I am even more appreciative of my smartphone than ever before. Yes this is largely an opinion piece (I encourage you all to comment at the end) but I will aim to shed insight into the ever-trusting world of the smartphone and its assistance in sports reporting no matter your location.
If you are devout enough to your calling, be it sport, current affairs, fashion etc. the continued churning out of these apps will appeal to you. They make for faster delivery times and greater engagement. Engagement is inevitable, resistance is futile.

 
It’s not just rugby that amasses a huge following on social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Unless you were living under a rock last weekend, you may have heard the term #tebowtime… If you’re unfamiliar Tebow refers to Tim Tebow, the Quarterback for the Denver Broncos and last weekend during the massively popular NFL playoffs, he was responsible for this:

https://twitter.com/#!/TWITTER

Twitter reported that the pass thrown by Tim that won the Denver Broncos a place in the next round of the NFL accounted for the highest amount of tweets per second in a sports game at 9,420. I wouldn’t mind but Timmy’s cult following has really come from nowhere as he is an average quarter back.
As news broke today at 11:55, on who Leinster had chosen to take on Glasgow in this weekend’s Heineken cup, the graph below shows the spike that took place in the hours before the announcement:

http://analytics.topsy.com/

The conclusion is that when accessibility is an issue, social media plays its part. Dubbed once the ‘hub of Irish rugby’, the closure of Totalrugby saw an outcry from people who relied greatly on their Facebook and Twitter updates. During Rugby World Cup 2011, in which many of the games aired during office hours, the requests for coverage filtered in daily, lending credence to the above statement.

Emerald rugby, the prominent Irish rugby magazine protested the closure and people followed:

 

Noted for its timely news updates and speediness in rugby news delivery, rugbydump.com has amassed a following of 155,504 Facebook followers. This figure is double that of the official Leinster rugby Facebook (66,000).

 

https://www.facebook.com/rugbydump

The reason for this is purely based on news and their knack for good video editing. The fact that an official franchise page falls well behind that of a ‘fan page’ that started up just six years ago in 2006, is tribute enough. This figure points to an average following of 25,000 fans a year. This is a huge figure for a website and Facebook page that doesn’t sell anything.
Twitter has become the bedrock for breaking news and many will turn their attention to the phone before they will the TV or radio.
The following is an infographic that surveyed 3000 people in November 2011:

 

http://img.scoop.it/8i8oJE1DOFB83UIqisKDijl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ

From it we can see that as a sports fan (for the most part) you own a smartphone.

Chances are your smart phone will have a section that will look just like mine:

 

No matter where I am, I can get a result, see a score live or in replay, read the analysis and then go on to chat with like-minded people about it.

In fairness, George Hook and his guest speaker did strike a chord in one area of their analysis. They mentioned how people are becoming addicted to their phones and to be honest, with the availability of not just news, views and opinions but actual live sport on your phone, who wouldn’t be?
The following is a graph that illustrates the increase in mobile app usage rather than that of web use, unfortunately it doesn’t narrow those findings down to sport related apps but you get the picture:

http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
 

What are your thoughts on this post? Leave a comment below.