Yesterday Rowing New Zealand finished up 8 days of hosting the 2010 World Rowing Championships at Lake Karapiro for the first time in over thirty years. It was a pretty memorable occasion as it was also the first time New Zealand had qualified for a men’s and women’s eight since 2007, and the event drew over 60,000 volunteers, spectators and athletes – the biggest crowd ever documented for a World Rowing Championships!
Due to much of my work this year being affiliated with The New Zealand Gynaecological Cancer Foundation and their ambassador Fiona Paterson (double sculls rower), I noticed a lot of activity online around promoting the event well up to and now still afterward and I was very impressed.
My newsfeed on Facebook was updated very regularly by the official championships Facebook Page, which has over 8,000 fans. Some of their content included live updates of what matches were taking place and the winners, diary-style videos from some of the Kiwi and overseas competitors, and summary broadcasts of the highlights each day brought. The page was well customized with ticket, merchandise and entertainment tabs.
The official Twitter account was an extended version of the live updates – and catered to the mobile supporters keen to know asap who won what, when, and with whom! I also thought I’d mention here the official Youtube page with over 30 videos uploaded during the event, which is what impressed me the most.
Youtube pages are always hard to get off the ground, as the content needs to be interesting to lure views. RNZ did incredibly well with getting the Cambridge community involved in many of the clips, as well as highlighting aspects of the championships that are often overlooked (i.e. transport, volunteers, entertainment, local kids etc).
Well done Rowing New Zealand – if only you could have shown them how it was done for the Commonwealth Games (check out my review here) this year!
Written by Jess Miller.
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