Jeff Bennett's Blog

The NHL kicked off their use of Twitter with a “Tweetup” celebration on the opening night of the NHL playoffs on April 15.  That night over 100 Twitter personas gathered at the NHL Store in New York to watch playoff games.  The NHL Tweet Up generated activity on Twitter for over 230,000 followers.

I contend that Twitter is a highly valuable communications tool for someone or an organization to connect with many followers, fans, friends, customers and students.  We have seen this in our work at NameMedia with our enthusiast web sites.  We have been syndicating new blog posts, photos, videos, news from our Photo.net, Craftster.Org, DavesGarden.com, Geek.Com and many other sites onto Twitter as many of our members are there.   We have also witnessed these interested folks “retweeting” and sharing our “tweets” to their followers to extend the syndication.  The network effect of syndicating good information to interested people is very powerful on Twitter.  We have expanded members, visits and followers as the result.

The same principle must be true with the NHL where a pool of fans has become engaged around the Tweetup and then extended this to their own followers.  Next thing you know you have several hundred thousand fans participating.

Beyond the NHL efforts many teams have begun to leverage Twitter for their fans.  The Washington Capitals have built an application for Fans use Twackle to track tweets, which is an innovative way to use Twitter for sure.  I was digging around on WeFollow, a site that is tracking Twitter usage, and this adds almost 60,000 additional followers across many teams at a grassroots level when you search on the NHL tag.

Twitter has roared onto the mass market stage in the last few months aided by the Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to get 1 million followers, Oprah’s adoption of Twitter and many mainstream shows popularizing the service.  All of this is truly great, but I maintain that useful applications and targeted use of the service is what is going to allow Twitter to sustain itself as a useful tool in the mainstream.  I am a big fan of Twitter as I have several groups that I am following and I am utilizing several Twitter applications.  Great to see the NHL using Twitter with a purpose to extend its reach with the playoffs.