Digital Sport Summit: Awesome event!
On July 7, 2010, I attended the Digital Sport Summit held in Melbourne, Victoria. I was really excited to attend for several reasons. First, many of the speakers were from Australian sporting organizations. Some of the speakers represented clubs and the league I am doing my research on. Second, the topic involved social media. I love social media and better understanding how it is used from an organizational perspective because that can have an important impact on how fans organize themselves. Third, it was a chance to get out of Canberra. I love the people I’ve had an opportunity to talk to up here including the Canberra Raiders and Canberra United but the market conditions are really different than those that exist in other parts of Australia. I also love Canberra but I wanted to go some place where I could get from Point A to Point B and pass by several coffee shops. I also wanted to see the penguins. Lastly, I wanted a chance to meet some of the people I’d gotten to know on Twitter who have been helpful in teaching me more about Australian sport.
The speakers included Ed Wyatt, Jeramie McPeek, Anthony Harrison, Peter Jankulovski, Finn Bradshaw, Darren Rowse, Alana Fisher, Nick Marvin and Harry O’Brien. Below is a gallery of some pictures I took from my seat in the back (where I had a table to write on, could use Twitter on my iPhone with out being annoying, and where I could do data gathering during presentations I was less interested in). The next two or three posts will include notes from the various sessions I listened to. I’ve decided to put them into separate posts because one big post would be really difficult to read.
Before getting to those posts, I just wanted to say that the event was really fantastic. I got a chance to meet a few people from the AFL including two guys from the league and two guys from the Essendon Bombers. (And they were polite when I attacked them with HERE IS A PAPER AND DATA NOT ABOUT YOUR TEAM BUT TO SEE WHAT I CAN DO.) Some of the presentations answered questions I had regarding why data was acting the way it was and explained some of the decision making going on that impacts the fan experience. It also did this from an Australian sport perspective, with many presenters giving context for how this compared to American and European social media usage. They presented organization, the media and athlete perspectives. This was useful because it helped put all these pieces into a larger context for how the larger sport industry functions. If Anthony Alsop and co. put on the event again with a similar price point, I’d happily try to go again.
