First off, we want to thank everyone who was part of our experiment. Nothing exactly like this has been done before and we appreciate your enthusiasm and sharing in what we have accomplished thus far. Thank you!
What worked
The morning of Oct. 18 started for us as early as it did for many of the runners in the Nationwide Better Health Columbus Marathon. Our first tweet began the excitement when we posted the wheelchair and handcart start times. Tweets for the rest of participants soon followed when the timing provider published start time data around 7:45 a.m.
Overall, among the five timing stations for full marathons and the three timing stations for half marathoners, we made a total of 7,047 tweets for 1,787 participants. That’s more than 12 percent of eligible participants. The 10K tweets and the half marathon distance tweets managed to create "Trending Topics" on Twitter for a couple of hours. That means these were the most popular phrases being used on Twitter at the time. Since Twitter is a service with millions of subscribers, a whole lot of people got to share in the excitement of the race and we brought a bit of added recognition to the Columbus Marathon and its participants.
With our help, “Columbus Marathon” was the most searched for phrase on Google for three hours, and we sent nearly 4,800 visitors to a special page, built by R2integrated, on columbusmarathon.com that displayed a live stream of related tweets and and photos posted from the web.
Race day challenges
A rounding error caused our tweeted times to be a tiny bit faster than your official race time. We’ve changed our programming to correct this in any future races.
Some runners who crossed the start more than about 16 minutes after the gun were initially given a start time matching the gun. That threw off our time calculations for those runners. The company updated those times to the runners’ actual start time, but not until after the race was over and our tweets had all gone out.
In both of these cases, the official results linked from the Columbus Marathon website are the correct ones. We sincerely apologize for any annoyances this may have caused you.
There were a few other reported issues - mostly related to Facebook importing of the tweets and text message notifications. Those both appear to be mostly related to improper configurations on the user’s end. We are going to make a real effort to be sure the process is a lot easier. In the future, we hope to enable separate and simpler authorization for Facebook and Twitter. You’ll be able to post to either or both. As for text messages, we’ll try to make the interactions more clear. We know it’s not as easy as it should be.
What we’re thinking for the future
TweetMyTime is interested in providing the service to other races in the future and hopes to make it easier to use and effortless for races to implement. We’re still hammering out the details and are happy to share when we have them.
If you’d like to be kept in the loop and updated about what’s going on with TweetMyTime beyond what we share on Twitter, enter your email address in the form below.
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