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!
What worked
The morning of Sunday October 18th started for us as early as it did for many of the runners in the Nationwide Better Health Columbus Marathon. The excitement all began when our first tweet posted during the wheelchair and handcart start time. Tweets started for a majority of participants’ when start time data was first published by the timing provider around 7:45 a.m.
Overall, between 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 - more than 12% or eligible participants. The 10k tweets and the half marathon distance tweets managed to create ‘trending topics’ on Twitter for a couple of hours, which means these were the most popular phrases being used on Twitter at the time, bringing a bit of added recognition to the Columbus Marathon and it’s participants.
With our help, ‘Columbus Marathon’ was the most searched for phrase on Google for three hours, and we sent almost 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
Many of your times were effected by a rounding error that made our tweeted times a minute and a second or two 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. This effected our time calculations for those runners. The timing 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 apologize for any annoyances this may have caused you.
There have been 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, not to pass the buck. In the future, we hope to enable separate, simpler authorization for Facebook and Twitter. You’ll be able to post to either one 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 hope to make it easier to use and simple for races to implement. We’re still hammering out the details and will share them with you when we have something more to say about it.
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