An inside look at the social media comms challenges for SEA Games

Being the social media communications firm for the Southeast Asia Games (SEA Games) in Singapore this year has been challenging.The biggest challenge? It’s a multisport, multi country and language event. The key obstacle was how to make it interesting and relevant to everyone in the region at any given moment without being physically in Singapore where the Games were hosted.This might seem like a similar problem for any multi-sport game like the Olympics, Asian Games and Commonwealth Games but this is a challenge in itself as the SEA region is less connected because of the lower internet penetration rate.So how can we bring the games to everyone in the region to get them to participate and be engaged despite the language barriers?We kept our focus on the pace and purpose of people and the culture of Southeast Asia wanting to disrupt, drive and connect them to the Games, making it the most digital games in SEA.DisruptIn the digitally connected world, we needed to share the anticipation, excitement, tribulations and stories to all countrymen across the 11 participating countries in the region. The one thing that binds us all together is content; to create content that would reach out to the vast groups of people.With content as the sticky factor, we teased out a series of different content from more factual information such as match line-ups, medal tallies etc to more emotional, inspirational stories about the athletes, medal wins, video highlights of the day.We set up a social media command centre where we trained citizen journalists prior to the Games to publish proactive and reactive content including curating content from consumers.The team published multi-language content across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in real-time. Selected content was amplified through paid and targeted buys. Relevant content created by the public, athletes, as well as volunteers trained by SMG are curated within a live “social wall” which resides in the official SEA games website.One of the key roles of the social command centre was to allow us to connect with our audience but more importantly it was also a critical function of the operations committee. More often than not topics surface on social media first. And since we are facing the fans, we are in a good position to assess on ground sentiments. The command centre had a team of community managers from Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand fuelling the multi-language desire in the Games.Three-quarters of all content were developed almost in real time and some, in local languages to cater to the regional audience. Also, we provided live tweeting of key sporting events - people who weren’t able to catch the match live either on ground or online were able to also be part of the games.DriveEach piece of content easily reached 10,000-20,000 people organically. Some peaked at 100,000 reach or more. What we thought would be a stumbling block – Facebook’s organic reach wasn’t for the high frequency of content. In this case, paid media support was only given to posts that required either 1) extremely high level of awareness in the shortest duration (Eg. Traffic advisories) and/or 2) specific call to action from the fans (Eg. Contests, Ticketing).ConnectNot every market in SEA has Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. We wanted to ensure everyone is able to consume the games in some form or other. SINGSOC’s decision to live stream the events on YouTube made it possible for us connect with people.Combined on all three social media platforms that we have, we published approx. 1200 pieces of content over the last 19 days. Organic reach has increased to as much as 9% for some posts as compared to normal organic reach of <1%.As I look back, the Games has taken a bigger presence in the digital world. The days where sports events are measured by the limited seats in the stadium in a by-gone era. A good sporting event is measured by fans across social media.As I look into the future, sporting events will be in an even more immersive experience where the spectator and athlete will converse to drive deeper, more connected human experiences, leading the velocity era of marketing sport. The writer is Brenda Chuah, associate director, Starcom MediaVest Group.