College baseball players + a one hour rain delay + jousting = social media phenomenon.
Plenty of other factors went in to creating a video with more than a million YouTube views, such has having a camera, a camera with memory card space, a fresh battery and a rain slicker. But picking up that camera “just in case something interesting happened” was the most important piece of creating a video that became instantly famous.
The video was unveiled to the YouTube, Twitter and Facebook social media universe on May 17 and generated a quarter-of-a-million YouTube views in just 24 hours. It’s unknown how many additional views came through other video sites and social media sites, but word spread fast.
The video hit the national television scene for the first time during ESPN’s SportsNation show at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Monday, launching even farther from there.
From humble beginnings, to ESPN’s 6 p.m. SportsCenter on Tuesday night, “College Baseball Rain Delay Jousting” made its rounds through the dense media world.
It’s hard to know how many places or on how many outlets the video appeared, as reports have poured in of a bevy of places and from numerous people, but among those we know about and outlets that specifically requested our clip, ESPN, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MLB Advanced Media/MLB Network, Yahoo, TruTV, the Weather Channel and Comedy Central are a sampling.
Specifically, the clip has appeared on:
• ESPN SportsNation (May 15)
• Comcast SportsNet’s Washington Post Live with Ivan Carter (May 15)
• WDBJ News7 at 11 (May 15) and News7 Mornin’ (May 16)
• ESPN First Take (May 16)
• ESPN/ESPN Radio’s Scott Van Pelt Show (May 16)
• ESPN Pardon the Interruption (May 16)
• ESPN SportsCenter (May 16)
• Fox News Channel’s Red Eye with Greg Gutfield
• G4TV’s Web Soup
Rumors even got around that Baseball Tonight analyst Nomar Garciapparra engaged in some in-studio jousting later with the BBTN crew later in the week.
SportsCenter’s Not Top 10 even featured the clip as its No. 1 sampling, or the “Worst of the Worst.”
The clip has also appeared in countless print/online media outlets, including ESPN.com, CNN/SI.com, NBC Sports.com, Huffington Post, Deadspin, the Roanoke Times, WUSA 9 (Washington, D.C.), Yahoo! Sports, The Sporting News, The Score.com, Comedy Central’s Sports Show with Norm MacDonald show blog, College Humor, and even British publication Asylum, to name a few.
As Aaron McFarling of the Roanoke Times quoted me as saying, this video truly showed “The power of social media.” I stand behind that.
(Here’s his story, After turning medieval, Radford’s rain delay goes viral – May 19, 2011)
No longer do I doubt the power of a Tweet, or a Like, or anything else. Your name, your message, your identity, can be exposed to thousands, or millions, in no time.
Ultimately, the people will decide the merits of your efforts. But if you catch lightning in a bottle, intentionally or otherwise, use social media to share that.
Patrick Reed Media 