According to a Nielson report, over one million people posted 4.5 million tweets about Los Angeles Laker Kobe Bryant’s final game on April 13 at Staples Center, Los Angeles.
During the final minutes of the game, the posts per minute reached 100,000. The Golden State Warrior’s 73rd win of the season set an NBA record that same night, but only generated about 625,000 tweets.
“Basically we worked under the assumption that you can’t do too much Kobe that day,” said Ty Nowell, manager of New Media for the Los Angeles Lakers. “Nike had the whole ‘Mamba Day’ thing going. And it really was a big deal. It overshadowed the Warriors breaking Michael Jordan’s illustrious record. All eyes were still on us. It was one of the coolest days I’ve ever been a part of. We just tried to cover as much of him as possible.”
And it seems Twitter couldn’t handle that kind of volume and engagement for long, since it broke down for about half an hour during the game.
“There are a lot of things I won’t forget about that night, and that’s one of them,” said Nowell.
When Twitter came back up, the Lakers account with its over 4.7 million followers didn’t, forcing the team to try to reach their fans through one of their other accounts while Twitter worked to fix a server issue. The @LakersDigital account they used only has around 5,000 followers, which made it a less than ideal solution.
“We use it mostly for social media night and nerdy stuff that people want to know,” said Nowell. “We have a few other accounts but obviously everyone is looking for that Lakers account, especially because it was when Kobe was starting to heat up after a slow first quarter. That was just out of desperate measures basically. We were like, we can get stuff out to people here and we’ll use it until the main account is back.”
As far as content goes, Nowell said they planned it out as much as they could, since they know his routine, but since the event is live, plans change. A scheduled gift exchange was pushed back an hour, and the players ran out earlier than they usually do, so a lot of energy was put into being flexible and keeping up with everything that was happening.
“We tried to mix in video, photos and play-by-play,” said Nowell. “We had a little more access that day, so I was in the locker room pregame and postgame, which was cool to give fans that insight into him walking into the locker room for the last time. There was so much going on, we just tried to cover everything. Some things lend themselves to photo, while some things with him talking were video. It was such a hard ticket to get, so for anybody that couldn’t be one of those 19,000 people in the arena, we tried to bring everyone else as close as possible.”
Not to mention the mobs of other photographers all fighting for the same shot.
“With so much other media there, this was like a finals game, but with a finals game you only have two teams to focus on with a few stars each and one TV partner. This was focusing on one guy with three TV partners and broadcasts going on, and pretty much every media person in L.A. who could get a credential was there. The stuff we tried to plan out, we also had to try to execute. It’s tough to get a shot when everyone else is trying to get the same shot.”
The last time Nowell had to cover an event on this scale was during game seven of the 2010 NBA Championships that pitted the Lakers against the Boston Celtics. But even though it was just six years ago, Nowell said today’s social media is completely different.
“It was a different digital age in 2010,” said Nowell. “We were still trying to figure it out with video and we were using Twit Pic, and now can get stuff in Instagram and Facebook so easily. This was our biggest event in this current iteration of social.”