Wimbledon tunes into social racket

The Wimbledon tennis tournament’s website will ensure it is serving up tennis lovers’ dream content by pulling in data on what topics are creating the most noise on the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
The All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club is using its long-running partnership with IBM – launched in 1989 – to implement the firm’s SoftLayer cloud technology to host the new social media tool.
The event, which starts next Monday (June 23), will see the “Social Command Centre” monitor all social coverage and adjust the event’s website accordingly.
Content and communications manager Alex Willis explained: “The centre will help us to follow the evolving topics on sites like Twitter to see what is being discussed, how the volume is changing, and we can tune and tailor that to the Wimbledon.com website.
“So if the social media coverage is actually talking about a match on court 12, rather than centre court, it means we can understand that and give people the content they want.”
At the heart of the programme is the IBM Watson big data and analytics platform which brings in key data points, including order of play and social media information, to understand how and when demand for the website will fluctuate each day.
The service runs its algorithm every 90 minutes so that it can respond to any changes that may have occurred, such as a shock defeat, and recognise that demand may be about to rise unexpectedly.
Last year the website received 19.7 million unique visitors and 433 million page views, so ensuring the right content is displayed at the right time is vital to meet the needs of tennis fans worldwide.

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