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Published: May 2012

KAEO The Details:
Name: TweetStarGame
Founded: 2011
Founders: Caleb Mezzy, Matt Kenig
Concept: A database of athletes’ social influence
Website: www.TweetStarGame.com
Twitter: @TweetStarGame
Email: Email TweetStarGame

Social media and sports have always gone together. Sports are inherently social. Over the last year, services such as Twitter and Instagram have exploded in popularity and athletes have been joined these networks at an alarming pace. These services provide athletes with a direct one-to-one pathway with their fans. There’s nothing a PR guy or an agent can do. It’s a great opportunity for athletes to connect with fans and build their brand.

Just in the last week, New York Giants teammates Victor Cruz and Osi Umenyiora showed the do’s and don’ts of Twitter. Victor Cruz hit the 140-character social service to display his new Super Bowl ring. Twitter stops counting at fifty, but his tweet got 50+ retweets and favorites. Osi, on the other hand, promised to buy Lawrence Taylor’s Super Bowl ring at an auction if he amassed 1 million followers on Twitter. Osi later dropped the number to 500,000. Earlier this week he passed on the ring and currently has less than 55,000 followers.

Caleb Mezzy believes there’s great valuable in knowing an athlete’s social influence. It’s not a simple conversion from on-field performance to social influence. Athletes that are genuine and connect with fans frequently have a higher social influence than athletes that take on a more elitist viewpoint about the social networks. Mezzy believes advertisers and agents can use an athlete’s social influence to better connect with their brand or increase their value in contract negotiations.

The higher an athlete’s social influence, the more fans respond and consume of that athlete. Until now, there hasn’t really been a service to measure an athlete’s social influence. Thus, TweetStarGame was created. TweetStarGame is a social media measuring database that calculates an athlete’s social influence based on their interactions on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. TweetStarGame uses Klout’s database as its biggest resource. The TweetStarGame website includes an overall leaderboard, which is usually filled with futbol players, as well as leaderboards for most of the major sports. At the time of this publishing, seven of the top ten on the overall leaderboard were futbol players with Christiano Ronaldo the top “Tweet Star.”

Mezzy, along with his cofounder Matt Kenig, launched TweetStarGame because they understood the value of an athlete’s social influence and there lacked a strong database online. There are several websites that offer lists of athletes on Twitter, but none that provide a game dynamic with a social influence ranking. Mezzy said his biggest struggle so far has been enhancing the user experience while sustaining the core focus of the database. In the future, Mezzy hopes to connect with established publishers and brands to become a resource for social influence.

For more information on TweetStarGame, visit their website at www.TweetStarGame.com.