Wheaties Ties Twitter MVPs to NBA Playoffs
Bowing to the way big sports events are watched these days–with real-time commentary via Twitter– General Mills’ Wheaties Fuel cereal is looking for the Most Valuable Tweeter in this year’s National basketball Association championships.
To enter the contest, which launched on April 17 with the first games in the opening round of competition for this year’s NBA title, participants must register for a free Twitter account and then sign up for the contest.
Once registered, they can start competing to dominate Twitter for each of the four championship periods by tweeting their comments using the #MVT hashtag. Ten finalists will be picked for each entry period in three categories: those with the most tweets for the period, those with the greatest number of re-tweets, and those with the most followers after the last game in that round.
At the end of each entry period—with the first one slated to close on May 2, 2010—a panel of judges will examine the Twitter output of all 30 finalists for that period and select one grand prize winner for the period, based on the relevance of his or her tweets to the round, enthusiasm, humor and originality.
That person will be named Most Valuable Tweeter for the round and will receive a year’s supply of Wheaties Fuel cereal, along with a branded item autographed by one of the athletes reportedly said to be involved in creating the cereal, including Payton Manning, Albert Pujols and Kevin Garnett. Each round will have its MVY names on the MostValuableTweeter.com Web site.
For those competitors whose Twitter skills may not be so strong, that site also offers some basic tips for winning the promotion. Those instructions include explaining that using the #MVT hashtag permits user tracking in Twitter and that while entrants will be judged on the volume, reach and re-tweet rate of all the tweets they post with that tag, “strategically, it’s better to tweet something related to basketball plus the hashtag” than to use it in any random tweets.
“Wheaties’ Most Valuable Tweeter competition gives basketball fans a fun and interactive way to follow each playoff game,” says Dan Stangler, marketing manager for Wheaties. “But only the most dedicated and outspoken fans can earn the title of MVT.”
The promotion is the second NBA-related campaign centered on Wheaties Fuel, a high-energy extension of the traditional Wheaties brand rolled out to stores late last year. For that launch, Wheaties used a sweepstakes offering tickets to the 2010 NBA All-Star Game in Dallas.
