The #CSAawards dinner

I was uber chuffed when an email popped up in my in-box from Vincent Hofmann inviting me to the SA Cricket Awards Gala Dinner. As a blogger I don’t often get invited to official events and it’s very difficult for me to get access to the players. Vincent and I were accompanied by Mike Stopforth for the evening festivities.

It’s fantastic to see a sports organization like Cricket South Africa embracing social media, their #CSAawards campaign on Twitter was a creative value add to the evening, and it showed how social media can compliment a live event. When writing this article I counted that there were 1024 tweets with the #CSAawards hashtag, which is an awesome level of interaction. CSA has encouraged the players to join Twitter which is a great step forward in giving their fans access to the players on an individual bases.

The various sponsors of the event also made use of social media to cover the event, Standard Bank, Cricket South Africa and KFC Fangaea we’re all tweeting like crazy and posting Twitpics in an effort to include the general public. They even had the presenter Ryan O’Connor reading out tweets from an iPad!

Cricket South Africa have a great Facebook page another sign of the integration of Cricket and social media, now if only we could find more cricket bloggers….

Mark Boucher, me, Graeme Smith and Roelof van der Merwe at the CSA Awards

1. 

   Vincent Hofmann says:

   July 22, 2010 at 2:16 pm

   It was awesome – and no thank you for attending and lending your voice.

   Just cool to be able to invite someone who I knew would enjoy it.

   Until the next one…
2. 

   mspr1nt says:

   July 29, 2010 at 9:58 pm

   ‘if only we could find more cricket bloggers’
   *sigh* no, if only the elite cliques who run the most popular blogs would play with the fat ugly kids

   But yes – totally agree, the way CSA are embracing social media is awesome. They do need to be careful though, we’re a fickle lot and the players need to be thick skinned to handle the abuse that will be hurled at them by the fickle fans when we fumble at a hurdle.
3. 

   Jonhenry Wilson says:

   September 5, 2010 at 5:03 pm

   Now you just have to crack the nod to the ICC Awards and you would have arrived. Love the blog, man. Keep up the great work.