Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

I ran my first 26.2 miles at the Nationwide Better Health Columbus Marathon Sunday.  It for sure won’t be my last.  As hard as I trained, I still missed my goal of a sub 3:10 time, which would have qualified me for the Boston Marathon.

See the happy look on my face?  Kristen McEnery snapped this shot at about mile 23 in Grandview.  I was hurting by that point.

A recurring theme from the speakers at TedxColumbus last night was that it’s OK to fail.  I agree with that.  We learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes.  Here’s what I learned from failing to hit the mark on my  run time in my first full marathon:

• Start tapering a week later.  For this race, I started cutting down the miles about three weeks out.  I peaked on my performance ability about a week too early.
• Don’t freak out and buy new shoes just before the race.  This is an all-around bad idea and a rookie mistake.  My legs were not used to the shoes.
• Pre-race nutrition is MUCH more important than I thought.  Hamburgers and Jacob’s birthday cake is not really a sufficient source of fuel. Duh.
• Starting with faster runners messes with your head.  Shortly after the 10K mark in the marathon, all kinds of people were whizzing by me.  I felt even slower.
• Reverse splits?  Frankly, the first time I even heard that term was after crossing the finish line.  Apparently it’s a good idea to NOT bolt out the starting gate like a bat out of hell.  Who knew?

I made tons of rookie mistakes, and now know better for the next race.  Thanks to everyone who congratulated me in person, on Facebook, and even on Twitter.  I really appreciate all of your support and I’m thrilled that I finished.  Unfortunately, the goal was never solely to finish.  The goal was to qualify for bigger races.  I’m not there yet… but I will be.

TweetMyTime Rocked It!
This was an interesting experiment in how niche events like marathons can leverage inbound marketing and social media buzz generation to build an even greater online presence and start an online conversation.  Here’s some of the breakdowns from our analysis (well, mostly Dave Culbertson’s analysis) on how this worked to benefit Nationwide Better Health and the Columbus Marathon.  There will be some more info up on play-by-play on the TweetMyTime blog soon.

Trending

• We trended on Twitter for a couple of hours for the terms contained in the tweets – “Passed 10″ and “Halfway.” These terms actually topped #beatcancer on the leader board  for a little over an hour.  We’re not entirely sure why Twitter trends didn’t pick up #cbusmarathon, but we think it may be related to the structure of the tweet and possibly the presence of “stop words” in the copy.  We’re looking into this to try and figure out the formula here, as well.
• We also trended No.1 on Google trends for around three hours.  And as a result, “Columbus Marathon” was the most searched for phrase on Google for three hours.  We have a hunch that this is a direct result of the buzz that was generated on the social web, and we’re looking at how we can prove this idea and then apply it to other races.

Google Analytics from http://ColumbusMarathon.com

Overall traffic from the launch of TweetMyTime registrant on-boarding between Aug. 1st 2009 through Oct. 18th 2009 (Race Day)

• Visits directly related to TweetMyTime – Facebook, Twitter, TweetMytime: 5,531 (3.2 percent)
• Total share of referred traffic: 21 percent
• Average visitor engagement on site: three pages and 3:21 visit length
• An estimated 3,500 additional visits from Twitter not included below (recorded by bit.ly, not present on Google Analytics)

Google Analytic results for Oct. 17th, the day before race:

• 13,850 visits (higher traffic is expected due to event taking place on next day)
• Visits directly related to TweetMyTime – Facebook, Twitter, TweetMytime are in addition to expected traffic: 489 (3.5 percent)
• Total share of referred traffic from Google and other sources: total of 24 percent

Google Analytic results for Oct. 18th, race day:

• 41,643 total site visits (being transparent, higher traffic can always be expected on race day because people are searching for info on parking, last minute updates, start times, etc.)
• Visits directly related to TweetMyTime application: 1,858 which is an increase to 4.5 percent
• Total share of referred traffic from Google and other sources: increase to 37.7 percent

What was even more interesting is that the amount of traffic generated to the marathon site from the Facebook referring URL.  Based on our numbers, we saw almost 4 times the amount of traffic coming from Facebook,  as compared to traffic from Twitter.  What’s REALLY cool is that Facebook, TweetMyTime.com, and Twitter dominated the day as the top traffic referral sources.

I’ve always been fascinated by the communication context of different social networks.  It’s interesting that in the context of Facebook – a network seen by most users as a collection of close personal friends and family – our conversions (i.e. people clicking through on the bit.ly link) went through the roof.  Visitor engagement on the site from these referring sites was decent, as well. But, there’s a ton of room for improvement.

We noticed, and you may have too, that a vast majority of automated status updates on a runner’s Facebook wall received dozens of comments from friends cheering them on as they ran.  Our whole goal with this experiment was to find a way to engineer a VERY large conversation around the race.  From the feedback we’ve received via Tweets, emails and comments,  it seems that people like how the application worked out.

We’re still chopping through what’s working and what’s not in hopes to make this application even better.  Word on the street is that lots of other races are paying attention to what we’re doing – at least that’s what Universal Sports seems to be thinking.

What’s your take?  How would you make TweetMyTime better for runners, their friends and families, and races?