NFL star Rashard Mendenhall has found himself in hot water over comments posted to his Twitter account on Monday in the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s death.
The Pittsburgh Steelers running back tweeted, among other things: “What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side…” In another tweet in response to University of Illinois basketball player Dominique Keller, Mendenhall implied a 9/11 conspiracy, writing: “I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style.”
The Steelers have moved quickly to distance themselves from Mendenhall’s comments by posting a statement on its website. President Art Rooney II writes, “I have not spoken with Rashard so it is hard to explain or even comprehend what he meant with his recent Twitter comments. The entire Steelers’ organization is very proud of the job our military personnel have done and we can only hope this leads to our troops coming home soon.”
While Mendenhall is yet to be punished by his team for the remarks, he wouldn’t be the first NFL player to get in trouble over tweets. Former Kansas City Chiefs running back Larry Johnson was suspended for a game (which cost him $213,000) and released by his team following a gay slur made on Twitter.
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Pack in your cathode ray tubes and shove those rabbit ears up…into the attic, because 21st century TV tech will pull you off your La-Z-Boy and onto the field of Super Bowl XLV.
High definition? Thanks Grandpa, but we’ll be rockin’ the 3D Smell-O-Vision Holodeck Chamber down in the man cave if you need anything.
It’s so real you can touch John Madden’s soul.
This comic was illustrated by Kiersten Essenpreis, a New York-based artist who draws and blogs at YouFail.com. For more laughs, check out our previous Mashable Comics.
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This year, startups and brands are hungrier than ever to capitalize on the Super Bowl and the anticipated volume of conversations that will spill over on social sites by association. In doing just that, Foursquare will be testing out two new ideas: A global promoted venue and redemption codes attached to badges.
The location-based mobile game is trading in the local appeal of its service for a day and working with the NFL on something more global in nature. On Sunday, all Foursquare users will see the same promoted trending venue — “Super Bowl Sunday” — for the duration of the game.
Foursquare will be doling out team-themed Super Bowl badges to Steelers and Packers fans who check in to the promoted venue and include the name of a team in their shouts. Foursquare users at the game can unlock a special Super Bowl XLV badge if they check in to the stadium.
More importantly, every unlocked badge comes with a unique redemption code that badge holders can use for a 20% discount on select merchandise at NFLShop.com.
Foursquare fans will appreciate the badges and the merchandise discount, but there’s much more to this promotion than ephemeral trophies and sporting memorabilia.
The “Super Bowl Sunday” manually promoted venue is a notable tangent from the startup’s everyday fare of venues promoted by popularity. For starters, Foursquare will likely see its most venue checkins to date. Then, of course, is the potential for the startup to open up promoted venues to paid advertisers.
Badge holder redemption codes are also something we’d anticipate the startup will proffer to future partners to better tie Foursquare activity to actual sales.
A Foursquare representative stressed that this particular promotion is merely an experiment and that no money is changing hands. But, in testing badge redemption codes and Foursquare-promoted venues, the startup seems to be laying the foundation for products with advertiser appeal.
More About: foursquare, MARKETING, nfl, sports, Super Bowl
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In a novel use of Twitter by an advertiser, the micro-blogging site is aggregating all the chatter about the Super Bowl into one Visa-sponsored webpage.
The page went live Wednesday and is billed as a “one-stop shop” where fans can experience Super Bowl XLV in real time, before and during the game, which takes place February 6. Visitors to the site will be able to see tweets from players, media and NFL personnel, as well as fans.
Twitter recognized that the number of tweets surged during big plays in last year’s Super Bowl. In fact, at those times, about 40% of all tweets were related to the game, according to a Twitter blog post. Similarly, during last Sunday’s AFC and NFC championship games, football-related trends dominated the site.
Twitter launched a similar microsite around Fashion Week last year that was sponsored by Visa rival American Express. Since the Super Bowl will attract significantly more conversation than Fashion Week, this could turn out to be a big win for Visa. And, although it wasn’t sponsored, Twitter set up a similar tracking page for the World Cup 2010, which undoubtedly will still be able to hold onto its status as the most-tweeted-about sporting event in history even after the Super Bowl.
But the success of this year’s Super Bowl promotion depends on how many people Twitter can lure to the Visa site. Right now, Twitter is hyping the site with a Promoted Trend beckoning users to “Go Inside SBXLV,” but clicking on that ad sends you to another Twitter page. From there, you have to hunt down the microsite URL via @VisaNFL, a new account that, at present, has only 75 followers.
Twitter has been working on advertising models for some time. The company last year introduced Promoted Tweets, which drew revenues from advertisers like Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Virgin America, among others. Twitter is projected to post ad revenues as high as $150 million this year.
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