Sport + Social Media = Success

A Dutch newspaper’s summer of sport with a social networking website has introduced a new audience to its online content.

The broadsheet De Telegraaf teamed up with social media group Hyves to offer tailored coverage of the Euro 2008 championships and the Beijing Olympics, reports the Editors Weblog.

Among their joint projects was a fantasy football league for the Euros, hosted on the Hyves site, which attracted some 170,000 participants.

More recently, they launched a new football game for the Dutch 2008/09 domestic season which currently has over 30,000 users.

And the results? Some 20% of the incoming traffic visiting the Telegraaf.nl sport section during the summer came from Hyves (prior to this, traffic from Hyves was “negligible”).

According to the Editors Weblog: “This partnership also helped the Telegraaf re-brand itself and present itself as a modern news organisation.

“The newspaper had a rather ‘old fashioned’ image before the project, but this initiative made people look at Telegraaf in a new light.

“The games on the Hyves site also got people talking about the site on the internet and the project became a topic of conversation around water-coolers in offices.”


Launched in 2004, Hyves is a Dutch social networking site with over five million users based in Holland and almost two million other members around the world.


[Picture – supercoolgifts.co.uk.]