Image Credit : Copyright TCS
Project Overview
TCS SocialSoccer reimagined the 2014 FIFA World Cup, demonstrating how a combination of digital forces can give powerful and effective analytic solutions, providing meaningful and potentially actionable analytics insights in real time in hands of a user.
The result was a comprehensive social insight into every team and player in the World Cup.
Organisation
Tata Consultancy Services (FleishmanHillard is TCS’ PR agency)
Team
Tata Consultancy Services with support from global agency, FleishmanHillard.
Project Brief
The briefing for TCS SocialSoccer, was to develop an app that digitally reimagined the world’s biggest sporting spectacle, the 2014 FIFA World Cup; bringing fans closer to the matches by using the power of digital forces – social media, big data, mobile and cloud – working in harmony.
Project Need
TCS SocialSoccer demonstrated how a combination of digital forces can give powerful and effective analytic solutions, providing meaningful and actionable analytics insights in real time. It uses Perivista, the TCS proprietary tool on big data analytics for sentiment and text analytics. The algorithms are executed in a Hadoop big data cluster on a real-time stream of twitter data. Analysis around sentiment, topic and entity extraction are performed on these tweets and the results are delivered to a mobility web service layer.
App features included:
• Trending tweets about favourite teams/players
• Twitter trending list of team/players
• Ongoing match analysis with Twitter activity details, tag cloud, sample tweets, live updates of events during the match, e.g. goals and yellow cards
• Locations of where teams/players were popular
TCS SocialSoccer brought fans an ability to relate or understand their counterparts in other parts of the world.
Brazilian fans knew that Neymar was not only the most mentioned player in their country but also in Croatia, their opponents in the tournament opener. However, the reasons for popularity were different; Brazilians loved him and were supporting him, and Croatians feared him and were discussing how to stop him.
Fans following the surreal Suarez ‘bite’ controversy on the app would have got a strong indication about his impending move to Barcelona from the number of mentions he was getting in the Catalan capital a week before the news of transfer was officially announced.
User Experience
TCS SocialSoccer gave fans an ability to relate or understand their counterparts in other parts of the world. It provided geography-based popularity of players in real time so you could know interesting facts like which player was more popular in a non-participating city like Kuala Lumpur or Mumbai.
As the users started getting more acquainted with the app, they started asking more insightful questions that often had little to do with the game and more to do with analysis. That was where TCS SocialSoccer as an app stood out against hundreds of other World Cup apps that came at the same time.
The user interface of TCS SocialSoccer incorporates playfulness, upfront presentation of data, eye pleasing subtle background, handholding tips for innovative controls and highlighting of relevant data. This helps to retain the attention of users as well as making them to revisit the app from regularly during the World Cup.
The app is presented in a smooth story flow where users can get a bird’s eye view as well as finer details of the popularity of their favourite teams and players. Another major challenge was the fragmentation of Android devices in terms of screen size and resolution. TCS SocialSoccer displays as intended in MDPI, HDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI and XXXHDPI devices as well as in iPhone 4 and iPhone 5.
Project Marketing
Raising awareness of the app
A Twitter handle @TCS_SocSoc was created to give the app a voice and a personality. The handle followed all the major matches using the app. It used data and insights from the app to show how the app was capturing the action well.
In TCS’ eight key markets, app reviewers, football pundits and technology journalists we identified. They were then targeted with tailored and localised pitches positioning TCS SocialSoccer as:
• App reviewers: A tool to enhance fans’ world cup experience
• Football pundits: A way for them to gain greater insights into to the World Cup
• Technology journalists: Pioneering use of digital technologies
Increasing the reach of the insights
Content was developed for social media and media relations:
• Quick media pitches: Insights directly from the app and developed bullet point insights to pitch to relevant in-market media
• Quick infographic: Shared through social channel, they contained one insight and were designed to enhance posts by supporting text with a graphic
• Full infographics: Looked at the most talked about teams, players, and which countries were talking about the World Cup most
Showcase the success of TCS SocialSoccer
Secure features on how TCS had used digital technology to enhance fans World Cup technology experience.
Project Privacy
The app was tested to ensure implementation of strong data privacy practices. Both static code analysis and penetration testing were conducted on the app to ensure that the app is hack proof.
Specific measures included:
• Ensured that there is no insecure storage of sensitive information
• Insecure custom permissions were not provided in the application
• Ensured that app does not store any sensitive information in the external storage
• App is secured against malicious activity launch, malicious service launch from external apps
• App is fool proof against SQL Injection
Eavesdropping and tampering are addressed at the server end by implementing Transport Layer Security to ensure communication security. All transactions between client and server were carried out using HTTPS.
Whenever the user wants to share match prediction via Twitter and Facebook, the app explicitly seeks permission from the user to access relevant personal data before sharing in social media. Further to this authentication is done using OAuth mechanism. OAuth token is valid only for the current transaction, after which the token expires, ruling out any chances of intrusion to user's private information.
The Selfie feature in the app does not use Geotagging, there by user's location information is protected.
Best Mobile Marketing Campaign
This category recognises campaigns that use elements such as competitions, promotions & messaging to engage customers on the mobile channel exclusively.
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