NBA All-Star Voting

This year the NBA has decided to have its all-star voting done through twitter using the hashtag #NBAvote and a player’s name. I think this idea was genius! This got millions and millions of people to use this hashtag trying to get their favorite player into the all-star game. According to the website, http://www.nba.com/2016/news/01/21/2016-all-star-starters-release/, the leading vote getter this year was Kobe Bryant with 1,891,614 votes! This had to of boosted ratings a ton.

            Before the All-Star voting was a real pain to do and it took a lot of effort. Now you can just do it through twitter. Every retweet that your #NBAvote tweet gets counts as a vote for that player. Results came out weekly to let you know how your favorite player was doing overall. This strategy definitely worked on me because I probably did at least 100 votes for Andre Drummond of the Detroit Pistons either through the hashtag or just retweeting different twitter accounts that used the hash tag.

            My only problem with this was that players just used their own twitter accounts to vote for themselves and got their fans to retweet it a bunch. So the best players didn’t necessarily make the all-star team but the most popular ones did. A prime example of that is Carmello Anthony. He’s not having the greatest season but he’s a superstar and plays in New York which is one of the largest markets in the world. So he ended up getting voted in as a starter while somebody like Andre Drummond has to come off the bench because he plays in Detroit where it’s not that great of a market even though he’s having a far superior year to Anthony.

            So overall I would say as far as a marketing strategy this worked out great for the NBA. They got millions and millions of people tweeting out their hashtag.