Twitter-Centric Ky Cager App Gets In Game

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The potential success of Catalist, a new app aggregating the galaxy of tweets around University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball, hinges on one premise: UK fans’ ferocity. Why else, after all, would anyone ever need a mainline flow of tweets from coaching staff, players and even potential high school recruits?

“In some ways, it approaches players like they’re celebrities,” said Sandy Martin, mobile director for South Bend, Ind.-based Schurz Communications and the project manager for the app. “And in Kentucky, our college basketball players are celebrities.”

Martin, a Kentucky native, knows from which she speaks. And in fact, almost immediately after the iPhone and iPad app hit the iTunes Store, it had been downloaded over 400 times.

The real impetus for the app, however, was to expand the online reach of UK’s small hometown daily paper, the Schurz-owned Danville, Ky. Advocate Messenger (circulation approximately 9,800) by tapping into a larger potential regional audience. “How could Danville make money off of the Louisville market?” Martin said. “It just doesn’t have much opportunity to do that. But to create and package a product that supports Kentucky basketball is a way to reach hundreds of thousands of people outside of their town of 150,000 people.”

Wildcats basketball already had several paid apps ranging from $0.99 to $3.99 in the market, so Martin said it was important to make this newcomer free. Revenue will instead come from display advertising, and the app launched with an exclusive local sponsor. She said that the Advocate Messenger would cast a regional net for potential future advertisers.

For their part, fans get a vertical toolbar of tweets of broken down by UK players and coaches and high school recruits, all of which are also reconfigured by upcoming games (those game-categorized tweets also feature tweets from opposing players, which are right justified in blocks against the left justified UK tweets). And these tweets are buttressed with more extensive team analysis provided by Larry Vaught, a veteran Advocate Messenger sportswriter and local radio host who has been covering the team since 1975.

Vaught, who has been allotted more space than a tweet’s 140 characters in the app’s dashboard, plans to update at least daily in its early days, upping the number of posts as the season rolls along. And he said the app will also soon feature guest analysis from local television and radio sports pundits.

While initially a bit daunted by the newly-installed Tweetdeck on his own smartphone, Vaught is embracing this new media front to his coverage. “I’m not exactly the prototype at 59-years-old in trying to learn to deal with all this, but they just show me which buttons to push,” he said.

For Martin, this isn’t the first foray into team tweet aggregation. The Catalist app is essentially a white label reconfiguration of an earlier Schurz app, HuddleUp, which was launched last October as a paid app for Notre Dame’s college football program. There, as with Catalist, there’s one caveat: there’s no moderation of the aggregated tweets, which means fans are getting an uncensored feed complete with random thoughts, casual obscenities and lots of non-sports palaver. Add to the mix the stream of tweets coming from high schoolers, and there’s the potential for some serious controversy (the app carries a disclaimer for language on its front door and sports a 12+ rating), not to mention that no one’s permission has been asked to be included in the app.

For recruits, Martin said she would remove anyone wanting to opt out. “I give that extra sensitivity to recruits because they’re still in high school,” she said. Not so for the college players, however: “I think it’s a little different. They’re publishing their tweets in a public forum.”

One Twitter forum that remains untapped in the app is among the fans themselves, who don’t have a voice in its current configuration. Martin said she’s working on their possible inclusion, though for the time being fans can retweet anything they find within the app by swiping over it.

Meanwhile, while college basketball season moves towards its March fever pitch and stronger potential ad revenue, Martin said she’s exploring other future white label possibilities for the app.

Vendor: Schurz Communications

Launched: January 2012

Cost to consumers: Free

Compatible devices: iPhone, iPad

White label version: Yes

Number of downloads: 2,500 in the first two weeks

Revenue streams: Display ads

Key characteristics: Catalist aggregates Twitter feeds from University of Kentucky basketball coaches, players and recruits, pairing them with analysis from veteran UK commentator Larry Vaught. Tweets are searchable by individual or game, and game-specific aggregation includes tweets from rival players.