Just launched on NBA.com, the “All Star Pulse” page features a real-time trending topics of sorts, showing the most talked about people and events from all-star weekend based on data from public Facebook status updates.
At launch, those topics are lead by Carmelo Anthony (who continues to be the subject of trade rumors), but as the weekend unfolds are likely to include updates about participants in various all-star activities, like the Rookie Challenge and Slam Dunk Contest, which are permanent fixtures under a “Featured” tab on the site’s main page.
The site lets you drill down on any of the trending topics for more information, including videos, photos, news stories and blog posts from NBA.com on the given subject. Look for Pulse and its up-to-the-minute trending topics to be promoted on-air by broadcasters across ESPN, TNT and NBA TV during the weekend’s festivities, starting with Friday night’s Celebrity Game.
An NBA source tells us the league chose Facebook — which they’ve been working with for more than five years — to power the site because “[the NBA] is such a global brand and with Facebook’s huge and ever growing universe we thought it made sense to visualize all the activity from Facebook. Twitter already has something built in for trending topics, but we thought this was a great opportunity to surface that information for Facebook.”
Pulse is the latest piece in the NBA’s social media strategy, which has grown to include a 7+ million community on Facebook, 2+ million followers on Twitter and its own checkin app that launched back in October. Individual teams have also been upping their own efforts, like the Golden State Warriors recent use of the Facebook Deals platform.
Separately, entertainment checkin startup Philo has teamed up with Shaq for all-star weekend to host a virtual viewing party during the dunk contest.
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