Colleague Judd Zulgad, who is clearly trying to get his own ZULGADBALL blog now that the Vikings season is over and he's not working 23 hours a day, drops in for the second time in recent days with some leftovers on a rather unique broadcast the Wolves are putting together Sunday. Judd, you have the floor:
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The Timberwolves will turn to social media outlets during a special telecast Sunday in hopes of engaging a fan base that often has had little reason to watch games.
Ted Johnson, the team's senior vice president of marketing and communications, said the Wolves' game at 6 p.m. Sunday against Oklahoma City at Target Center will be aired as a three-hour, commercial free-telecast on KSTC (Ch. 45) in which several forms of social networking will be used to get fans involved.
The game hadn't previously been on the team's TV schedule and will serve as a way to promote an advertising campaign for 2010-11 season tickets that will begin Monday. "We have talked to people at the league and they have never heard any team who has done anything like this to this extent, integrating all social networking platforms," Johnson said.
Tom Hanneman and Jim Petersen, the Wolves' regular TV team, will call the game and will be joined various guests, including Wolves owner Glen Taylor and David Kahn, the team's president of basketball operations. The game will be shown in its entirety but fans will be able to participate through Timberwolves.com, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and text messages.
For instance, the Wolves will have fans submit YouTube videos of themselves telling Kahn whom they feel the team should draft. The Wolves will use their Facebook page for a trivia contest and also plan a Tweetup that they will advertise on their Twitter page in the coming days and then devote a section to those fans. The Wolves' website will be the site of live web chats in which questions can be asked of Taylor and Kahn.
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We have a feeling there are plenty of RandBallers (or ZulgadBallers) who could get out ahead of this with some pretty good questions and/or videos. We already got in our question for Kahn last week. If anyone would like to hear the audio of the exchange, drop us an e-mail sometime.
