The National Basketball Association (NBA) had a special treat for its fans during the 2012 Olympic Games in London. For 10 intense days, the Jubilee Hall gym, located in the heart of Covent Garden, became the NBA House.

Over 53,000 fans visited the NBA House in person and millions of supporters followed it online. The unique brand experience, created by Ignite-London, gave guests the chance to meet their basketball idols; try their hand at basketball and other interactive games; and talk to other fans and stars using Cisco Telepresence. It also included a shop, a Playstation Vita area and a VIP area.

But the NBA House also harnessed the power of social media, thanks to an interactive social media wall developed by Touchez.

Darrell McLennan-Fordyce, senior director of marketing communications EMEA says: “We embrace new media all the time. Communicating with our fans is essential for us and social media gives us the right platform to do so.

“The NBA was founded back in 1946 in North America. Now with fans all over the world we are always looking for new ways to connect. Currently we have over 5 million followers on Twitter. Touchez’s social media video wall allows us to showcase how big our conversation is.”

Bart Kamp, director of Touchez comments: “When Ignite asked us to create a multitouch video wall for its social media activity at NBA House we knew it was going to be a great project. We chose to visualise a large amount of data by using the iconic NBA basketball, which rotated like the world and around it, it would show 1000 tweets with the avatar of each tweeter on display.

In screensaver mode the wall would display #nba and #nbahouse tweets in real time, which encouraged many visitors to tweet their own pictures on the wall again.

People could touch the screen to navigate and spin the ball, open the tweets and view them in a new window.”

Located just by the entrance of the NBA House, Touchez social media wall was a combination of four 55” slim bezel NEC screens with a bespoke 110” 32 touch points multitouch powdered coated steel screen overlay to allow the interaction with visitors.

“We specialise in touch interactive solutions,” explains Kamp, “This goes from the sale and rental of large multitouch screens and overlays, to software that is tailored for the client. In this case we used flash for the design and touch interactivity, and our data base is cloud based as the NBA wishes to use it whenever wherever’’

The NBA House Facebook page reached over 1 million people during the event.

The NBA House was a very successful event, likely to be repeated in other locations around the world. Meanwhile the Social Media Wall is already making other rounds with the NBA…

Go Check Out the Photos of the Social Media Wall from another NBA event