Queen’s Football hit big headlines this year, after winning their fourth Vanier Cup and earning the top spot in Canadian University Sport (CIS). Although the hype around our football team is hardly comparable to that of the Super Bowl, a certain feeling of “eventness” was created this season through media attention. More specifically, this “eventness” was created through YouTube videos interviewing Queen’s players. The Queen’s student body then watched these videos and got to know their team. Fans became emotionally invested in the team and through engaging in these interviews also became “informed viewers”. This caused the opportunity for extended engagement, as dedicated fans visited the Gaels website regularly to follow the football team and purchased official football apparel from the Qshop.
One video that really caught my attention was the Queen’s University Rush- Western @ Queen’s. I found this sequence to be very entertaining and humorous as I know a few of the players in the video. This video actually became a hot topic of conversation around campus reaching 3,408 views on YouTube.
As I was now an invested fan myself, I decided to participate in the excitement and make a video of my own. It just so happens that my field hockey team was playing western the upcoming weekend as well, so I created a “mock” football rush video. To my surprise it gained a lot of attention and caused some unexpected controversy. It was meant to be funny and somewhat poke fun at the Western team, but in the end I think it created more rivalry between Queen’s and Western. When we played Western the following weekend I heard numerous comments on the field about the video and later learned that the whole team had already seen my mocumentary.
I guess these days we really do need to be careful about what we put on the internet and how people may create misconceptions. In this case it was all good humour, but it was a good reminder of just how fast digital WOM (word of mouth) is.
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