Nike's Game On Facebook Campaign: Data, Nike+ and Great Photos.

Nike is so good: - terrific Facebook campaign during the NBA Playoffs

- smart experimentation on Twitter with Promoted Tweets

- innovative personalized shopping engine (which now includes licensed products)

- and that doesn't include Nike+ and their terrific / innovative integrations with Path, Facebook and Twitter

Here is yet another great campaign by Nike. In an effort to promote Nike+ ("the future of sport"), Nike took to Facebook and highlighted a barrage of athletes training and collecting data via Nike+ and/or Nike Fuel. Like most of Nike's social work, it's very visual, fun and unique. It is also on brand and tapping into the personal data / gamification theme. Notably, this was also released the day of the NBA Draft - which is driven by similar data analysis.... and many of those athletes will soon be sponsored by Nike.

On Facebook, Nike does a great job of clustering photos into albums - whereas many brands / pages, highlight individual photos.

NBA Launches Player Cam, Facebook Connect for Conference Finals

The NBA clearly has MLB.tv envy...And it's not a bad thing! (now if only the NFL would start experimenting)

I have written before that Major League Baseball is the only major sports league to grasp the web and really innovate with MLB.tv and their successful iPhone App. Well the NBA is starting to test the waters.

During tonight's Conference Finals, viewers can actually follow the game entirely on NBA.com with:

nba-player-cam Four-Way Player Cams - Follow Dwight Howard or Lebron James directly - You can also choose between Robo Cam and Action Cam - Swap audio and customize the tiled screen layout (very much like MLB.tv) - No high definition option - but you can view in full screen

Socialize with Facebook, Twitter & MySpace While watching the in-game player cams, you can login with Facebook, Twitter or MySpace and converse on NBA.com. The integration doesn't look great and is far from YouTube's Facebook Connect implementation, but it's a good first step and, I believe, the first pro league integration of Facebook Connect.

Sponsorship Of course, the experience is ad-supported (by Axe Dry) but the integration is slick and non-intrusive.