CFL Personalities to ‘Talk’ Football on Halifax-Made Social Media Platform
HALIFAX – A new Halifax-made social media platform just got a huge boost in name recognition, which will likely drive up subscribers. ililli (pronounced I-Lilly), a platform where users upload audio files and can talk to their audience, now have prominent football media personalities talking about the CFL on the site.
The list is a who’s-who of CFL analysts across the country, including such names as Dave Naylor, Jeff Hamilton, Rod Pedersen, Darrin Bauming, Farhan Lilji, Danny Austin, Marshall Ferguson, Dave Campbell, Aaron Korolnek, Mike Mitchell, and Matthew Scianetti.
The conversations about CFL football on ililli this season will be a part of the platforms #TalkMore events.
“Every part of the country is covered, and the country as a whole is covered,” says ililli founder Charles Benaiah. “I think we have a great group that covers (the CFL) from a lot of different angles.”
Out of the media personalities, it was TSN’s Dave Naylor who pushed for the group to hop onto the ililli platform. Benaiah reached out to Naylor in the early days of the platform and encouraged him to get involved.
“Dave Naylor was one of the first people jump on ililli,” says Benaiah. He’s probably been our most vocal advocate.”
“He and I started talking about once or twice a week.”
Naylor and Benaiah were actually high school friends more than 30 years ago. In 1985, the two tried to create a curling video game on Benaiah’s Atari 800 computer.
“This is an accurate description, and a perfect metaphor – we never got out of the hack (a foothold in curling),” said Naylor in an interview with Huddle.
“You could pick up the stone and toss it, and the rock kind of disappeared and went into the abyss.”
The two hadn’t spoken since their high school days, until this past spring when Benaiah told Naylor about ililli. After using the platform himself, Naylor reached out to his football colleagues to get them onboard as well.
One thing Naylor enjoys about ililli is how it allows the user to take advantage of tone and emphasis when making a post. This is something that often gets lost in short posts on Twitter. He believes ililli is a great place to talk about sports opinions because of such advantages.
“On twitter you can misinterpreted because there’s no way to express tone. If you’re trying to be funny, or trying to be sarcastic, a lot of times that stuff gets lost,” says Naylor.
For Benaiah, it’s important to get good sports talkers onto his platform. Afterall, there are few things more entertaining than listening to someone passionate about sport giving their opinions verbally.
“When you think about ‘talk radio,’ it’s almost impossible to use that phrase without saying ‘sports talk radio,’” says Benaiah.
“Almost everyone is a fan of a team, or a player, or sport, and almost everyone has an opinion all the time. So, you want to either to hear people’s opinion or have an outlet for those opinions.”
“From that perspective, ililli is a gamechanger-no pun intended.”
ililli was launched in June and was created by Benaiah’s company Watzan, which provides content curation for people in the pharmaceutical and medical industry.
Given its foundation, it’s no surprise many users on ililli are doctors or involved in the medical industry. It’s a great resource for people to hear experts converse about medical issues.
But Benaiah knows that a diversity of topics, and views, are important for any social media platforms. So, he is happy to see sports and other areas of interest are taking off on ililli.
In June the platform had just 150 users – it’s now 10-times that number nearly three months later.
“We’re pretty excited about the diversity of content that’s there,” says Benaiah. “It’s our job to identity areas that can create rapid growth, and we definitely think sports is one of them.”
ililli has also been growing its revenue sources through ads and, as a result, the workforce for the platform has tripled since June.
Now, Benaiah is trying to convince people in the foodie world to hop onto the talk platform. Every day, countless photos of delicious food is posted to social media. Now, can you imagine how delicious a receipt would sound while being read aloud?
“Talking about food makes a lot of sense,” says Benaiah. “People will take a picture of their food and put it on Pintrest, and it’ll be really great to be able to talk about that.”