Aug. 5, 2010

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon State Athletics has announced the addition of podcasts to osubeavers.com as the newest social media tool to allow fans to follow the Beavers.

Podcasts will allow fans to hear and see interviews with their favorite players and coaches from various Oregon State athletic teams. Currently, to kick off the introduction of the podcast, fans can listen to football head coach Mike Riley’s roundtable interview with members of the media from earlier this week.

To visit the podcast page, visit osubeavers.com and select “podcasts” from the pulldown menu called “Fan Zone.” For those unfamiliar with podcasts, the social media tool allows users to subscribe to the podcast free of charge through iTunes. When new audio or video is added, the podcast downloads automatically to the users’ iTunes account and can be placed on any music player compatible with iTunes.

Fans also have the ability to download an mp3 from the web site without using iTunes and can also set up an RSS feed that will notify them when new content is added.

During football season, fans will see new content added such as interviews with players and coaches, and post-practice wrap-ups from Riley. Others sports may add interviews and sound bites.

Football Twitter, Baseball Facebook added

Podcasts are not the only social media additions for Oregon State Athletics recently. A new football Twitter page has been added to the family, and can be accessed and followed by visiting www.Twitter.com/OSUBeaversFB. For those fans who already follow Coach Riley, the new football Twitter has been created to give additional information on the program and will be particularly active on gamedays, providing Tweets regarding the score, big plays and any other pertinent information.

Also, baseball has added its own Facebook page that can be accessed by visiting www.facebook.com/OregonStateBaseball. The page is in addition to baseball’s Twitter page, at www.twitter.com/beaver_baseball, and which has nearly 700 followers. The Facebook page will give fans another opportunity to follow Oregon State baseball with links and photos.

The two additions complement an already great slate of social media for OSU Athletic teams. To see a complete list of social media sites, visit the social media page under the “Fan Zone” dropdown on osubeavers.com. Check back often as other sports may add social media in the future.

Schedule Downloads still available

OSU Athletics introduced schedule downloads that users could utilize to sync to their BlackBerrys and other smart phones last year. That page is still active, with the football schedule available for download now (note, there are only a limited number of game times for football as of today and this file will be updated as new times are announced). Other fall sports will be added in the coming days to enable fans to better follow their favorite Oregon State teams.

To visit the schedule downloads page, go to “schedule downloads” under the Fan Zone dropdown on osubeavers.com. A set of instructions on how to use the files is available there.