• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, January 31, 2013

Apparently social media command centers are now A Thing. For the second year in a row, the Super Bowl -- which somehow manages to be the most important sporting event of all time, year after year -- has its own dedicated social media team that will be tweeting and Facebooking and Tumblring and Instagramming and all that stuff all through Super Bowl weekend.

The Social Media Center for Super Bowl XLVII, located above the NFL Media Center in New Orleans’ Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, will employ over 100 volunteers working in shifts to answer questions and disseminate important information about the event and its locale, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The center was set up by FSC Interactive, and is co-directed by Jeremy Cooker, director of marketing and special projects for the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation, and FSC vice-president Tiffany Starnes.

The center is tracking inquiries made within a set geographic radius of the French Quarter using HootSuite. No surprise, one of the most popular lines of inquiry is about food, with one of the most popular sub-categories of questions concerning where to obtain crawfish. On the food front, visitors can turn to EatNowLA.com, a Web site with accompanying app which displays how long customers have to wait to get a table at restaurants throughout the Big Easy.

As noted, this is the second year that the Super Bowl has a dedicated social media command hub. The 2012 Super Bowl XLVI Social Media Center was created by Raidious, an Indianapolis-based digital marketing firm, and was manned by Raidious staffers as well as dozens of student volunteers from Ball State University, Butler University and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.