Scouting the Crowd – How Marketers are Redefining Sports Fans

www.tourterraba.com (Our Costa Rican tour website)

“Backpacker Bob, Professor Penny, Momma Mary, Single Steve.”  My grad school professor read aloud the list of characters as we sat in a Costa Rican restaurant preparing for our trip home to the States last January.  They would be our fictional audiences for a website we would have two weeks to develop and they sounded to me like something out of a children’s book.  

            In the marketing world we were told they are called personas, and the idea is simple.  Create real life characters for each target market of consumers that might be interested in our “tour Costa Rica with an indigenous tribe” website, with clear needs, desires, and interests and figure out how to effectively market to each.  While the gimmicky character names and stories resulted in a few eye rolls initially, they became an effective tool as time went on for why every decision we made mattered.  Would we need a website responsive to mobile?  Yes, Backpacker Bob would only be able to access our content via a smartphone.  Would we want video content on the site?  Yes, Single Steve would want to show his friends the cool waterfalls and rappelling activities available.  Would we need a questions and answers section?  Yes, Momma Mary would want to know things like safety, nearest hospitals, and what to bring before loading her kids in the car.  Each persona encouraged our team to think of the needs of its represented audience and how to improve the overall experience of our site.

instagram.com/brooklyn_hun

  I hadn’t thought much about the use of personas since my role as marketing lead in Costa Rica, that is until this week, when I traveled to Tampa to visit with Emily Miller, in-game entertainment coordinator for the Tampa Bay Rays.  During our discussion about the great work the Rays have done in their small market to get fans in the seats and create an advanced inner stadium experience, Emily brought up personas as clutch to the baseball marketing business.  “Pat Parent, Fred Fanatic, Sally Socialite,” the names brought a smile, reminiscent of my time in Costa Rica, only here they were the basis for every marketing decision at the Rays.   

Source: http://bit.ly/1nUYUUC

  Fred Fanatic fills most of the weekday attendance, his passion for the game frees the clubhouse from providing extra frills.  He’s a stats reading, play watching, score-keeping traditionalist whose love for baseball brings him to the stadium as often as he can.  Access to game recaps, scores for other concurrent games, and materials on the history of the team, as well as the in-stadium Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame, and season ticket packages are provided by the Rays to keep Fred returning weekly if not nightly. 

Source: http://bit.ly/1fVukQV

  Sally Socialite represents the young professional. She appreciates a ballgame for networking, time with friends, or even just an evening out.  She wants and expects to stay connected to her social networks via her smartphone while at the ballpark, and whether it’s a date night or a girls’ night out, she looks for other concession/merchandise specials and outside entertainment to maintain her interest.  For this demographic the Rays have embraced social media with fan-generated content, check-ins, “tweet ups,” free t-shirts, and company sponsored events.  The organization was also the first to extend the Major League Baseball experience to include an after the game concert series culminating in a more lucrative night out package.
 

Source: J. Meric/Getty Images

Finally, Pat Parent seeks something affordable, fun, and engaging for her kids.  She looks for good deals, family-friendly activities, and experiences her kids will enjoy.  The Rays have reached out to this demographic on Sundays, with kid centered activities for a whole day at the park with group deals for parking, autographs, promotional gifts for kids, popular mascot involvement including a team created DJ Kitty character, opportunities for kids to run the bases after the game, and kid-centric in stadium activities.

Personas have become an easy tool for marketers to remind the rest of the organization who the target markets are and why the strategies they’ve implemented will be effective.  They can be transferable to any business or industry and while they may seem a bit rudimentary they allow the organization to think from the prospective of a representative group member about what his or her demographic's needs might be and how to target content, products, and sales calls in a far less overwhelming way than considering every individual customer.  Consider utilizing these tools when presenting to executives, they are easy to recall, visually entertaining, and often an effective brainstorming tool to encourage conversation and strategic thinking about ways to reach more customers in more unique ways.  Do you use personas in your industry?  Are they successful?  Let me know!

2013: A LOOK BACK IN SPORTS - PART 6 - NCAA FOOTBALL

 Continuing last week's coverage, I take a look this week at Nielsen's data on sports fans in 2013 focusing on the latest findings on NCAA football.  You can read the full-summarized report here: http://bit.ly/1fT9KVa.  I've read through it and here are some of the most interesting facts from the past year:

Source: http://bit.ly/1ppC8j4

The changing leaves, the crisp air, the endless pumpkin baked goods, for many these images call to mind autumn and with those thoughts also come dreams of a college football championship season.  A record thirty-one NCAA football games aired nationally in 2013, not even counting the bowl games, compared to only twenty-two games in 2012.  This was in large part due to a dominate SEC division, Florida State’s catapult to fame run in the ACC, and strong showings by Michigan State and Ohio State in the Big 10.  The games drew over 5 million viewers on average, while the 2014 BCS National Championship had over 25 million viewers dialed in to watch the battle between Auburn and Florida State.  Fans took to Twitter as well, with 4.4 million tweets by 1.2 million unique authors flooding the Twitter airwaves during that time, a 400 thousands tweet rise from 2012. 

Source: http://bit.ly/1iRBGdp

• Florida State may have broken the SEC’s seven consecutive BCS championships, but the conference enjoyed another banner year having the most viewed college football games of the 2013 season with 9.7 million on average tuning in for the top 10 nationally televised regular season games involving a team from the SEC.
• The Big-10 brings in the second largest audience with an average of 7 million watching their teams compete.
• Top NCAA football advertiser: AT&T Wireless 
• NCAA football fans are 18% more likely than the average U.S. adult to have life insurance and 24% more like to belong to a health club.
• The average NCAA Bowl Game viewer is most likely to be a white male aged 55+ who makes $20,000 -$40,000 annually.
• The top storylines in the 2013 NCAA football regular season included Alabama holding the top spot in the polls until the final week of the season, Auburn and Missouri’s resurgence, and “Johnny Football” lighting up the scoreboard for the Aggies. 



Source: http://bit.ly/1eC8DsE

• The top two local fan bases with most-devoted fan bases saw the percentages of their population having watched, attended, or listened to the team in the past 12 months clock in at over 60%.  The top two spots were so close in fact, only one percentage point separated first from second place.
•  The Alabama Crimson Tide’s local fan base in Birmingham took second place with 65% of the population faithful and dedicated to the organization. The top honors however, landed with fans in Columbus, where 66% of the population stands behind the Ohio State Buckeyes.

Social Media Shenanigans – Roundtable Discussion with Collegiate Sports Information Directors

The University of Kansas bans football team from Twitter during the season

“It’s funny, if you pitch it to the media, they’ll talk about how horrible it is.  Two or three years ago social media was horrible because student-athletes were putting dumb things on the Internet.  Well now, it’s horrible because people are saying mean things to them.  They’re trying to get student-athletes off of it...even if you try to shut them down, they can’t, we’re all too addicted to social media, we can’t stop using it.”  

 It was the words of Kevin DeShazo, a social media expert on training collegiate athletes on how to use social media platforms effectively, and it was a valid point.  In the past ten years since the internet gave birth to Facebook, social media use has skyrocketed, paving the way for one successful social media company after another to earn a fortune with services offering everything from photo and link sharing to chat messaging and miniaturized video entertainment.  Checking or updating social media has become routine for many, no less ingrained in their daily activity as drinking a cup of coffee each morning.  Within that rise, student-athletes have flocked to these tools, proudly sharing their day-to-day routines and team allegiances to the masses.  DeShazo’s infographic is telling; cultivated from surveys and data from collegiate athletes around the country, it paints a clear picture of just how engrained these tools are in a typical student-athlete’s life.

http://www.fieldhousemedia.net/blog/social-media-use-of-student-athletes-infographic

But whose responsibility is it to oversee these accounts while the media circle like vultures around the online feeding ground looking for any missteps or breaking news?  Who is tasked with supervising student-athletes on building positive representations of themselves and the universities they play for while they're constantly online?  For many schools that job falls in the hands of the athletic department administration.  “The sports information directors, those are the people I feel the worse for,” DeShazo stressed, “being an SID is overwhelming enough and then you add all these new responsibilities to it, it’s a different game.  They were just told to be the social media person because they had a Twitter account and so they’re the ones kind of in charge, and they’re overwhelmed…it was one thing when it was just Facebook, but now it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Snapchat, and all these other platforms almost overnight.”

I started to wonder what it's like for these sports information directors and associate athlete directors, heralded with new responsibilities in an office already moving constant communications out the door from game recaps and event schedules to press releases and media interviews, now assigned to managing news outlets eager for information while coaching their athletes on appropriate university standards online.  So I started calling around to hear what the job is like these days, what the strategies are for social media education, and how schools are managing this constantly evolving scene both at the institution level and via the actions of its 18-22 year old athletes.  A white paper detailing strategies for higher learning institutions on how to handle student-athlete social media education is in the works.  In the meantime, here’s a little of what I heard.

On Operating in a Digital World…“The number one thing that it’s done is we now operate in a 24-hour news cycle.  As recently as just a few years ago we could hold off stories, we could give them to newspapers to run for tomorrow morning’s paper if we had a breaking story, that’s just not the case anymore.  If I tried to give something of a breaking nature to the newspaper and asked them to hold it they’d laugh at me.”  - Assistant Athletics Director Mike Flynn, Appalachian State University 

On Adjusting the Department’s Role….“I think social media is great for institutions and it certainly has changed the way we work.  Even in 2010 we were doing nothing with social media, except on occasion we might put out on Twitter if a kid set a record or something like that.  To where in 2013, I had six to seven people dedicated to social media at each home football game.  So it certainly has had a drastic change in how we do our job.”  - Sports Information Director, Steve Shutt, Wake Forest University

On Sharing Social Media Responsibilities…“We try to keep an eye on our kids on social media, we don’t have anybody; we’re a two and a half person shop right now.  Basically our view on social media with our athletes is we try to put a lot of the responsibility with our students.  At the start of every season we’ll give the speech about social media responsibility and we’ll try and go in the summer and see what’s out there and review and revisit everything we’re teaching.  Basically our policy is we let the kids regulate themselves, however if we see something that is unacceptable we’ll come in and we’ll take care of it.”  - Sports Information Director Matt Turk, California State University Bakersfield

On Student-Athlete Education vs. Social Media Policies...“We did not feel that it was the right thing to do to create a policy.  It didn’t make any sense to have a subset of the student body be held to a policy when their classmates, that don’t happen to be athletes, are under no such policy.  So not having a policy kind of led us to our next avenue, taking the approach of education and trying to make the student-athletes aware of what’s out there and best practices.  We created a teaching tool, a presentation we give, and we engage with our athletes, we want them to follow the official accounts for their sports, and we can follow them back and offer assistance and guidance if a red flag goes up.”   - Assistant Director of Athletics Art Chase, Duke University

On the Bigger Social Media Picture…“I focus more on teaching the understanding that you’re now part of a bigger brand.  When you signed on to play here, you signed up to be a Colorado Buffalo…it’s about understanding that you’re more than just yourself.  We try not to make it a ‘you can’t do this, and you can’t do that’ because I think they kind of shut off when you do that.  It’s also really rewarding for me that we have some really good cases by the time they’re juniors or seniors of a couple kids really getting it and understanding it and having really good examples for us to show all the new kids coming in.”  - Associate Sports Information Director, Curtis Snyder, University of Colorado Boulder

Retweets, Viral Videos, & Fan Followings: Collegiate Athletes in the Digital World

 “Go to Google and search ‘kicked off team and Twitter’ and you’ll have 300,000 hits in less than a second pop up,” the University of Colorado Boulder’s associate sports information director Curtis Snyder said to me when asked about the negative consequences of student-athletes using social media.  The conversation arose as part of a white paper I was developing on successful strategies for college/university athletic departments to use in approaching social media training with their student-athletes, and the topic was one in which many in sports have taken a position. 

 

Ohio State's backup quarterback Cardale Jones before & after 

disciplinary suspension for inappropriate tweets

 Some schools have outright banned the use of social media among student-athletes whether on select teams or as a whole, including the likes of Villanova and Mississippi State, as well as the universities of Miami, South Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, and Florida State to name just a few, believing it does more harm than good.  The University of Louisville coach Rick Pitino gave his rather outspoken opinion in support of his basketball team's Twitter ban at the end of February going so far as to call social media “poison,” and that anyone who reads it as “not all there,” both at a news conference and on an appearance on ESPN Radio’s Mike and Mike.  

FOX Sports Live post news conference Tweet

 However, there are many who see social media as an opportunity to engage, to communicate, and to have control over personal reputation and branding.  Kentucky coach John Calipari spoke out on the same “Mike and Mike” show in defense of these digital tools describing the value in their proper use among his student-athletes.  “Twitter is an opportunity -- Facebook is an opportunity -- to say what you feel, to try to pick people up, to try to be positive, to try to add something to society, to try to let people see you transparently. You cannot be defined, if you are on social media, by somebody else,” he continued.  And there are student athletes who have succeeded at making social media an extension of who they are in a positive and encouraging way. 

With March Madness underway and NCAA athletes in the spotlight as they fight their way to a championship title this basketball season, it seems an opportune moment to discuss social media and what fans might be exposed to from their favorite collegiate stars.  So I bring you a rundown on some of the best and the worse moments in collegiate student-athletes and social media history.  You be the judge, should we encourage its use or ban it all together?    

2013: A LOOK BACK IN SPORTS - PART 5 - NCAA BASKETBALL

Continuing last week's coverage, I take a look this week at Nielsen's data on sports fans in 2013 focusing on the latest findings on NCAA basketball.  You can read the full-summarized report here: http://bit.ly/1fT9KVa.  I've read through it and here are some of the most interesting facts from the past year:

 

http://bit.ly/1isPuxm

There’s nothing quite like the excitement and fan participation that surrounds March Madness.  Perhaps it’s the office pools and bracket-ready eagerness that has the viewing audience changing, but the NCAA Tournament’s viewership definitely evolves from the NCAA regular season.  With a 14% hike in female viewers and a 4% hike in households with an income of $100K or more, the sport invites in a new demographic at the start of the tournament.   It’s not only the audience that changes, but rather social media becomes abuzz with a significant number of ravenous, content generating, March Madness fans.  The significant amount of Twitter activity in the 2013 Championship Game between Michigan and Louisville ranked it as the most tweeted about telecast in the month of April.  Here’s the latest and greatest on NCAA basketball thru a look back on 2013.

http://bit.ly/1i434V4

·      NCAA Basketball regular reason viewership took a small loss for the 2012-2013 season with a .2% decrease, however the championship game saw quite the growth in viewership with a 12.3% year to year gain.

·      Top NCAA Basketball advertiser: AT&T Wireless

·      Adults who visit NCAA.com are 59% more likely than the average U.S. adult to have purchased sporting goods in the last six months.

·      The average NCAA Tournament viewer is a likely to be a white male aged 55+ who makes $40,000-$75,000 annually.  However, the next largest income group, those making 100K or more a year, is very close behind.

http://bit.ly/1ejZkdr

·      With some of the strongholds in college basketball resting comfortably in its conference, including the likes of North Carolina and Duke, the ACC has long been thought of as the most popular conference.  But in the 2012-13 regular season the Big 10 topped the rankings in TV viewership with more fans tuning in to see Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, and Ohio State play.

·      On average, three million viewers tuned in for the top 10 nationally televised regular season games involving a team from the Big 10 conference.

http://bit.ly/OcG2jB

·      The top two local fan bases determined by percentages of their population having watched, attended, or listened to the team in the past 12 month, came in at over 50% of the population devoted.  But while the Louisville Cardinals put up strong numbers with 58% of their population showing their support for the team, they'll have to relish in the number two spot.  

·      The Cardinals' local fan base is no match for the number one Kentucky Wildcats, where a whopping 67% of their population is faithful to the organization.

Changing Dynamics: How the Charlotte Bobcats are Taking on A New Identity - Special Guest Charlotte Bobcats Exec Jerome Hubbard

http://bit.ly/1cD8Ac6

To say that the journey of the Charlotte Bobcats over the past few years has been rough, would be putting it lightly.  Despite sizable notoriety at the helm of the organization with owner Michael Jordan hard at work, the Bobcats have faced a losing record season after season.  But there’s a new franchise in the making, a team finding a competitive edge with the acquisition of Al Jefferson alongside a young core of talented players, and a new look that will see the Bobcats donning an old familiar name when they return as the Charlotte Hornets next year.  An Emory University study highlighted Charlotte’s basketball fans as some of the most social media savvy, holding steady at 4^th in the league for most engaged fans only after the NBA’s heaviest hitters (Lakers, Heat, Celtics). Recently news broke about the team’s partnership with 10 Foot Wave, incorporating the company’s FanConnect platform within Time Warner Cable Arena. The technology combines sponsor messaging with live game content, real-time stats, NBA scores and social media delivered to screens throughout the venue.  I sat down with Jerome Hubbard, Communications Coordinator for the Charlotte Bobcats, this week to discuss the new platforms, the exciting re-branding, and the unwavering fan support as the team begins its journey to capturing a new generation of fans.

On the Challenges of the Digital Information Age…"When I first got here our record was 7-59. There’s not much good that’s going to come out of 7-59, it is what it is.  If you’re the Miami Heat and you’re winning games and you’re blowing people out of the water, and you have the best player in the game you don’t really have to worry about information because at the end of the day it’s pretty much everyday the Miami Heat win and why they win.  When you’re dealing with losing, and you’re dealing with people who are tired of losing, who work their tail off and are not seeing the results, then they say that we’re not showing effort, we’re not showing energy, we’re not showing the patience and the due diligence and the hard work, and that’s not right.  So that’s more of a situation that you have to really monitor and that goes to the personal relationships. In the past and even now the personal relationships that you gain with the reporters and the people who are covering the team, whether it’s on the TV side, the radio side, or the print side, those relationships allow you to give them information knowing that they’ll use it fairly and that ultimately they’ll use it in the right way.  If you don’t have those personal skills or that personal relationship then it’s really hard and that to me really makes or breaks a person in this field."

instagram.com/brooklyn_hun

On Resurrecting & Rebranding the Hornets…"There’s certain things about the Hornets that Charlotte loves. Charlotte loves the colors, Charlotte loves the name, Charlotte even loves the mascot.  But you also have to keep in mind at the end of the day that it HAS to be different. We can’t go back to everything that was the Hornets, but we do want to continue to grow and galvanize not only our Bobcats fans, but those Hornets historians who love the Hornets, love the tradition, love everything about the experience when they first came.  You have all of these different moving parts, the official name change, the logo, the mascot, the cheerleaders, the unveiling of our uniforms, all of those different things are strategic and I think we’ve made a concentrated effort to continue to make sure that we maximize every opportunity with each phase that we’re going through.  Everything that we do we want to be an experience.  Unveiling our logo was an event where we had our owner Michael Jordan halftime, really bringing out the logo with former Hornets players with a bunch of fans there screaming, and it was well received, in the same way that it was well received when we applied and were approved for the name change. Hats off to not only the organization, but also the fans that continue to support us.  There’s so much going on and we want to maximize it, whether it’s thru digital, thru a fan experience, or whether it’s just the continued process from start to finish. "

instagram.com/brooklyn_hun

On New Technology in the Arena…"If you look at the NFL, their sales in relation to attendance has decreased over the past couple years and that’s because a lot of people feel as though it’s much more convenient to be in front of the TV where I can watch NFL RedZone and have five different games on at one time and I can monitor not only the one I want to watch, but also what’s going on here, what’s going on there, and how this or that game affects my fantasy league or team.  That truly appeals to fans not only in the NFL, but also in MLB, and also the NBA, so if we can continue to add various elements to our inner arena experience, that may be something that somebody else doesn’t have.  And that may get that one or two or 100 or 200 more individuals attending our games. So you want to continue reinventing the wheel and keep adding elements and hopefully you get to a point where you have the best inner arena experience in the NBA, and even more so than that, just sports in general.  Adding something like the FanConnect or the Technocom business center in our arena, or adding luxury suites and a luxury experience for our suite owners, all of these different things come into play and that’s just added value to our inner arena experience for those that decide to come to our games."

instagram.com/brooklyn_hun

On Developing the Fan Experience…The fans are fans, if a team is losing or winning they’re still going to come out and support. Like the Knicks, they have a loyal fan base, they sell out every game no matter what. Win lose or draw they’re selling out every game and that is a credit to the fans.  We want to make the fan experience great in Charlotte and we’ve done so many things to continue to make sure that the organization and the fan experience at our basketball games and anytime they come to our arena is up to par.  Whether it’s the interaction with the players that they possibly can have pregame, the concession stand, the dance team, the mascot, whether it’s us going out into the community and having giveaways, or even having trivia contests through social media, there’s so many different things that we have done in order to continue to keep our fans engaged, to continue to keep the environment of the games great.  So even if we win or lose, we want people to be able to say, I enjoyed myself at the basketball game, it really was a great experience.  That one-on-one experience that you can get coming to a Bobcats game is something that you really want to hang your hat on.