Sports 2.0 webinar 0802v.22

Conversational Sports Marketing: Leveraging your Social Network to Fire-Up your Team’s Brand and Ignite Fan Engagement

Justin Chase
Social Media Strategist

Justin ChaseSocial Media Strategist
5+ yrs of experience building social strategies for Fortune 500 companies
Proven social media thought leader
Responsible for social strategy and implementation guidelines that delivered 1MM+ Facebook fans in under a month
Expert in turning self-contained websites into full socially-enabled experiences

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Agenda
KickApps Overview
The Evolution of Social in Sports
The Importance of an Integrated Social Strategy
Creating a Forum for Your Fans
Use Game Day for Activation
The KickApps Solution
How to Monetize Your Community

What is KickApps?
TECHNOLOGY
Robust platform to build
custom social experiences
SERVICE
Strategy & services to maximize your social impact

KickApps Clients
Football
Basketball
Hockey
Other
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Being a sports fan isn’t a solitary experience Sports are meant to be enjoyed in groupsSports are inherently social…

A fans natural behavior OFFLINE…
1.) Identify
2.) Support
3.) Shout-Out
4.) Congregate
5.) Camaraderie
6.) Validate

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Mirrors a member’s behavior
ONLINE…Within a fan driven community

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Identify
Support
Shout Out
Congregate
Camaraderie
Validation

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The Sports News Cycle Has Shortened
Real Time
Next Day
Same Day
Hours
NATIONALNEWS
SPORTSMEDIA
SOCIAL MEDIA
INTERNET

Now fans get their latest sports updates directly from the athletes in real time – and it’s because of this…
Social is KING!!!
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We are all witnesses…To the most-hyped, highest anticipated, most covered, free agency in all of sports – period.
And the Social Revolution
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LeBron’s free agency sparked a national social movement…the likes of which the world has never seen. In New York a facebook page was erected and entitled C’MonLebron. This page literally embodied a city-wide social movement to bring LeBron to the Big Apple.
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Q: But why doesn’t anyone remember Kobe’s decision? Just six years ago, when Kobe decided to test his value in the free agency market, a very similar situation ensued. But how come no one remembers?
A: The Adoption of SOCIAL!
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Now Athletes control the media.
Twitter, Facebook and Blogs have broken down the wall between the fan and athlete.

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Fans have unprecedented access to athletes 24/7. Shaq doesn’t use a ghost writer for any of his tweets. Misspellings and all its 100% Shaq. This authenticity is one of the reasons that athletes are so popular in the social space.

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LeBron started a Twitter account 2 days before he was scheduled to make “The Decision” and just three tweets later, LeBron had amassed almost 300k fans, netting more than 98k fans per tweet.

Now as fans have access to players like never before.
Why not promote and facilitate access to the players on your team?
So you control the interaction.
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HOW?
Weekly tweets from your players
Community player blogs
Position based groups
Team facebook pages cross pollinated with content from domain
Personalized video responses from players to fan questions
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This means that
we as teams…
Facilitate flow of conversation
Create relevant, authentic and official destinations
Need to leverage the individual athlete’s celebrity
Use earned media to generate publicity
Have an integrated social media strategy

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Operating without a social strategy… is like walking a tightrope without a net
52% of social marketers are operating without a game plan
Those with a plan find it doesn’t fit all their needs
71% of companies who have a plan acknowledge it’s only short term
*May 2010 Digital Brand Expressions, “Social Media without a Parachute.” excerpt taken from eMarketer, June 21st , 2010

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Most Brands… Don’t Have an Integrated Social Strategy
52% of social marketers operate without a game plan
Those with a plan find it doesn’t fit all their needs
71% of companies with a plan acknowledge it’s only short term
Why?
*May 2010 Digital Brand Expressions, “Social Media without a Parachute.” excerpt taken from eMarketer, June 21st , 2010

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The answer to the question “Why did brands jump in so quickly without a strategy,” is all brands that didn’t have the luxury of being early adopters – found themselves in a race to break into the space for fear of being left behind.

As brands dove-in head first, they were not considering best practices, they were simply thinking about acquisition and forgetting about high engagement and social sustainability

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Use KickApps As Your Social Hub
Boost Cross-Channel Engagement
Across Your Social Network

Levels of Fan Engagement
High
Mid
Low
Passive – Consumption Only
Most Brands are stuck here

A KickApps fan page facilitates high engagement user behavior. LoriAnn reached MVP status through the points and levels system and has over 40k views

With fans like Lori Ann creating more robust full featured profiles – teams are strengthening inter-community identification and getting more valuable, relevant fan data that can be repurposed

This also means you can deliver more relevant content feeds through User Aware Widgets. UAWs are KickApps widgets that pull feeds from your fan’s profile or social graph to populate themselves with content relevant to that specific fan, such as, local promotions, regional offers, local events etc.
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LoriAnnSUPERFAN!
The possibilities of the KA Fan Page
Really the possibilities are endless but the thing to focus on is the idea that a social experience can be personalized. You can serve up content that is relevant to a specific fan which then can be pushed out across that fan’s social network

The KickApps webcam video response tool allows players to respond via webcam to fan questions. These are real authentic minimally produced webcam videos that athletes on your team can record in seconds.
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You can also take existing video on domain and widgetize it in the KickApps widget studio. The widget studio lets you create fully customizable widgets that can be syndicated to your social web. This is an example of a kickapps video widget on the sixflags domain that was embedded directly on facebook within a custom tab.

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So We Know…
The KickApps platform is ideal for building or growing your team’s community
A robust fan page enables fans to express themselves
Smarter profiles feed smarter widgets
A community on domain doesn’t detract from the rest of your social network

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Every team has millions of fans…
Why aren’t they members of your community?
*

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Every major sports team
has millions of “traditional” fans.
So how can you convert those traditional fans to fans of your social community?
*

If you build it…They will come…
This is not to say that if you create a social destination fans will follow – you need to create that unique official experience that fans are not going to get elsewhere
*
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Fans want to express themselves. Fans want to be heard.
Teams that don’t create a forum, for fans to interact, contribute and participate, are leaving the door open for fans to create the experience on their own
AND THEY WILL!
*
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Building Social Brand Affinity. Create a community destination that your biggest fans can’t ignore. Target key influencers first and the causal fans will follow – Ok, so now that I’ve built my social community, what now? How can I promote it?

.
*

Use game day for activation…One of the best ways to build a strong social campaign is through offline activation.
Brands will invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in agencies or PR firms to manage these activations…But you don’t have to
Because you already have dozens of free activations.
Every home game = An Activation
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So how do you activate?
Social Tailgates – take a traditional offline tailgate and make it a social event
Incentivize check-ins – reward online fans for checking in offline
Reward UGC–offer rewards such as autographed apparel for the user with the best athlete photo, painted face, crazy hair, etc.
Mascot Participation – get your mascots and cheerleaders involved in offline activations
Community Meetups– for a simpler activation have various checkins around your stadium for community members, but you take their pictures and upload them to the community.
Player Cameos –Get players to greetyour community members
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Post online community content EVERYWHERE!
Within your stadium, arena, park or venue you need to make sure you are posting your community content everywhere
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Take an arena for example…Content can live on a scoreboard…
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Or a ticket stub….
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Or signage…
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So now we know…
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That by using game day as activation and your stadium for earned media you can grow and promote your community with no massive traditional media buys. Ok great – so now you have grown a large community. Your fans are engaged as you’ve created a sustainable social experience with exclusive content - So what now ?
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So how can you monetize your teams' social community?

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Have you ever been to a stadium
and not seen an advertisement?

Never?
Maybe in high school?
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You control the space.
You shape sponsor messaging.
You control the merchandizing.

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Since you are inspiring, nurturing and facilitating the flow of conversation, you have a finger on the pulse of the community consumer. This means that by monitoring and engaging in the conversation, you can optimize the merchandise and target different consumer groups within the community.

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If you can become the go-to source for news, tweets, player content, customized video response, blogs & profiles - your fans are going to view your social community as invaluable - fans by nature are loyal, and once this occurs its proven that they will show their loyalty by being high-engagement, high- impact and high-UGC generating fans.

Contact Information Justin Chase Social Media Strategist KickApps JCHASE@KICKAPPS.COM212.730.4556

Sports 2.0 webinar 0802v.22

by KickApps on Aug 02, 2010

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Sports 2.0 webinar 0802v.22 — Presentation Transcript

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