Episode 263 Snippets: Aaron Eisman of Eisman Digital Consulting

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 263 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Miller Yoho, Director of Communications and Marketing
for the Charlotte Sports Foundation, which runs the Duke’s Mayo
Bowl and the Jumpan Invitational, among other events..
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast platforms
and at www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 263: Aaron Eisman

Aaron’s Career Path
“I'm from Los Angeles. I grew up more Dodgers; not Lakers, but Clippers, and I
didn't really watch much hockey. And actually, I was more of a Broncos fan than
any California team because John Elway and his blond hair and my first football
game in the late 90s was watching him play. So I grew up a big sports fan. That's
how my dad, my brother and I bonded growing up. And I'd read the LA Times
sports section, so I thought one day I'd go to journalism school and become a
sports writer for the LA Times. That was the dream and goal. Things changed
from 2009 to 2013. I went to college and started to become more digitally
friendly, doing blogging and podcasting — it wasn't podcast, it was more like
online radio. And sportswriting was still there, but it was shorter writing and, you
know, writing for tweets and less characters, writing for captions on Facebook, all
that stuff for myself.

“Then when I came out of college, I spent my next three jobs, and in total I
spent 11 years, in sports social media. I spent time at Turner Sports for a
year, was part of their first social media team. I then went to Bleacher
Report for three years and helped run social media for them. And then I
moved back home to Los Angeles to work for the NFL and helped run NFL
Network's social media. Currently, for the last four and a half years, I've
been running my own social media agency, mainly athletes and sports
agencies I've been helping, but ultimately we do random projects. We have
sports tech startups, apps, I've worked with a lawyer and I've worked with a
former dog TV star. I mean, we've had some cool projects, and it's been fun
and I'm excited to share more today.”

On developing his social media foundation and guiding principles
“I think early on in social media, you know, 2014-2015 when I was getting out of college
and starting my career as a part of Turner Sports, it was just let's get content out there.
It was let's get things that are cool that we were doing at NBA on TNT, NBA, TV, March
Madness, I launched PGA social, PGA Instagram for them, and I did some cool things
there. But it was very much — there's this quote that I have in my book from my mentor
at Turner Sports, Morgan Dewan, and she said content was dripping off the walls and
we just needed people that were endemic to the space. I think it's what she said. It was
just cool because it was just like, yeah, me and eight other recent college graduates all
came in there, we're all 21, 22, 23 (years-old) and we all helped contribute to like
thousands if not billions of video views, new followers, all that stuff for those brands
that I mentioned. And it was just about pushing out content and having fun with it, and
then it slowly turns into a competition aspect.

“When I was a Bleacher Report, it was more let's beat out ESPN and
Barstool Sports and all these other brands. And how do we do that? We do
it by hiring good talent in-house and creating the best content, going viral,
all that stuff. That was cool to do that there, and then NFL Network it was,
like, let's be complimentary to the NFL. Let's still promote the NFL
Network and have fun with it, but also we're under the shield and we'll be
conservative in ways; we can't make fun of the refs or Roger Goodell or this
or that. You know, that was a no no. But we can still have fun with Kay
Adams when she was she was on; we would do segments with her on social
media. Deion Sanders had his own show for like a season, which was fun to
riff off and do stuff there, but it was more just an engagement play.

“But yeah, throughout the years it was more about, like, let's push up good
content because content is king to me. And Bill Gates said that in the mid
90s he wrote an essay about it that I just love. Then later on about analytics
and getting the right numbers. And lately it's been like influencers and
content creators. Like, that wasn't a thing to me until at least 2016, 2017,
and now it's a big deal. So the power of the influencer, the power of the
authenticity of the person or whoever's running the account and the voice
is what's big now these days.”

“Engagement rate I think was a cool metric back then. I think it still is a
cool metric because like, yeah, I get 20% engagement rate on an NBA on
TNT post, whether it's on Facebook or Twitter, or any other platform.
Instagram started to become more of a thing in 2015 for us, but it was
yeah, I mean, there's different metrics, and KPIs always change and differ,
but the competition has only grown up with the more accounts that have
built up and the more random niche account that can just go viral that's
not a main, big media staple or big account. It's like these smaller accounts
these days that can go from 0 to 200,000 followers very quickly because
they just post good content. And that just didn't happen back then. It was
always, you have to be a name brand in 2014 to 2016-2017 to have a good
presence. And things change over time, obviously.”

On the key to Bleacher Report’s social media mastery early on
“I think it was this mixture of quantity versus quality aspect. Early on in Twitter days, when
you couldn't have as many characters and when you couldn’t put a video or photo [on a
tweet] — when that changed, things changed very quickly. And a lot of it was the quantity
aspect was let's get breaking news up before ESPN, or we got a scoop, let's get it out there
before anyone else hits it; like it's a random reporter, be as quick as possible. I mean, I
remember the day that Kevin Durant did the whole Players Tribune thing saying he's going
to the Warriors. That was on July 4th and there was only like ten people working at the
Bleacher Report office in New York City that day, and I was the one controlling social media,
and I had to read the article and say, okay, he's going to the Warriors, let me just tweet out
that he's going to the Warriors because Players Tribune didn't, they said [to go] read the
article because they wanted the site view. Bleacher Report was one of the first ones to tweet
that out, because I wanted to be competitive and I said to my bosses, like, let's go with it
quick, but before ESPN and other people get a hold of this news. So that's what we did.

“Breaking news had to be quicker than everyone else. We had to beat out
all the competitors. The quality play, which was what Bleacher Report was
known for, is, you know, they used to have this firm and I haven't talked
about this in a while. They call this their social programing team and social
moments team. Social programing team was what I was on for most of my
career at Bleacher Report, just constantly getting out news articles from
Bleacher Report, promoting the podcast, doing things of that nature and
then posting some paid social and other things that people would create.

“But the Social Moments team was the viral meme team, I guess you could
say. It was a team of about like ten, 12 people literally sitting in a room a
couple times a week and they would just think of viral moments or they
would create an idea before it happened. Like, if the Cubs are going to win
the World Series, what are we going to do social media-wise to make it look
really exciting and dope?...They called it going ‘vi’ and going vi is going
viral, just shortened down. So some of them would be like, ‘Oh, did you see,
did you see me the other day going vi?’ They were competitive with each
other. They would go against each other and it'd be like, ‘Oh, my idea went
vi the other day’ and then my idea is doing really well or my idea stunk and
they would not make fun of the person, but they would say, ‘Oh, we
thought it was going to go viral, but it didn't.’

“So it was kind of this we were in our own lane. Some guy said to me, and
for my book, he was part of that team, he was like, we were playing chess
and we were always steps ahead of the competition. We were always
getting ready to do checkmate while they were just starting their
chessboard, you know? So we already knew the game plan of what needed
to go viral and what was needed to make Bleacher Report what it is today.
And I think we did a good [job]; Iand, you know, [it was] a big team. I
mean, it's not just me, it's like ten, 15 other people that put it together and
put out some great content and you know, they've reaped the rewards and
they probably made millions off of social media because of what we built in
the mid 2010s. So I'm appreciative of that.”

“It was constantly being willing to think ahead of the competition, think
different than the competition, think more creatively than the competition
because that's how it was. And nowadays it's more than just you're
competing against sports media companies, as a Bleacher Report is, you're
competing against, like, the attention habits, the consumption habits, the
audience, you're competing against every account…everyone's scrolling and
this kind of idea of how to stop the scroll, it's got to create really high-end
viral content. And back then we just wanted to beat out these other sports
media companies, and it was very competitive as sports are. So, yeah, I
mean, these days it's just let's come up with the best types of content, let's
get the best access to the best athletes and let's be authentic and build a
community around social media. Those are kind of the concepts, these days,
that's changed from my time in the early-mid 2010s to what it is today.”

“When I was at Bleacher Report, I got this idea of proactive versus reactive. The
proactive content is your evergreen. You know, it's like you could think of the idea on a
Monday, it comes out on a Wednesday or Friday, and you prepare that graphic or that
video or that motion effects or the animation or that cartoon in advance, depending on
who's on your staff to build that piece of out. Then the reactive stuff is like the Dodgers
win the World Series in 2020 or this trade happens, Shohei Ohtani— I keep going on
Dodgers rants, but like, you know, that type of stuff happens, you've got to be reactive
to the news. If you don't know the news is going to happen, which most people didn't
know the news because Shohei Ohtani posts a Dodgers logo on his Instagram…How do
you be reactive to that? Okay, this just happened, we have ten different jerseys swaps
ready to go of the ten different teams that were interested in Shohei Ohtani. So that was
already pre made; I mean that was what it was about at Bleacher Report. Like, we had
these jersey swaps made or these face swaps or these other types of swaps made before
the competition. We knew that if this happened we were ready to push out a piece of
viral content because we had it prepared in advance.

“So proactive versus reactive, you know, a news story happens, we're going to
react very quickly to it. And what I learned at Bleacher Report, which might be a
good thing to say on this, was there's different waves of content. You know, Kevin
Durant, breaking news, going to the Warriors is wave one. We just tweeted it out
with a photo. Wave two might be a video of him leaving and and, you know,
leaving his old team and saying goodbye; like a funny little video. And then wave
3 or 4 might just be considered more content off of that. So people need to think
in waves. And if they can’t, if they don't have the team of like a Bleacher Report
size, you could create like a small time team that can do a bunch of [things]; a
bunch of Swiss Army knives is what I call them. People that can post, they can be
a community manager, they can create graphic designs or videos, they can do
analytics. If you get a couple of those on your team, 1 to 3 of those that can do
multiple things or a specialist or two that can do graphic design really well or
video editing really well, then it really makes a difference in your team.

So whether you have a one person team, three person team, or 25-person
team like we had at Bleacher Report, it all just depends on how to use your
resources to best execute content and how do you think proactively and
reactively, so that you're constantly staying on top of the trends. You know,
you're far and beyond past your competition or other people, and you're
thinking of ideas, creating ideas and executing ideas that are going to make
a difference to your audience and hopefully grow your following at the end
of the day, because that's what a lot of people are trying to do. But there's
other KPIs and metrics that we can go into that are both vanity but both
exciting for people to just appease the bosses above them so they can hit
those.

“So, yeah, I mean, ultimately when you think proactive, reactive, evergreen,
breaking news — any of these other creative metrics and things that you
think of in your head about how the content should be or what it should be,
then you're going to really advance as a social media team, and just think
ahead of the curve.”

On standing out among the noise and the crowd
“I think at Bleacher Report [there] was this idea of having creative thinkers
on the team that could think of better ideas than every other media outlet
out there, and that's one of the reasons why Turner Sports acquired Bleacher
Report in 2012 was they knew it was like young and hip and it was less of the
TV aspect, more of the online blogging and posting aspect and they saw
which direction they wanted to put money in and Turner Sports gave them
money to build out a social media team that would be 20+ people that could
handle a lot of funny stuff and post a lot of cool things. And that's not cheap,
you know, to build out a 20+ person team, that's millions of dollars that
you're investing towards people, towards the infrastructure, towards going
to games, towards everything that needs to happen to be successful with it.

“So yeah, I think it's a mixture of let's get the news out before everyone else and
let's be correct about it. Let's make sure the name is spelled correctly, the image
used is the right player, all that stuff. Let's be accurate with it and correct, but
let's get it out before everyone else. Then the other side of it, the more important
side is let's be more creative than everyone else. Let's get that more viral idea that
goes out before other people. And you do that by thinking ten steps ahead of the
competition, like, what are we doing? The news, you know, like, you know there's
going to be a NBA trade deadline, [so] how are we thinking differently meme-wise
or funny graphics or this or that, like jersey swaps before other people are? And
how do we have people on the staff to execute very quickly on a high end scale,
whether it's reactive news, like something just happens, let's get it out. Or
whether it's like the proactive stuff that you can think of days in advance that
you're just going to be ready for x, y, z news to potentially happen, the Shohei
Ohtani news or other things like that.

Then it's just, like, have fun with it. It's free to post on social media. It's fun
to post, have fun with it. I mean, don't screw up and get your bosses angry
with you at the end of the day, but enjoy that you can push out good
content and sometimes it hits and sometimes it flops. Everyone thinks that
everything went viral for Bleacher Report from 2015 to 2018-2019, but not
everything did. Sometimes they spent hours and hours on an idea and they
thought it was going to go viral, the Social Moments team, and it didn't go
viral. And sometimes they thought of something in an hour and and
created it and it did go viral. So you just never know, honestly.

“You can put money in the budget towards different things and you just
don't know how the audience reacts. Sometimes there's a method to what
the audience likes and will like, but sometimes there's this method of the
audience won't like everything you push out, but you got to keep consistent
with it, keep creating good ideas so that you can stand out from the
competition, whether it's competing with other sports media outlets or you
just competing with random people that have these accounts that are
sitting in their mom's basements, as we like to say, and they just tweet out
or post good things. So it happens either way.

“But, yeah, it's all about connecting to the audience these days. It's not
about posting as much what you like, I mean, posting what you like is
important, but at the end of the day, you're posting towards the audience
and you want to grow your audience. So you got to attack your audience by
creative ideas, by breaking news, by good articles and content. So all that
stuff is very important, relevant to how a sports media outlet thinks or a
team thinks or a regular account on the street thinks.”

On allocation of time and resources across content, platforms, and target audiences
“I think the perfect answer to your question is about the NFL and how they treated
things. I was there from 2018 to 2019, like a year and a half, and we created things
differently in-house; like the NFL had a different voice and viewpoint, their accounts
and how big the team was versus The Checkdown. The Checkdown started, I think, in
2018-2019 and The Checkdown was really funny and cool and hip. It was two guys, Ben
Gallagher and Grady Rains, and they just did a good job of riffing off fun things without
making fun of the wrong people in the NFL. Their audience was more the Gen Z's,
young millennials. And then NFL Network knew that the audience off of like, what I
was doing on NFL Network was typically going to be a little bit older audience because
the Gen Z's just love getting their content off social media versus the millennials to later
millennials, the baby boomers — those people don't mind watching TV for an hour or
two hours versus the Gen Z's can only watch two minutes at a time, sometimes on their
phone, and they watch another two minutes or another 30 seconds or whatever it is.

“But yeah, I've worked with teams in the past, I've worked with athletes
and other people, and ultimately it's just — to me, there's five pillars of
social media success. It's branding, strategy, content posting/community
management as well as analytics. There's paid social and influencer
relations as well. To me those have always been the core of what makes an
account good these days.

“So what I mean is strategy is going to be important building; like, if it takes me a week
or two weeks to build a strategy for an athlete or for a sports agency, or for a team or a
league or anybody that we work with over my four and a half years of doing this,
strategy could take time, but it's good; and branding and strategy are good building
blocks and good foundation for an account to build the pyramid out. Then content's
one of the heavier points, and if the strategy is building out the right content, then the
content should hit, and if the content should hit, then the numbers should prove it. The
numbers don't lie, so the analytics should tell you. I always used to say content is king,
which is what Bill Gates wrote about and analytics are queen, which is just as
important. The numbers should tell a story. I think there's that show on ESPN —
Numbers Never Lie. So there's this idea that strategy, content and analytics all play well
together, even to this day, and it did a long time ago as well, was the strategy is
important to build the building blocks for working with any client that I work with
today and the branding side is what the content should look like and how it feels, what
types of content, what content buckets we’re hitting off of.

“Then it's the analytics. If the content is hitting and the audience is
growing or the audience is engaging with it, then the analytics should show
that, and then the analytics should reaffirm or adjust the overall strategy.
So it kind of works in a cycle almost between those three aspects. But yeah
strategy is everything for people and I can gain clients lose clients based off
of if the strategy is actually working and leading to the KPIs that the client
needs.”

On meeting metrics goals while aligning with brand goals
“The strategy is created based upon the goals of the organization. I've had clients that
tell me, hey, we want more followers on these accounts, hey, we want more website
traffic or more app downloads or more merch sales or other metrics, better
engagement than we have before or better growth rate than we currently have, more
followers, anything of that nature. People want different things, to help grow their
social media account or grow other goals they have. So how we get there is you want to
figure out the goals of the person or the client you're working with then you figure out
the strategy of how to get to those goals. And some of it's not overnight. I mean, one of
my biggest clients right now is a golf training app and they more care about the
process of what the content looks like. If it takes time for us to create the great
content, it'll take time, but we don't need to push out a great post every day because
sometimes it leads to more followers, sometimes it doesn't and we're accepting of that.

“But then I have other accounts that say we just want to tweet out like dope
memes and GIFs and get our following up very quickly. And that's okay too,
because that's what they want and I can make recommendations all I want,
but it's what the client wants and needs and hopes that they can get. Whether
there's a 30 year-old running the organization’s social media marketing or a
50 year-old, they all have different opinions on what they want and the
metrics and KPIs to hit, and also what other things to explore. So we do our
best as an individual to hit the goals that our clients are hoping for and if it
doesn't work out after three months, four months, whatever it is on on their
contract, you know, we could part ways and that's okay too. But at the end of
the day, we'll do our best to figure out what your goals are, how to get the
strategy there, and how to post the best content, get the best results analytics
wise. And if we can get all that done then we'll have clients longer term.

“We've had clients for three months, six months, we have clients for 1 to 2
years and longer. So it all just depends on the person. But typically we just
try to post good content, try to get the, the person or the client excited
about what we're posting and do more and more of it. And if we could do
that or if we need to pivot and make changes, we can make changes as a
social media team that I have with me and just be prepared for anything
that the client asks for, because at the end of the day, the client's paying
you. The client asks for this, the client asks for that, you got to hear what
the client has to say or else they're on to another social media agency that
they'd rather work with. It happens.

“Ultimately, I think we've done a good job. We worked with over 40 clients
in four and a half years and, because of that, we've learned to work with
different people, working with different goals and objectives and
personalities and all kinds of things. And that's where you best get to
understand what not just the client needs, but what the client's following
needs. It's different for every client sometimes. So we gotta figure that out
early on when working with a client.”

On working with clients to build out plans with different potential scale
and rewards depending on level of investment
“I think the more you're willing to spend — I mean, it's both ways; you
know, in-house, it depends on the budget, how I would build out a team; if
I could only hire one person I want a Swiss Army knife. I want someone
that can do analytics, graphic design, video edits, posting, like, has all that
skill set. If I have a 3 to 5 person team, I want a couple specialists and then
someone that can really run the show. If I have a 5 to 20 person team, it's a
lot of specialists, a lot of posts, people that know some analytics, different
specialists around the company that can really be on top of their game. But
yeah, I think that's how I would think it typically is.

“Then if you're a client, it differs client by client. What they want differs, what types
of content they're looking for differs, so you need to really get in the mindset of what
the client wants and needs and put it together. And some clients that I've worked
with over the years are hands off. They say, post what you want, have fun with it,
enjoy it, give me the analytics once a month, twice a month. Then some are really
hands on, some hands on in a good way, some hands on in a bad way —
micromanaging. There's the difference between hands on in a good way where
they're being productive, they're being helpful, they're telling us what's working and
what's not working for them and they're being very open and honest and
transparent with us. Then there's the people that are micromanagers that are way
too hands on and they think they know what they're doing and they have this idea
for their brand. And of course, this is their brand, this is their baby. Whatever it is,
we can listen to them. But they should also put some trust in us. I've been doing this
for 11 years. I have people on my team that have been doing this for 3 to 5 years for
big brands.

“Ultimately it’s understanding the client, but also the client understanding
you as a team and understanding what you need to be pushing out content-
wise that can resonate with the audience over time. So, yeah, whether you
have to build that, it depends on the budget. The reason why I created my
agency was I don't want to charge people $10-20,000 a month. I don't
think it's necessary to build out a good social media team for those prices. I
think you could do it with $1-5000 a month. Hire us… is your budget to
hire 3 to 5 people in house. Maybe you have a budget for that. If you're
battling as a startup that can spend $80,000 a year on one social media
employee or do I use Eisman Digital, [which is] more cost effective for us
and a bigger team and maybe go that route?

“So it depends what route the company wants to take or my client wants to
take, depending on their budget. But you get different bang for your buck
mentality whether you hire a social media coordinator a couple years out of
college, or you hire a veteran that's been in the game for five, ten years in-
house that can build out your social media team. So it all depends on the
situation, the scenario. But ultimately you just got to be the most effective
with your budget and hope that your budget works out and you hope you
hire the right people so you can get the best results, whether that's in-
house or out of house.”

On insights from social flowing to other marketing touchpoints and fan
engagement channels
“I think there's all kinds of forms of marketing, and social media is very
front-facing of an organization or forward-facing of an organization, and
social media is what hopefully people connect to about that brand. You
know, I like Patagonia clothing, but I think their social media is dope, it's
great what they do. Or Nike is amazing on social media because they have a
great team that runs it in house and stuff. So I think what it's all leading
towards is this idea of just pushing out good content, connecting to the
audience, hopefully getting the KPIs and engagement you're hoping for and
ultimately, like, if you're doing that as an organization, it's good. But yeah, I
mean different clients want different things

Different bosses want different KPIs, different companies have different budgets
when they want to put towards social media. But yeah, there's different forms of
marketing, social media is one of them, but do you want to do a newsletter or do
you want to do ad placements on Google? Do you want to do paid social or does
your organic post that does well numbers-wise deserve to be boosted and put
money behind it? That stuff — and influencer marketing, there's just so many
forms of marketing these days when five, ten years ago, probably more ten years
ago, it was your general marketing people, your public relations people and
maybe you had 1 or 2 social media people ten years ago, and now it's completely
changed into social media needs to be a beast for organizations. You need to hire
more people to do social media than PR, or more people to do social media than
other forms of marketing. You only need one newsletter guy and you need one
one person that does PR these days, but you need like a five person social media
team.

“Everyone allocates their budget differently based upon their objectives
and KPIs. But ultimately it depends on you and your budget. It depends on
what your objectives are and your KPIs to determine what you need to do
and hiring the right people, whether it's in-house or hiring an agency like
Eisman Digital. So it all depends on the person, the organization, their
budget and how they want to spend it. And you have to have the right
people in those spots to know how to spend that money, allocate the
budget and where to allocate the budget to so that they can have the best
results as well.”

On managing up and selling a strategy to senior leaders even if they have
other ideas and preconceived notions
“I think like we talked about earlier, it's all about the goals. So if the goals are
let's sell more merch, well, maybe Instagram Shop or sending people from
Instagram to your website store, that might be more advantageous than
doing just an original tweet that says ‘Go to my website to buy this.’ I think
people need to understand that social media is is not easy and it's never been
easy. It's about building a platform-specific strategy. So some of my clients
want more followers, okay, we can get you more followers on TikTok, we just
push out tons of TikToks per day, per week and we'll try to get you more
followers because the algorithm is hitting well on TikTok to get more
followers if you hit a couple of good home run videos.

“Instagram, it's constantly about quality these days and collaborations — if
you want to grow an account these days, you need to collaborate with the
right people or pay the right people to collaborate with and do the
collaboration button or have them repost on their Instagram Story or
whatever it is to get more followers. The quality needs to be there for that
piece of content as well, because what's going to get the the consumer to stop
their thumb and stop the scroll and actually watch that content versus going
to the next piece of content, because you have a limited amount of time to
reach the audience. I mean, these days you might have three seconds, five
seconds to connect to the audience on a piece of social media content, or else
they're swiping or scrolling to the next piece of content, so you don't have
much time to connect to the audience and it needs to be good content very
quickly.

“I think that's important for people to know is, like, it's not easy to post on
social media, but depending on the goals, then you figure out the strategy
and hopefully the strategy connects to the goals and gets you the results
you're looking for. And sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. But you
ultimately got to be true to yourself and true to yourself as an agency or an
agency owner and just say, ‘We've done our best to help this client out.
We've gotten them more followers. We've gotten them more website traffic.
We've done this or that for them and we've used different platforms,
different ways to connect to those goals that they're trying to attribute.’ But
it depends, are you B2B, B2C? Do you just want to hit the Gen Zs? Where do
you want to hit them? We're not hitting them on Facebook, so we're going to
hit them on TikTok and Instagram. I want to get a part of the NBA Twitter
conversation, let's go on Twitter, let's be a part of that.

“It depends on what platforms you want to be on, what are your goals, and
then how that all connects to each other so that you're best suited for how
to really attack the audience and build out that strategy that really connects
and engages the audience. Not everyone's going to be able to do it the right
way. Sometimes people do it the right way, and some people do it the
wrong way and that's the difference between gaining a client and getting
more clients that way and losing clients left and right, based upon your
execution.

“I came up with this acronym called ICE: ideate, create and execute. Maybe
I heard this before, maybe I need to coin it. But if you can have people in
your team that can ideate and think of the right ideas, create, create that
content itself, and then execute and post the content with the right voice
and the authenticity, and hopefully you have the engagement and the
results you're looking for.
“But every organization is different. Every organization wants different
things. And you base your strategy around those goals and hopefully hit
those goals and everyone's happy at the end of the day as well.”

On the business goals social media is well and not well-suited for
“What I've learned, and I've learned this with the client recently was this idea of
there's some goals social media can accomplish — we can grow followers, we can
get some website traffic, we can get some merch sales, we can get some app
downloads, but ultimately, the product of whoever we're posting towards has to be
good and has to connect to the audience. I can send like 10,000 people to a website,
but if there's only five signups out of those 10,000 people, then it's not us not doing
our job because we're sending the 10,000 people over. It's your product that's not
resonating with the audience. We're connecting to the audience. And I've had
people say to me, ‘Aaron, you told me you're going to get me more people to watch
our product or to buy our product or to be a subscriber.’ And you know what I say
to them? I say to them, like, ‘We can do our best to send people to your website and
do this, but we can't make them buy that's on you or on the consumer itself and
whether they connect to the thing.’

“So, you know, it's just tough to tell people that sometimes. But there's
some KPIs and metrics that social media can hit very easily and we can go
after those growth metrics and stuff and those engagement metrics and
those impression metrics and all that stuff, reach metrics, whatever you
want to call it, but sometimes we can only accomplish so much on social
media. It's got to be the product that has to sell. It's got to be the website
that has to sell, the podcast has to be good. You know, for example, like
social media can push people to the podcast, but if the podcast isn't good
they're not gonna listen to more than one episode or more than ten
minutes of that podcast. So hopefully we're having a good conversation
now, so we can get more people to listen to your podcast as well. So it all is
relevant to each other.

“But, you know, we could [only] do so much; like Bleacher Report can do
so much to say ‘Go to the Bleacher Report website,’ but if the content of a
website is good or not good or whatever it is, then people aren't going to
resonate with the content or download the app or this or that. So content's
got to be there with social media, but the product has to be there with
whoever you're posting towards so that you're going to get more engaging
followers and stuff.”

On the process and intention of writing his book The Evolution of Sports
Social Media
“I think early on, maybe since I was between 12-14 [years-old], I wanted to
write a book. I wanted to be a part of the LA Times. I wanted to do cool
things with my career. I knew I wasn't going to be an athlete. I mean, I still
play golf and have a 12 handicap, but I'm no Tiger Woods or Brooks
Koepka or any of these guys, and I will never be that good at golf unless I
play every day and have training and exercise and completely put my life
towards that goal. But I'm 32 and that's just not going to happen anymore.

“But what I did with the book was one of my goals was to write a book at
some point in my life. Then a couple of years ago, my mom and I were
writing down goals of mine for by the time I'm 30 or 31, and one of the
goals was to write a book by 30 and that's what I did. It took nine months
to fully complete from the first page, the first introduction, the title of the
book till it was published and pushed out there into the world. It took nine
months. It's like having a baby, writing a book and putting it all together.
It's not easy. Not everyone can do it, I think. Some people can write kids
books, some people can write a mystery book, some people can write
whatever kinds of books, but I knew I had to pick a topic that I was really
keen towards and I really love. That's why I chose sports social media.

“Like I told you before this, there wasn't a non-textbook that talked about
sports social media and I think I was like, if anyone's going to write it, don't
have the imposter syndrome and just do it and just accomplish it. And
that's what I did. I wrote the book, and it was a lot of nights where I'm
spending 30, 45 minutes, an hour listening to some music and just
pumping out content, putting out words and at the end of the day, then you
have, you know, 145 pages, 45,000 words, and you got a book that can be
sold on Amazon and elsewhere. And that's what happened to me.

“I'll go back a little bit. I took a Georgetown University writing course with this guy,
Eric Koester, and he was just good about — like, he would do these Zooms about what
you should be writing about or how you should take your chapters, or how you should
research, how you should interview people for your book, all this type of stuff. And we
would get an editor alongside that paid class and would teach us how to write the book
the right way. So that was really vital towards me being able to write the book. But at
the end of the day, if you're not a good writer or if you're not creative or you're not this
or that, you might not be able to be a good book writer. It's not for everybody, and
there's only a few people that can do it at a high level and write multiple books and be
published multiple times, and be in every airport that you can think of. Not everyone
can be those types of people, but ultimately I was like, I just want to have fun with it. I
just want to do a book and accomplish something. And whether it sold five copies or
500 copies or 5000 copies, I don't care, as long as I can get it out there and say I
accomplished one of my goals and I'm proud of it. And luckily I can say all that, which
is nice.”

On the time sensitivity considerations of a book about social media
“You know, there is in a certain extent, like my book will definitely be, in ways,
people can still read about it because it's talking about ESPN social media in the
early 2010s, it's talking about Bleacher Report disrupting social media in 2015 to
2018 ish, it's talking about House of Highlights and Omar Raja’s story. It's
athletes, social media — there are certain things that are going to always be
relevant in my book. But like my brother says ‘When's version two coming out?’
Because yeah, things do change in social media. And I wrote this book over two
years ago, so things change. I mean, I didn't write much about TikTok two and a
half years ago, but now TikTok's one of the biggest things. I mean, literally, it was
going to get banned from the US at some point because people were anti-TikTok,
anti-Asia, anti-China, whatever it is those politicians were. But I didn't write about
that two and a half years ago. And it's interesting to see how like things change.

“How I finished the book, and I won't give it away, but it was kind of like,
let's put our seat belts on and see what things change and evolve, because
it's constantly going to do that and you just gotta be along for the ride. You
can be one of the game changers in the industry, or you can watch the
industry change itself and just be a part of the ride itself and be cruising
along. So yeah, I think it just all depends on what you want to do with that
in the book, and hopefully there'll be a version two one day, or maybe I'll
do something on a different topic in sports social media. Maybe I’ll do
athletes social media, I'll do paid social media, or I'll do this type of social
media, whatever it is, I can do a different version of it.

But ultimately, yeah, some of my viewpoints and stories will remain true in
that book that people can't recreate unless they copy it and use some AI
tool. But for the most part, I wrote the book, I accomplished it, I
interviewed over 100 people, I talked to the right people in the industry,
hopefully all the right people in the industry and we put together a really
good book and I'm proud of it. I'm proud I accomplished that goal. I'm
already thinking about book two, and it might not even be sports social
media related. So there's interesting avenues out there that I can take. I
enjoyed writing the book. I enjoyed putting together and I still enjoy
getting emails and messages from people all around the world that said
they read my book It’s pretty cool to hear and have people say that to you.”

Aaron’s favorite or most memorable Vine that he remembers, whether it
was produced by one of your employers or not
“I think, and I hope I get this right, but the LeBron James kid. ‘LeBron
James, LeBron James, LeBron James’ would loop and play over and over
and over again and that just got stuck in people’s heads. I love that one. I
mean there are a couple other good ones where like a father is bringing a
son his first baseball bat and they're crying, I think that was one of them
that might have that did really well on Vine. But yeah, the LeBron James
one.”

Aaron’s favorite story he worked on writing for the Indiana Daily Student when he was
a student at Indiana University
“I covered all kinds of teams for the four years. I mean, I covered the number one
[men’s basketball] team in the country with Victor Oladipo and Cody Zeller and all the
guys. And the year before we beat number one Kentucky on a buzzer beater in 2012.
But honestly the best story was working with the Olympic sports, the volleyball players,
the field hockey players, the softball players, whatever it was. I had a great story on the
field hockey player Mutsa Mutembwa. She won the Rhodes Scholarship and this was
the first time done in over 40 years in Indiana University history. It was amazing that
she won it, and her job was to fix the Zimbabwe economy. I just thought it was, like,
such a cool story to talk about a small village, a girl that came from there and then went
to Indiana to play field hockey, wins the Rhodes scholarship, and has an amazing
career after that. So she's doing some great things even to this day, so it was cool to do
that story.”

The social media platform that sports organizations are sleeping on right now or
something that's just underutilized
“I think it's honestly going to be LinkedIn. I know it has always been a B2B
platform, but it's turning into a B2C kind of opportunity for fans. I think they're
going to be more influencers, off of LinkedIn. I mean, like Malcolm Lemons,
Andrew Petcash, Adam White, these are good names that I follow that are almost
like influencers on LinkedIn these days. People really trust their writing, their
opinion and their thought leadership. So I think the teams can think of that way
too — I mean, not just posting jobs, but, like, let's do something fun that's
LinkedIn job related, or let's think of ideas that are LinkedIn specific. I just think
that's going to be cool for teams and professional outlets to see how they can
translate a good idea into LinkedIn, because it's different than all the other
platforms, but it could be unique in its own way.

“I think you get great engagement off LinkedIn compared to some of the
other smaller ones. Like, I'd rather do LinkedIn than Facebook, I'd rather
do LinkedIn than sometimes Twitter these days. So I just love LinkedIn as
a platform. It's really helping my business and I think it's the unsung hero
right now of social media, I think people don't talk about it enough.”

The most initially challenging and later rewarding client that Aaron has
worked for Eisman Digital Consulting so far
”I think, on the challenging side, I had a top five baseball agency in the
world, and they were just a struggle to deal with. Like, they didn't want to
pay us what we're worth for the content we're creating for them. They were
micromanaging us all the time, they were micromanaging little words we
would put in a caption that they didn't like, they were being too hands on.
They were just not letting us have creative freedom and let our creative
wings fly high, and it just wasn't good.

“Then on the rewarding side, I worked with an NBA agency, Life Sports
agency — shout out to Todd Ramasar, and they represent Pascal Siakam,
Kevon Looney, Thomas Bryant, a bunch of other NBA guys and non-NBA
professional basketball players. We had them as a client for nearly two
years, I think, and they were just great at being like hands off and letting
me do what I want to do as a company and letting us have fun with it and
letting us talk to their players and all this stuff. When you allow people to
show their creative freedom and to flex their muscles a little bit creatively,
you have good results.”

The most viral posts from Aaron’s time with Bleacher Report or Turner
“I think it's a Vine, and this is actually the first chapter of my book. People
can buy it on Amazon, read about it more. But it was a chapter called Down
Goes Shaq and the caption was literally Down Goes Shaq. It was literally
Kenny [Smith] pushing Shaq into a Christmas tree. I posted it everywhere,
got it out there. We clipped it on SnappyTV, posted it everywhere. It did
millions and millions of Vine loops. I wish I could get the numbers on it
today, but it's in the millions. Facebook did really well, too. I think that
video got seen over 20 million times at least.

“It was just cool to just get to be there doing it. I mean it was on a
Christmas Eve Day. I was working myself on NBA on TNT. It was,you
know, the Jewish guy by the TV, eating my Chinese food and watching this.
And I didn't know he was going to push Shaq into a Christmas tree, but
clipped it, posted it everywhere and it took off. And all I had to write was
three words ‘Down goes Shaq!’”

The most memorable experience or learning at an internship Aaron had in college
“I had this one with the American Junior Golf Association, the AJGA. We traveled
around the country, I mean, maybe $2-300 bucks a month or whatever, it was like
a little stipend. But we traveled around the country and We would put on golf
tournaments. I would do a little bit of social media, a little bit of PR, a little bit of
helping out setting up the tournament, like putting down the posters of the
sponsors and stuff around the golf course. So I did all of that, and it was just cool to
do different parts of an organization. I still recommend people to do the AJGA
[internship], whether you're a sports fan or a non sports fan, it's a good way to get
experiences, to travel the country for a summer, and we did ten tournaments in 2
or 3 months, I think it was. So it was a phenomenal experience, phenomenal way to
travel the country and really good way to work, a team building experience because
you work with about eight, nine other college interns as well. I really loved it.”

The best meal to get in Los Angeles and where to get it. And
the best thing Aaron has eaten in Vietnam (where his wife is
from and he spends time)
“So, the best thing is anything Roy Choi. If you know the
chef at all, he does Korean Mexican food, there an app back
in the day, and maybe there's a new app version of it, where
you could follow food trucks around LA and where they
were going and based on what they're tweeting or they put
themselves on the map and there was always three Kogi
food trucks, and you would find, okay, one's on the west
side in Venice today, one is in The Valley in Tarzana today,
one's in South Bay. So in LA, you'd always go hunt them
down and go find out which days and how many hours they
were going to be at that spot, because they couldn't be there
all day because the parking permits and things of that
nature. I would hunt that food down. And now he's got
probably at least 6 or 7 restaurants around the country…

“Then for Vietnam, everyone thinks pho and banh
mi are the go- to foods and they are great, for
Vietnam, but there's a lot of good food that people
don't try in the US. There's one called Bun Cha,
which is literally like boiled pork with noodles
and fish sauce and it’s just unbelievable. Another
one called Cha ca, which is a fish dish that's really
good. But yeah, I mean, I think people, unless
they come to Vietnam, they won't open up their
minds to all kinds of Vietnamese cuisine, which I
think is one of the better cuisines I've ever had.
There's not enough of it in LA, I think, you see a
lot of other diverse Asian communities, as well,
but I'd like to see more Vietnamese soul food kind
of stuff in LA in all parts around the US.”

Aaron’s favorite or most memorable book (besides the one he wrote!)
“One that really made me want to become a writer, and I told the writer
this at the 2015 PGA Championship in Whistling Straits in Wisconsin,
there's a book by John Feinstein called The Punch. And The Punch is all
about a single incident between Rudy Tomjanovich and Kermit
Washington, a guy punched him on the court and almost killed Rudy
Tomjanovich. It’s a really interesting book about dynamics, about what
happened that day, all that stuff.

“And then I like this book called The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday.
And I think it's just a great read. It’s good for motivation. It's like history
stories about leaders and people who accomplished, [faced] obstacles and
came through on the other side andlearned from it. I think that it resonates
today and I think the Patriots even used that as one of their books for a lot
of the athletes to read. It's not too long. Ryan Holiday has turned into one
of my favorite authors, as well as Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers is a third
book that I would recommend.”

What happens next — will Indiana men's basketball make a Final four or
will Indiana football win ten games?
“Honestly, I think just the way college basketball changes worse than the
way college football does with this whole transfer portal, this whole going
to the pros after one year, I think college football is in a better place. We
just hired a coach (Curt Cignetti) from James Madison, and he's a winner.
He's won 103 games and lost 12 in his his lifetime as a coach. And maybe
you could say it's James Madison so he can win a lot there, but he's really
gotten a lot of good transfers lately. And I think I would say in three years
Indiana will win ten games. But you can't quote me on that, but we’ll see
what happens in three years….”

Aaron’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“As a Broncos fan, I would like to say the Broncos but, really, I like the Chargers
and what they've done over the last 1 to 2 years. I interviewed for the job a
couple years ago, didn't get it. But I think Megan Julian has done a great job. I
think they get good good player content, they do funny meme content and fun
stuff, and they engage the audience really well and they don't mind having a fun
voice, a cool voice with it, I think, too. So I think they've done a good job with it.
“And honestly, I didn't know if they would do a good job years ago because the
ownership is a little bit stringent in ways that I've heard in the past, but they've
let them fly their wings. And I think the Chargers have really turned into one of
the top teams in social media.”

Where to find Aaron and Eisman Digital on digital/social media
Visit https://eismandigital.com/ and find Aaron Eisman and Eisman
Digital on LinkedIn especially
Also find Aaron @ASiegalEisman on Twitter and Instagram, @aaronse503
on TikTok, @EismanDigital on Instagram and Twitter
Check out his book The Evolution of Sports Social Media on Amazon

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Aaron for being so generous with his time to share
his knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

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