A few months ago I was talking to Jason Lemire (GM of Pali Blues) about social media, Facebook in particular, and he asked what the difference was between a friend and a fan. I was in a contemplative mood and spent a few minutes going on about how a friend comes to a game and enjoys it, but a fan wins or loses with the team. At the end of my musings I realized he was asking about friends vs. fans on Facebook (friends are for profile pages while fans are for fan pages).
I don’t think Jason minded my longer and slightly off-topic answer, though, because it is a question that is constantly on the mind of a General Manager. What makes a fan, a fan?
Gerry Marrone, Sky Blue FC’s GM, used his twitter account recently to pose the question: (@SkyBlueFC_GM) “What makes you a fan of a team?”
There is no simple answer, especially since each sport has its own audience and therefore its own set of guidelines to attract fans. And each sports team has to target its local audience as well as a more national/global market. I talked about fandom a bit in a previous post, but it’s a topic with lots of depth so here goes again:
Wikipedia defines a fan as “someone who has an intense, occasionally overwhelming liking and enthusiasm for…” and then immediately went on to describe how they show their enthusiasm. That’s brings up a dichotomy that’s essential to a true fan experience: you have to earn the right to be a true fan.
The sports fan experience is a vicarious one, which creates a lot of bandwagon fans who really aren’t anything more than simple spectators. A few try to overcompensate for their recent conversion to the team by decking themselves in the appropriate gear.
Granted, my best memories as a fan are not always the best, most exciting or highest scoring games, but rather are the moments when I went all out. Face paint, outfits, and head-to-toe colors with a vocal enthusiasm that leaves me hoarse at the end of the game. I love those games the best because I earned my part of that win.
Back to Gerry Marrone’s question “What makes you a fan of a team?”
Other fans.
I want to be inspired by the other fans, not just the players on the field. I love reading stories, like this one, about fans and the creative ways they support their team.
For an organization looking for new fans, I think the best thing to do is to let people know that you have an environment that lets fans be fans. Not to say that they get drunk and are belligerent—there is an etiquette to fandom. Here’s a great article by ESPN about being a college fan, and it starts out by laying down the law,
"lest civilization devolve into a Hobbesian state of nature, "Lord of the Flies," with all of us grasping for the conch and no one agreeing if it takes one or both feet inbounds for a sideline catch to count."
They break the laws into five general categories (definitely check out the whole list, it's a good read):
"I. ALLEGIANCES, OR WHO YA GOT?
II. ATTIRE, OR WHAT TO WEAR
III. LIFESTYLE, OR WHY DID I EVER THINK GRADUATION WAS A GOOD IDEA?
IV. GLOATING, OR WHY ANYONE BOTHERS TO BE A FAN IN THE FIRST PLACE
V. TAUNTING, OR THE ONLY THING BETTER THAN GLOATING"
I love the supporters groups that are starting up for the WPS teams and I love that the organizations are getting behind these groups. Last season the LA Sol made some attempts to promote fan gathers, but they never were able to get beyond PR stunts. The Marta Maniacs were never more than just a name, a banner and a few individuals in the stadium.
They needed to break out of the PR stunts and make some real efforts to get behind the fan driven supports groups that might have been started. It gets back to the true fan concept, the average WPS person may know of the Marta Maniacs but only a true Sol fan would know of the …
I don’t mean to criticize the organization as a whole, there were a lot of great people there who tried really hard, but come on they were a professional sports team. They needed to do better.
A supporters group needs to be much more than just a PR stunt. Take a look at any soccer league, any team, and you will find a couple diehard groups to emulate. Tying the dichotomy to the supporters groups, I want to be able to win with the team, but also to compete as a fan against other fans. Sports are all about competition, so why not foster that mentality in the stands? Could be a competition between supporter groups for the same team, between groups for the competing teams or just fans for either side taking their spectatorship to the next, more active level.
Being a Los Angelian, I don’t know much about the other WPS teams supporters groups in the ’09 season, but I’m definitely hearing a lot on my social media radar about their gearing up for 2010.
St. Louis Athletica tried something interesting to reach out to fans on Twitter with their contest for a TweetCaptain to run the @TheJoanies account.
Clearly, social media has made it so much easier to find and target little pockets of fans, but the limit of SM lies in that not all the target fans are going to be on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter or are not going to check Delicious, Digg, YouTube, etc.
And how do you break out of the pocket to find new fans? I’ve got a few fundamentals I try to live by when promoting something with social media…
- CROSS-POLLINATE
- INFLUENCE THE INFLUENCERS
- TAG TAG TAG
CROSS-POLLINATE: Get your ideas on different platforms and link them to each other. Though there is some overlapping, the average social media user is not on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; they focus a single site or a small selection of their favorite sites. Putting your content on various platforms gives it a greater chance of being seen and then spread.
INFLUENCE THE INFLUENCERS: Get a discourse going with somebody who already has a number of fans/followers so their supporters become aware of you through that discourse (or more direct support). For people pushing smaller sports/interests, you would be well served by approaching bloggers/twitter-ers working in other categories that somehow might interact with you. The best Big Fish are the ones who will reply and actually get a discourse going. Sometimes it is worth it to go after the biggies who don’t reply, but it’s more of a shot in the dark.
I love social media because it is still unexplored territory. Usually, the only real consequence to trying something new on social media is the loss of time that it took for you to do it. The more you try the more you learn, so jump in and figure out what works for you.
But this next tip is pretty universal, so I recommend everyone using social media take it to heart.
TAG TAG TAG: Make sure to tag your work correctly and Google how Google works (search engine optimization). A core aspect of promotion is simply getting noticed, making tags and optimizing your search-able content key. The more relevant tags you add, the easier it is for viewers to find the content. You can poorly tag something (using keywords that don’t direct the right traffic to your content), but you can’t over-tag something, according to my brother who is a product manager at YouTube currently focusing on video search. He literally does this for a living, so if you don’t believe me then believe him.
Make sure to be on top of you analytics, too. See what keywords bring in the most viewers and cater your later content to it.
I talk about optimizing your use of Twitter a bit in an earlier post, so check that out if you still wanna read some more.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment