Tag: Sports

Social Media and Sports- a Winning team

The idea of leveraging social media in sports has been around for a while now, as teams and individuals use various platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to engage with fans. Its a great combination for both as social media thrives on sources that provide engaging content, and sports teams build and succeed financially on engaging fans. The direct nature and immediacy of twitter has made it a particular favorite for athletes to use, and with significant success. Athletes such as Danica Patrick are now being paid to twitter (in this case by Tissot), and others such as Shaquille O’Neal, Lance Armstrong, Mark Sanchez, Lamar Odom, Derek Fisher, and Dwight Howard are all attracting large numbers of subscribers.

Sports Illustrated ran a piece recently highlighting the growing importance of social media in the industry and the widening use of Twitter by the leagues

“The tool is scoring for the pro leagues too. All the majors — the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR — shoot their followers useful information like scores, schedules, and highlight clips” Mainstream indeed.

For those facing the challenge if getting started in Social Media, here are a few of the key reasons why you, your team, or your sponsors should invest the time to get involved, and build a strategy to stay involved.

1. Your fans want to be in touch with you. These systems allow you to engage and provide customer service that is personal, and yet also manageable.
2. Fans like to have news from a vareity of sources, but some news is best coming direct from you. You have authority and only sometimes choice of when to issues the news. Use those advantages.
3. Sponsors keep many athlets and sports running. They give based on what they get. Social media gives you a chance to bring them in to conversation, thank them and send your fans their way.
4. Your fans are a great source of ideas and solutions. They are thrilled to be involved so, so asking questions is a great way to engage and costs little.
5. They are talking about you already. Some good, some bad. Either way, you can only influence the outcome if you are in the conversation
6. Its not just a scoreboard, you can put rich content and bring in people that might not like your “official sites”.
7. You can always send people back to the official sites. It will bring in new fans and add to traffic, rarely does more contejnt of interest reduce your influence.
8. Finally, you can actually see what is happening. Official sites will appeal to a part of your fan base, but not all. By engaging in social media conversations, you get in on a broader and much bigger set of conversations. By engaging social media business intelligence services, you can hear and see what is being said and use this feedback to assess you success relative to targets.

Its important to also get involved before you need to. If you have been an influential part of the community by creating great content and commenting on other peoples ideas and issues, highlighting ideas, events, dealing with issues or celebrating, it is not self serving as a simple marketing piece, and is infinately more effective.

Sports Marketing & Management- UCLA Anderson Summer Institute

 Epic States has been working with the  Entertainment and Media Management Institute to provide academic materials and marketing for the  UCLA Anderson Summer Institute in Sports Marketing & Management.

 

 

This summer the Sports Marketing & Management Institute is holding a course from June 22 – July 31 that will give students a one-of-a-kind opportunity to study the changing global landscape of sports entertainment, marketing and management, while also undertaking a high-profile experience project with a major sports enterprise.

 The Summer Institute offers:

• Experiential, for-credit curriculum utilizing the famed Harvard Business School case study method of learning, customized to action-oriented decision making in sports marketing and management
• Experience internship projects that add real-world context to case learning and that provide student with high-impact and high-profile professional experience to serve as a foundation for a career in the industry
• Personalized career management to help students define their career objectives, identify resources, strategize opportunities and make critical networking connections.
• Expert and inside knowledge from industry thought leaders and top business professors with expertise in sports marketing and management
• Day and evening industry networking activities  that allow for exclusive access to industry leaders and academic thought leaders in media and entertainment

Students will learn to think and act like seasoned leaders in the sports business, understanding the complexities of on the field and off the field, contemporary sports issues and maintaining the aptitude to navigate industry challenge.

Go HERE for more information!!!