Sale Sharks’ head of social media has been forced to apologise to the clubs fans following a post she made on her personal Facebook page.

With the Aviva Premiership side struggling after losing seven consecutive home games, some fans took to Twitter to criticise the clubs social media approach.

In response, Holleh Nowrouz posted on her personal Facebook page: “Oh the joys of managing a sport club’s social media when we’ve lost the last 7 home games.

“To the Sale Sharks fans, who comment about the club needing to spend less time blogging and tweeting and more time coaching, the staff who create content for the website and social media platforms, are not the same members of staff who coach the team. You absolute ****wits.”

The post, which was written in October, was spotted by a fan and posted on a rugby fan site.

Sale replied to the incident on an online message board, saying: “Holleh Nowrouz deeply regrets the posting she made on her personal Facebook page at the end of October.”

“Disciplinary action has been taken and the matter has been dealt with internally and both Sale Sharks and Holleh Nowrouz would like to apologise to supporters of Sale Sharks for causing unnecessary distress.”

Sale originally confirmed that Nowrouz has been disciplined and she was expected to stay on in her role as head of social media.  However, in a statement released a few days later it emerged that she had been sacked with immediate effect.

A spokesman said: “Following a stringent disciplinary review Sale Sharks has announced that the club’s Social Media Executive Holleh Nowrouz, has been dismissed from her role with immediate effect.

“The club’s CEO Steve Diamond conducted the review in the aftermath of adverse comments made by Ms Nowrouz towards a section of the club’s fans on a personal social networking site.”

Mr Diamond added: ” As a club we have always been proud of the backing we receive from our supporters through thick and thin over our 151 year history.

“At this crucial time for the club Holleh’s comments, though private, just overstepped the mark and left her position untenable.”

It’s that time of year again where we take a look into our crystal balls to predict what trends need to be kept an eye on over this next year.  Last year we were lucky enough to have a wide variety of people offering their predictions for 2012, many of which were ones we saw come true.

Some of the highlights of these insights were areas such as the live streaming of training sessions and press conferences becoming more the norm. This has come true with the likes of The FA streaming training sessions when the England squad get together, also Man City with their “Tunnel Cam” and QPR using Livestream to showcase their press conferences.  There are many other examples of this outside the UK and is something fans have come to enjoy and now even expect.

Two other areas that were mentioned a few times were Mobile optimisation and Big Data.  This was in a time when ‘datatainment’ hadn’t been mentioned by Richard Ayers yet (how long before it enters the Oxford English Dictionary?) and we were entering the next in a line of ‘this is the year of the mobile’.  But this time it has become a very true statement.  The biggest growth factors seen by all social networks was on mobile (including tablet) as people move away from PC’s and to easier, quicker ways of accessing their favourite sites.  Below are the links to the full predictions from a year ago…

http://www.theuksportsnetwork.com/social-media-sport-2012-predictions-part-1

http://www.theuksportsnetwork.com/social-media-sports-2012-predictions-part-2-uk

So now we move onto 2013 and we ponder what the next 12 months hold for the industry.

Before we get to our experts, who have been handpicked to take part in this years stargaze, I’m going throw my own ideas out there for you to think about – and maybe disagree with.  I know we’re not going to get everything 100% spot on but we are going to take a good, educated guess.

For me the main thing that I have seen and expect the trend to continue is the maturation of the industry.  By this I mean that we have seen a significant move away from PR activities, those quick hits which have little long term benefit, and also a long overdue move away from what we call ‘vanity metrics’ (likes, comments, views, etc).  Businesses and clubs are starting to look more seriously at the industry as they moe to becoming more of a ‘social business’.

Most of top clubs, NGB’s and brands now have dedicated resource in place for social media and these people are taking it to the next level.  The majority are very intelligent and experienced with an increasing say on what the strategy is going to be, and then implementing it.   As a greater understanding of how social media fits in with business objectives (this can include fan engagement and not just financial) we will see more resource being put into the areas.

Another area I see a demand for soon is that of aggregator platforms – or social hubs.  We see so many platforms now that those in charge are looking at the role of each and how these can come together in a way in which it is easy for fans to digest.  I was close to implementing this for a recent campaign and am sure would have been a great success.  What you see is fantastic ‘stickiness’ as people use them primarily around events to get a better picture of what is happening.  It’s something I’ve touched on before as an early prediction for 2013.

That’s is enough from me for now.  I’ll be writing up more of my thoughts on what is coming, including a deeper look at business objectives and that move away from vanity metrics.

Here are the thoughts of some of the most widely respected thought-leaders in digital sport.

I’m delighted to welcome….. Amy Jo Martin (CEO of Digital Royalty), Adam Bader (Social Media Manager at Real Madrid), Shergul Arshad (Digital Business Director at AS Roma) and Oscar Ugaz (Regional Project Director at Phantasia Wunderman).

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AMY JO MARTIN – CEO, DIGITAL ROYALTY

Amy Jo founded Digital Royalty three years ago to help companies, celebrities, professional sports leagues, teams and athletes build, measure and monetize their digital universe. In addition, Digital Royalty provides customized social media education programs through Digital Royalty University, which offers a comprehensive curriculum blending strategic and tactical training.

Amy Jo herself has nearly 1.3 million Twitter followers @AmyJoMartin and she travels the world to speak about the latest trends in social media, how to monetize various social platforms, and how to successfully build a personal brand by utilizing social media. Her audiences have varied from the Harvard Business School and National Sports Forum to the Design Leadership Summit in Venice, Italy. Martin is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and Sports Business Journal. In October 2012, she became a New York Times best-selling author with the publication of her book, Renegades Write the Rules.  She and Digital Royalty have been featured in top-tier media outlets including Vanity Fair, TIME, Forbes, The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN SportsCenter, USA Today, MSNBC and Newsweek. Martin also sits on the St. Jude Digital Board of Directors.

“2013 will be a very important year in social media and I think we’ll see even more change in the industry than in 2012.

Need for Education: Social media affects every part of a business—executives, HR, legal, customer service, etc.—therefore, everyone needs some kind of education. I’ve witnessed a lack of proper social media education over the past few years when working with clients and businesses. That’s why I launched Digital Royalty University. For the past year and a half, I have been developing and testing classes, while training thousands of our client’s employees. Especially in the sports industry, where social media debacles seem to happen daily, educating players on how to engage with their fans via social media channels could prevent 90% of these crises.

User Fatigue: Fatigue, consolidation, and the continuing struggle to remain relevant will be prevalent themes next year. There are simply too many options out there. People are busy, so social media platforms must continue to find interesting ways to engage users. With so many choices to choose from, simplicity and value reign, as evidenced by the success of platforms like Instagram.

Better value offer: Brands are beginning to recognize the power of providing relevant content vs. just trying to sell products. Via Pinterest and Instagram, yoga-gear retailer Lululemon features not only products, but useful information like yoga poses and running tips. By toning down the sales pitch and showing real-life uses for their products, people feel more engaged and involved with the brand.”

ADAM BADER – SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER, REAL MADRID

Adam is the Social Media Manager at Real Madrid C.F.  He manages the social media presence of the club (currently serving over 40 million fans) and helps plan its online and social media strategy.  He advices on SEO and content production as well as supervise the official websites.  Also a guest lecturer at the Real Madrid International School (European University of Madrid) and previously worked for Realmadrid TV and OleOle.
“In 2012 I said everyone will focus on mobile apps and streaming and I see that the majority have done that. YouTube streaming is a brilliant product that makes it easy for clubs to stream events to a large audience without consuming big resources. In 2013, I think the focus will still be on video, especially Google Hangouts. It’s currently the best way to do “social” interviews with players and managers and fans love it. Another product that will see a lot of exposure in the industry is Instagram. It’s a great way to be personal with your fans and share behind the scenes photos.

Twitter has proved to be the place to go for breaking sports news in 2012. I think clubs realise this and will start breaking news on the platform before their official websites like Chelsea did with the Benetiz signing recently. This way they make sure they get the news out faster than anyone else and to a lot more people. Another thing I think clubs should and will do in 2013 is to use it to start and support campaigns. For example, I’ve seen my good friend and Guardian Journalist Sid Lowe help Real Oviedo start a campaign to raise money to avoid bankruptcy and they managed to raise enough cash in less than a month all thanks to the power of Twitter and of course the love people have for the game and the club. If you want to read more about this, check out this article: http://weplay.co/real-oviedo-the-hunt-for-social-investors/”

SHERGUL ARSHAD – DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL BUSINESS, AS ROMA

Shergul is Director of Digital Business at leading Serie A club AS Roma.  A passionate football fan who has previously worked at Amazon, Stylefeeder and Time Inc. Here he talks about the lessons learned from taking social media from nothing to being one of the leading lights in the country.

“In 2013 I think there will be some interesting trends in the world of social media and football.  First off, as clubs have seen their social media audience numbers soar, there will be much more focus on obtaining full user data and then centralizing the many various databases in a cost-efficient, browser-based manner.  Gone are the days of expensive CRM implementations, and there will be a rise in web-based information repositories that can manage data and communicate to fans on a personalized basis.

At AS Roma we are looking at such options via our partner, Raptor Sports Properties.  In eCommerce, there will be more of a trend towards targeting fans via social profiles and maximizing relevant, personalized offers.  YouTube could become a much more meaningful source of revenue if it opens up a paid access channel, as has been reported.  Twitter will continue to penetrate countries that have been slower to adopt, but some high profile incidents such as the Ashley Cole Tweet could lead to less authentic and more manipulated usage by athletes – unless Twitter deploys some damage control techniques.

Facebook fan pages may continue to suffer backlash until Facebook opens up easier ways to go back and view past posts via searching and browsing, and until they remove the throttling of posts that are vastly limiting reach. Finally, I think some clubs will be exposed as having “bought” their way into millions of fake fans and followers just to dupe advertisers and fans.  This has happened with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more – and the negative effect will be evidenced when advertisers back away from clubs who have exhibited such deceptive behavior.  There’s a lot for the major social networks to take away here, and I trust that the continual optimization will lead clubs and our fans to an even better place in 2013: more content, more access, more reach,  more authenticity, more protection and more money to the clubs and value to the fans.”

OSCAR UGAZ - Regional Project Director at Phantasia Wunderman

Oscar (@oscarugaz) is Regional Project Manager at Phantasia Wunderman and former Digital Business Manager at Real Madrid  with expertise in Digital Media and online businesses. Over the past 15 years he has worked for major brands in America and Europe. 

“This is not a prediction. It is more like a wish and a demand. 2013 must be the year to get honest about digital in the sports industry.Social media, online video and mobile have been around for some time and a lot of buzz has being poured around them. But the contribution to the bottom line is still very small. Bad news is that 2013 is going to be most of the same.

We must acknowledge that digital in our industry is an investment.  That real value nowadays is in the understanding of the mechanics that will shape the near future and how we can take advantage of them.  This is not a solitary process. Sponsors, right holders and other partners must be involved.

Get ready for some disdain looks at the office and please understand the situation. We are talking about the classical innovators dilemma:  successful sports organizations focus in their cash cows of today (TV rights, ticketing and cookie cutter sponsorship deals). Few understand that disruptive innovation starts in small markets, with little returns. But then, the innovation hits the mainstream and old business models are beat down (Hello news media and music industry!).

Let’s stop buzzing and start measuring.  Not only how much money we make but also how much we save doing more with earned and owned media. How much traffic we are converting with less resources? Can we improve business results using clever solutions over new platforms? And most important of all: what are we learning to get prepared for the road of disruptions and potential business bubbles down the road.

Hope that the predictions of 2014 and the years ahead find us ready. Ready not only inside the digital department but within the whole organization. It will be terrible to predict or, God forbid, describe a major shift in the old business models (Hello football clubs, look what YouTube is doing) and discover that we are totally unprepared.
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So, do you agree with our experts?  What are your predictions for social media and sport in 2013?

Love to hear your comments below….

Guest Post: Jeremy Taylor is community manager at Our Social Times – a UK based social media agency, blog and events company.

Last week UEFA announced that the Serbian Football Association would be fined £66,000 after members of the England under-21 team were subject to racist abuse and violence in a recent match.

Predictably, the announcement sparked uproar on Twitter. There had been widespread calls for UEFA to ban Serbia from future competitions, so the fine seemed a very lenient punishment to a lot of fans.

Using our social media monitoring tool to search for mentions that associate UEFA with racism, we can see a huge spike following last week’s announcement. The overwhelmingly majority of these are tweets criticising UEFA or mocking their unwillingness to seriously tackle racism.

There is another very noticeable and perhaps more surprising trend. A look at the topic cloud (below) shows “Nicklas Bendtner” featuring very prominently. Given that he doesn’t play for England or Serbia and had no involvement in the match whatsoever, it might seem strange for him to have more mentions than Serbia, Danny Rose or even the Ferdinand’s.

Drilling into these mentions, we can see that they all refer to the £80,000 fine that Bendtner received for showing his Paddy Power branded boxer shorts when celebrating a goal in Euro 2012. The fact that Bendtner was fined significantly more for unauthorised advertising than Serbia were for racism and violence is shocking – which explains why it was tweeted and retweeted by hundreds of sarcastic social media users.

So. Bendtner’s pants are still more offensive to UEFA than racism. Good to know.

— LadyArse (@LadyArse) December 13, 2012

Although this is probably not a subject Paddy Power would want to associate themselves with, there is no sign of any animosity towards them. Instead, by fining Bendtner such a large sum UEFA have scored an own goal and given Paddy Power more publicity than they could have dreamed of when they first gave Bendtner his green undies.

Discussion and Analysis

After collecting the primary data to provide the basis of this research, an in-depth look into how the sportspeople researched in the content analysis are categorised into ‘tweeters’, ‘twits’ and ‘twats’ to provide the context for the need of social media policy. Sport corporate communicators can identify which sportspeople have the biggest influence and impact on reputation. Using the formula to analysis each tweet, corporate communicators can categorise each post from the individual who has used social media. The graphic below shows the sportspeople who were analysed, and based on their score, they were placed in one of the three categories. However it is worth pointing out that the ‘Twit’ category is still of massive concern to corporate communicators, despite these sportspeople using social media well, they still have posts that will be seen as negative to corporate reputation.

Figure 1: Tweeters, Twits and Twats Model

Whilst using the graphic to identify those who are influential, corporate communicators can go on identify strategic business objectives to target inappropriate social media use. This research, as well as the formula used before can be used to justify the awareness, knowledge, interest and support of using and implement a tougher social media policy. Knowledge and research is key and with these measurements, corporate communicators will be able to set clear, achievable business objectives to tackle social media abuse.

Tweeters 

The first of these categories, Tweeters, consists of those that use social media, at all times appropriately and in line with corporate standards, knowing full well their messages can be used to attract attention and be created as stories. Not only will a good ‘Tweeter’ do this, he or she will identify the number of times they have tweeted, how good they are at re-tweeting other people’s messages and the number of times their post were re-tweeted by other people reflects positively on corporate reputation.

A good Tweet is like a good book or a good film – different people have different tastes. Nevertheless, most people consider ‘Saving Private Ryan’ superior to ‘Saturday Night Fever’. Most people find that the experience of reading ‘Great Expectations’ enriches them more than ‘First Among Equals’. In the same way, there is an emerging consensus about what makes a good Tweet, and, more importantly, a good Tweeter.

This was completed by detailed content analysis that was evident in the secondary research. It appeared that many sportspersons, overall, are using it appropriately. They are engaging with fans, using posts to promote the organisation and in the meantime providing some personality to make their social media accounts interesting.  Characters like Michael Owen, Jenson Button and Stuart Broad all show great traits at being good ‘tweeters’. All of them engage openly with their audiences, inform followers of deep insight in their lives and will always speak favorably of the team they represent.

These accounts appear more corporate and acceptable than others. Some social media users are accustomed to all sorts of corporate speak, but they know using the corporate tongue can be severely off putting. These use social media to share information, ask questions of followers, offer personal thoughts and insights into their sport, and, most importantly, appear to have a conciseness.

This tends to mean that these sportspeople become influential with their followers, because their tweets are interesting. Each tweets offers reason and something for their audience to engage in. Even tweeting in a ‘work’ capacity, they are communicating to the world at large. The ultimate goal maybe to become more popular after a relatively short career span sport gives you, or they may be targeting stakeholders, fans, supporters, possible employers, sponsors, or more influential individuals. Michael Owen, for instance, often engages with fellow footballers and journalists to provide context and make his tweets interesting. He understands, more than most sportspeople, that Twitter is ultimately about engaging and broadcasting.

If sportspeople are engaging with stakeholders on a regular basis, it is up to corporate communicators to ensure messages surrounding the organisation remain professional to prevent any possible individual and corporate conflict. At the very least, sportspeople will be educated on how to make the most twitter and engagement. A policy will certainly come in handy for those who do not understand Twitter and use it simply to ‘banter’. These people will be known as ‘twits’. To really prove this point, you would need to ask followers and supporters whether they respected the club better because of what i.e. Michael Owen tweeted. This would be a great area for some further research.

 Twits

On a greater scale ‘Twits’ do not use social media inappropriately, but bordering on it. At best neutral, their tweets are not aimed at enhancing the corporate reputation of their clubs. These accounts do not use Twitter to provide great insight into their lives, nor do they use it to engage their followers. It appears, from the content analysis that they use Twitter as either a form of broadcasting, to banter with mates/colleagues or to spit out what they are feeling as individuals, irrespective of what effect it has on the club or their teammates these can either enhance or damage reputation or corporate image.

Most commonly with the rugby players in this content analysis, the majority of their tweets are aimed at colleagues or fellow rugby players to ‘banter’. They cannot be so naïve as to think that the public is not listening, but even if they are, corporate communicators would still want to nullify the majority of these tweets as they can be used as the basis of news stories and speculation. Thankfully, rugby is not as popular as other mainstream sports so the size of the audience may not be as detrimental, but it can hugely influential even in a smaller community of fans. Despite that sounding like a good comprise, with not too many picking up on their tweets, it means that these ‘Twits” are not using social media to its full potential and not in tune with corporate reputation. This will ultimately cause conflict between the individual and the organisation, especially if there is no procedure or guidelines put in place to prevent harmless tweets become harmful.

Many of these sportspeople tend to ‘blow their own trumpet’. These are a few that happen to be in desired professions of many, but those who use twitter bordering on inappropriately will ‘re-tweet’ praise about themselves, and will use self-promotion to promote external business ventures and friends’ Twitter accounts. A few sportspeople, like Graeme Swann and James Haskell use Twitter almost exclusively for ‘bantering’ purpose or purely making it about their thoughts and actions. They may think this is good tweeting; however, these sportspeople can come across as egotistical and self-serving. They may have many followers, but it may be because of their performances on the pitch rather than their ability to communicate. Corporate communicators will need to teach and encourage these ‘egos’ to use social media appropriately. These accounts, with a little and guidance, can be used to great benefit by both the individual and the organisation and with a social media policy being used as a guidance, conflicts will be avoided. However, some social media accounts go far beyond this and use social media very inappropriately. These are known as ‘Twats’; i.e., those who use social media in a manner that is destructive of corporate reputation.

Twats 

The English colloquial term ‘Twat’ speaks volumes about some individuals that use social media inappropriately, resulting in heavy reputation damage of the organisation and to the individual as well. With football being global and the players’ appealing across a broad spectrum of social media users, their posts are constantly analysed for any possible slip. Footballers Rio Ferdinandand Joey Barton are two excellent examples.  Both are footballers of certain stature and both tend to constantly be in trouble with the governing bodies or their club about their social media use. Even though that are not in the ‘Twat’ category, they are both heavy social media users and when they publish a negative tweet, it has an incredible response.

Ferdinand, for instance, with over 3m followers, has been found guilty of improper conduct and was subsequently fined £45,000 by The FA for comments on Twitter (source: www.bbc.com, August 12 2012). An independent Regulatory Commission found the Manchester United defender had brought the game in disrepute after referencing to colour of skin in a tweet. Ferdinand denied he was being racist after responding to a tweet describing his England colleague Ashley Cole as a “choc ice”. As Ferdinand’s content analysis will show, this brought out a surge of reaction and the footballer subsequently tried to defend himself and deleted the tweet. The damage had been done. Manchester United’s hands-off approach (They are the only club not to operate a club Twitter account) showed Ferdinand by himself against his followers. Plenty of news stories were created, and it made back pages in the media. This act of foolishness gave Ferdinand’s reputation as big hit, and because his name is associated with Manchester United, it received bad publicity too.

Rio Ferdinand’s tweet: “I hear you fella! Choc ice is classic. Hahahahahaha!!”

He later deleted the tweet and claimed on Twitter that it was slang for someone being “fake”, but the FA charged him with making improper comments that included a reference to ethnic origin and/or colour and/or race. In the aftermath, he soon defended the use Twitter claiming:

“I treat it as fun. I don’t take it too seriously to be honest.”

Referring back to the research, Ferdinand’s comment above suggests everything why a social media policy is needed in sport. Treating a major communication tool as “fun” shows no clear consideration for corporate reputation and the impact of his organisation. His manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, adds on the Ferdinand’s fine: “Twitter, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you’d bother.” Clearly, he was upset with the fine and how one of his leading employees managed to get into trouble. This blatant lack of understanding needs urgent addressing and it is up to corporate communicators to take the initiative and lay out set guidelines for all employees to follow.

More frustrating for corporate communicators, Ferdinand, who has over three millions followers, all with a considered interest in the football and the club he represents, does not take social media “too seriously” and this is one sportsman that is clearly visible to the wider public. Not only his inappropriate use of social media will land him in trouble, as already previously stated, his club will have plenty of negative publicity being associated with him. Images of the footballer in the organisation’s colors will be on every leading news website and every back page of the written press. While the use of sanctions, fines and public rebukes are a way of restraining misuse of social media; it would have been far more effective to avoid the problem in the first place.

Earlier this week I had the honour of speaking at the World Yacht Racing Forum in Gothenburg, Sweden.  It is a sport that, outside of the Olympics, I am quite unfamiliar with.  It was a really interesting couple of days hearing about marketing, events and sponsorship before delivering my short piece about social media.  The moderator for the event was my friend David Fuller.  David is Founder and CEO of Pilote Media and runs the successful blog YachtRacing.biz.  Here is a look at the world of sailing and social media by David… 

The other week, I attended a couple of events that looked into the importance of content as part of a marketing strategy. Sports brands have it comparatively easy when it comes to creating compelling stories, at least they have more raw content to weave stories out of, even if they struggle with narrative sometimes.

Content is about more than social media. In fact, it could be argued that social media has made some companies lazy by building a myth around casual interactivity being a proxy for engagement.

One thing is becoming more established. “Vanity metrics”, which include ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ are not as important as measures which take into account quality rather than quantity.

So in this month’s look at the world of Sailsport on Facebook, we are going to start off with a measure of interactivity – the number of people that Facebook say are ‘Talking About’ a certain page.

Top 10 – Talked About SailSport Facebook Pages.

No surprises for guessing that the Vendee Globe and associated pages are at the top of the list this month. The round-the-world race has found 43,815 new likes in the last month, but more importantly 21,268 people are interacting with the facebook page – double the 2nd place  and 10 times more than 10th place. Virtual Regatta is the official online game for the Vendee Globe, so it makes sense that there would be an increase in the number of people talking about this page. Alex Thomson Racing are also in the Top 10, but in the UK at least the team is using paid advertising on Facebook to attract visitors and increase social metrics.

Special mention goes to Luna Rossa, who presumably by leveraging Prada’s 2 million or so ‘likes’ managed to get more people talking about the page than like it.

Top 10 Sailsport pages – Actual Growth.

Having said that ‘likes’ was not the favourite measure of people who are looking to engage on social media, the sport of sailing is still trying to get an audience, let alone interact with them. Growth in the number of people who sign up to receive updates from sailing brands in their feeds is important to the health of the marketing of the sport.

North Sails have recently released a film about the history of the company. It’s a great example of content marketing – telling relevant stories to people and changing their attitudes and behavior as a result. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that North Sails’ content on Facebook is predominantly written in Italian, which might explain why it is most popular in Rome and could explain why 11,650 more people decided to invite the brand into their social feed this month.

Over the past few months I’ve written a few pieces on Formula One and recently had the opportunity to provide my thoughts on the season we have just witnessed.

As part of their commitment towards motor racing, Money Supermarket, have been reaching out to bloggers within sport to help them produce an overall chart of who had the best season in their eyes.  As it proved, the order in which they finished in the main title event wasn’t necessarily translated to here.

See if you can spot the UKSN comment somewhere on the image (there is one there I promise).  And let me know in the comments at the bottom as to whether you agree with the final order.

As part of our look at the use of social media within sport it’s also important to look at the overall picture.  We speak a lot about different Facebook campaigns but what are the stats around its use in this country?

Facebook have just released a video to help explain the main findings.  A lot of it is the building up of its self (as you would expect) as they look to keep companies on board when it comes to advertising sales.

But there are some interesting stats in there worth taking note of.  The demographics of the audience is always a key one, though you’d need to look more specifically into your sport.  If you haven’t tried it then go into the Facebook ad tool via your page and go through the setting up of a campaign.  It will tell you how many people you can reach through key words, so basically you can see how many people have said they are interesting in a certain sport or activity before you do too much.  It’s a useful tool and you dont have to actually buy any ad space, just leave the page when you have the info you want.

Other info worth noting in the video is the behaviour of certain groups and how they are accessing that info.  The use of mobile has increased significantly.  If you haven’t yet, it well worth reading the 2012 Social Media Report from Nielsen.  In here it states how the use of social media on PC’s has started to decrease but accessing by mobile and tablet has increased significantly.

This wont come as a surprise to many but is a definite shift in how and when people are using social media.  As brands, clubs, etc we need to take this on board and ensure our strategies are following this same trend.  Making your sites and content mobile centric is becoming more important.

Anyway, here is the video….

Interviews

To understand and investigate the data extracted from the questionnaires further (Corporate communicators, Sports Stars and Sports Fans), a series of interviews were undertaken from a broad spectrum of the industry. Not only professional and semi-professional sportspeople were interviewed but those within industry ranging from journalists, corporate communicators and PR professionals.

This was an important step to add context to the current data and provide a qualitative angle to progress and investigate further.  Do experts concur that the conflicts between sportspeople and their organisations over social media need to be controlled through a management policy?

This blogger was able to obtain interviews with six in-house sporting corporate communicators, including: Trevor Braitwait, Director of Communications at Sheffield Wednesday FC; Simon Williams, Communications Officer at Southampton FC; Max Fitzgerald, Communications Executive at AFC Bournemouth; Mike McGreary, Website Manager at Middlesbrough FC; Ian Cotton, Ex-Director of Communications at Liverpool and Tom Tainton, Media Officer at Bristol Rugby. Each quote has been disguised to keep views confidential.

From the interviews undertaken, there was a resounding difference between the thought of reputation and social media, and the constant battle between the individual and the organisation.

“Protecting and promoting our brand is a key part of my role. There is no specific strategy as this unfolds on an ongoing basis.” 

Worryingly, and quite unnaturally, senior management at sports clubs has made the conscious effort not to introduce a strategic strategy to deal with reputation. Across other business sectors, plans are put into place but this shows the immaturity of the sports communication industry. The younger professionals coming into the industry sees their roles slightly differently:

“Reputation management is a critical element of my role – we try to boost our reputation and ‘culture’ created by the boss and the coaching staff through positive reinforcement on our social media channels.”

This shows the willingness and eagerness to use social media more actively within the whole communication and PR strategy. As it shows in the corporate communication questionnaire, younger people are using social media to get their messages across and they are more aware of the importance of it.

“This (Using players’ social media account to boost reputation) can backfire, as two high profile football clubs recently discovered to their cost… The reputation of the club is and always will be greater than that of any individual.”

This shows two things: a clear age gap in thinking about social media, and potential differences between team sports. Some policy is for the players to express themselves and rely more on media curation to measure and keep an eye on any bad publicity.

“I think it’s important that players are given the chance to show their character on these platforms. It can however, be useful when promoting club offers due to their wider reaching fanbase.”

Again, it appears from these interviews that the younger corporate communicators are keener to use individual social media accounts to promote engagement and building and maintaining reputation.

“Every player receives social media training as well, as well as guidelines for social media use. We highlight the risks that social media can carry, particularly within the framework of media and public responsibility. Players directly represent the club and, as a result, are expected to portray themselves and their teammates in a positive manner at all times.”

Younger communicators also know the consequences and potential “pitfalls” of social media and have quickly asserted his influence to give the club a shining light for the players to use.

“By showing a personable side to the Club and creating open access to our players, we hope that supporters have a positive view of *club* and thus will be encouraged to invest time and money into our product.”

Despite the apparent differences across the three interviews, all agree that an in-depth social media policy would help to clarify current “grey areas”. Some know that they “are speaking to the media every time they tweet” and this view, from a media relations point, will help to identify potential areas for a reputation hit. Sport is highly speculative and the media can use these ‘posts’ as content to attract headlines and unnecessary, avoidable issues.

Not only it is imperative to understand the in-house corporate communicators view, it is also imperative to understand how these stories are sourced and used. After consulting journalists ranging from online, print and radio, further understanding can be taken to influence policy.

Older journalists are still adapting to sportspeople using things like social media with many believing the journalism industry is becoming more of a ‘Soap Opera’ rather than its primary objective to deliver high quality news content. One senior journalist sees social media and publicity in a different light.

“An agent’s sole raison d’etre is to get publicity for their clients in order to raise their profile and subsequently their earnings. It’s a murky and cynical business and cricketer’s, once largely removed from it, have smelt the money and are moving centre stage. “

The nation’s appetite for celebrity culture and speculative stories are ever increasing, and this senior journalist sees social media as a publicity tool for sportspeople to attract more attention. In this example, cricketers are becoming centre stage and the likes of Kevin Pietersen are becoming household names.

Their social media accounts are heavily watched in case a potential story appears. This seems to be a case of trying to build and maintain of the individuals as opposed to other collaborating with the individual’s organisations. These players are building context to market themselves and the speculation stories being produced

Interviews with sportspeople

Sportspeople sometimes create their downfall. Speculation and stories are a react to ill-informed tweets, used by those that do not appear to be educated on the consequences and understanding of social media. The data gathered from the questionnaires show clear indication that more guidance is needed to prevent future inappropriate use. As questions arose about their inappropriate social media use, many were unaware that those images and posts were made public, even when talking directly to someone.

This is an education corporate communicators need to have with their employees to prevent avoidable reputation damage. After interviewing eight sportspeople about their use of social media, many interesting points came across. As Figure 1 will show, many sportspeople enjoy using social media as fan engagement and ‘banter’ with fellow professionals.

More needs to be done to boost understanding and the consequences from using social media inappropriately as sportspeople do not understand the extent of social media and its potential impact.

Through clear guidelines and with the help of a communication specialist, their education about how to use social media could be significantly improved. To show this understanding, a focus group took place to understand how online journalists see social media use and what they think of it.

Focus group with online journalists and corporate communicators

Projecting reputation is hugely important in sport. Sport is speculative and can easily be attacked by the media who are looking for ‘easy’ stories. As mentioned before in the sportspeople questionnaire, the players seem indifferent to those journalists using their posts as stories, but their understanding of corporate reputation need to be improved.

Online journalists, Nick Howson and Vanessa Keller, who work exclusively in news gathering and content creation, know the true value of the usefulness of social media and in the interviews for this dissertation, they believe it “breaking down barriers” that were previously there.

Not only is it making their jobs easier, but also they believe they are getting more truthful responses rather than the “spin” they receive when trying to obtain quotes through their agents.

Not is social media clearly changing how journalism is practiced, but it shows the potential pitfalls that corporate communicators need to correct to ensure the barriers between the organisation and its consumers stays together.

“Traffic-wise, social media is great at getting more hits and impressions on our page. It’s an original source not the spin that clubs try to put out. In ways, it is even better than a press conference, as players are always under the watchful eye, they used social media more carefree and aren’t restricted in what they say.”

“There is becoming less need for PR, social media is becoming the number one source for journalists to go to.”

These were just some of main finding resulting from the focus group. Journalists are actively using social media as the main source for potential stories and speculation. It needs urgent addressing by clubs’ communications department, as this is a way where important can be leaked to the public. A clear social media policy outlining the consequences of such actions would provide a base a better place to prevent sportspeople people ‘twats’.

Even more so, the LinkedIn discussion with corporate communicators discovered that introducing social media policy can be rather tricky regardless of its usefulness.

Figure 2: Selected quotes from Corporate Communicators’ Focus Group

From the primary data gathered, the case studies need be sorted out to determine who are the ‘tweeters’, ‘twits’ or ‘twats’ (Next post) – and how social media policy should be framed to handle each in a way that enhances corporate reputation.

Catch up with the previous posts in Steven’s series (there are more to come)….

Part 4: Why do fans follow sports stars on social media?

Part 3: Sports people’s views of social media and how people react to them

Part 2: Why sports organisations need social media guidelines

Part 1: Sportspeople and Twitter, how they influence their communities

This is a strange post for me to write.  If you read the blog on a regular basis then you’ll know it is more industry news/opinion than anything personal.  But for once I wanted to take an opportunity to update you on something that is quite momentous for myself and is going to kick start some much needed changes to this site.

Let me give you some background…..

Since moving to London almost 2 1/2 years ago I’ve been really proud and lucky to work with some amazing people at Carat Digital and more recently We Are Social. Two awesome agencies.  Almost 100% of my time has been devoted to servicing one client, adidas, one of the biggest brands on the planet and one that has so many different categories, sponsored events and athletes and so much going for it.  It’s never been boring I can say that for sure!

But now I feel is the right time for a change…. So today is my last day at We Are Social!  

I’m really excited about what new challenges lie ahead but at the same time sad.  Sad because I’m going to be leaving a great business and will miss the people there. 

This industry has grown so rapidly and I’ve been lucky to have been part of it from early on and gained great deal of experience.  I’ve got to meet so many people and opportunities have come and gone along the way which either didn’t feel right because they were too early or not quite in the right place.

I’ve never been one who has been afraid to take a chance and now feel it is the right time to push myself and continue my education in a different way.  My brother and father have both been self-employed for a long time and it seems like it’s a family trait!  So this is the road I’ve chosen to go down.

I see so much potential in this website, UK Sports Network, and working on it still gets me excited every day.  There are new features I would like to incorporate into the site as part of a redesign, which I see and hear a need for.  I’m really looking forward to having more time to spend on the site (tinkering with it has always been fun).  This new found time will be spent writing, redesigning and striking new partnerships that will provide more and more useful tools and content for you guys.  There will also be more opportunities for me to speak to industry leaders and deliver content in different ways.

The most recent UKSN event was last week.  This is another area I’m looking forward to growing and doing more of.  It’s not just going to be about more quick half day events but also delivering full day programmes and shorter workshops – so learning and doing, rather than just listening.  I’m hoping to trial the first workshop with a great partner in the early part of next year.  So keep you eyes peeled for more information!

As well as working on UKSN I’ll also be busy building up my own social media consultancy business (the part where I make some money!).  There are a great deal of opportunities in the industry and a long way to go in social for brands.  I’m looking forward to being able to use my experience and enthusiasm to help people, who are equally passionate about their own businesses, understand and best use social media.

It is also an opportunity for me to work with a variety of businesses in the sports world, bringing some of my experience from working on adidas and the agency world to start-ups, small business, agencies and hopefully some bigger brands as well.  For the moment there is no Dan McLaren website… but hopefully soon.

If you’d like to have a chat about how I can help your business, you can get hold of me on the normal email daniel [at] theuksportsnetwork.com.  In the meantime I’ll be on the networking circuit BIG STYLE!

And there’s more…

As all of the above may not keep me busy enough (!). I’m delighted to be working with my good friend Luca on his brilliant new fan engagement agency, We Play.  He has a great business in the making and is catching people’s attention from as far away as Australia already.  It’s one to keep an eye on for sure!

The final string to my bow is public speaking.  This year has been a busy one and next year promises to be even more so.  It’s something I never would have thought I’d end up doing but I’ve really enjoyed each and every one I have done.  Who knows how far it will go but for any start-up or business it is a great way of putting yourself in people’s minds and showcasing what you can do.  I can’t recommend it enough.  Next week I’m off to Gothenburg in Sweden to speak at the World Yacht Racing Forum.  I can’t wait!

So that’s it….that’s my news.  Thanks to everyone who has helped me get to this point in my life and be able to make a decision like this.  I’ve been so excited about making this work for a while now and it’s about to become reality!

Next week sees the bringing together of Chris Schlosser, General Manager of Major League Soccer Digital, John McCauley, Digital Director of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Opta and Repucom.  This has all been brought together by the force of nature that is Sanjit Atwal.

I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Sanjit for a while now and have kept a close on what his company, Squawka.  If you have not heard about Squawka before then read on as Sanjit himsef explains more about who he is and what they do.