Guest Post: Steven Woodgate MA, 25, recently graduated with distinction in Public Relations in his postgraduate study at Southampton Solent University. His love for sport stemmed from his undergraduate degree in sports journalism and following Reading FC. You can follow him on @StevenWoodgate

It’s been a tough weekend for sport: so many statements and apologies, and not enough sporting action.  These mindless idiots above need to be sanctioned, sentenced and slapped, but unfortunately, Millwall, the club, will no doubt get caught in the cross fire.

In the Guardian yesterday, in Barney Ronay’s piece, the club was summed up rather perfectly:

“And for all its urban location this is still a strangely isolated club, buried in the industrial inner suburbs, hard to get to, detached from gentrified new-build London. It must also be said there was a sense of isolation, almost a weariness to the club response immediately after the game. The manager, Kenny Jackett, claimed not to have seen the incident and stopped short of condemning anybody for anything. Millwall’s media officer made it clear, in not so many words, that there are those who might point the finger at the police for not intervening quicker. The Millwall chairman, John Berylson, mused that you can never be sure who’s sitting where on these occasions. Perhaps proximity to such things frays the nerves and dulls the reflexes, but given the genuinely shocking nature of the violence, something more is required. There will be calls for fines and bans. A greater show of backbone from those in authority at the club would be a good place to start.”

Nail on the head.

Communication is the biggest factor, and this blog has mentioned it before, true leadership is needed. Perception and reputation has followed Millwall everywhere, and they lived up to their battered stereotype.

It’s understandable that the club is not directly responsible, but more needs to be done to investigate who comes to games. Imagine these marred events every weekend in the Premier League when Big Brother’s eyes are constantly watching. It would horrific. These people are Millwall’s cancer.

Having Millwall in the Premier League is probably the FA’s and League’s biggest worry. The PL is the most watched league in the world, and imagines of in-fighting, blooded noses, and shoes flying everywhere would cause colossal damage.

Groups of 30 men of varying ages throwing punches and kicks is not an image of football and is certainly not condoned in society. The absence of police is almost as laughable. The ‘stewards’ are not bodyguards and if they were expected to get involved to split up the trouble, I would expect the FA to pay them more than the £7 per hour they currently get.

The problem needs to be prevented. A big issues management brainstorm needs to be sanctioned. There are ways these troublemakers can be found, and if the right tools were used, and the right messages displayed, the trouble would certainly cease  - somewhat.

Social listening is one method. Look to social media to find out who these people, the repeat offenders, are and ban them immediately and make examples of them.

Those in the club can pick up trends, find out who the key troublemakers are and pass them over to the authorities. Simply working with the police is not enough, those in-charge at Millwall need reputation building and to be seen as authoritative leaders of condone such scenes and not stand for it. It may cost Millwall fans, and money, in the short-term, but longer-term they will reap the benefits.

Their run to the FA Cup semi-final is a remarkable story. But it’s all ended in blood, stolen police hats, and young girls crying. The shame.

It is no good the FA fining the club, banning them from games, but they need to work together and come up with a plan to cut the problem at its root and not simply firefight.

What a strange, and awful, occasion it turned out to be.

By the way, congratulations Wigan Athletic on a fine win.

Following nearly 1 year of preparation, my business partner and I launched MySeatz.com, in August 2011. MySeatz was launched to become the destination for deals on Football League tickets.

MySeatz aimed to increase attendances throughout the Football League by working directly with clubs to make tickets available at a discounted price through sporadic, time limited, and often last minute deals for tickets on the MySeatz web platform. MySeatz was the first dedicated UK Football ticket deal website.

The state of Football attendances seemed to support our theory. Taking each League as a cohort, The Championship, League 1 and League 2 only filled an overall average of 68.7%, 42.7% and 43.4% respectively of stadium capacities in the 2010/2011 season. (These stats haven’t changed much in the last 18 months, incidentally).

It was great…all of this was fuel for the MySeatz fire.

Much of the preparation time my co founder and I spent pre launch was on considering the viewpoint of the Football club, particularly as we understood that clubs wouldn’t be eager to devalue their own ticketing infrastructures.

From a fans perspective, they were able to visit MySeatz.com and register their interest in receiving deals from any one of the 72 Football League Clubs. When we had a deal for their club, we’d email it to them…simple!
We were therefore building fan networks for each Football league club, then offering clubs a cost effective opportunity to sell ticket deals to their registered fans on MySeatz.

However, after over 1 year of efforts, and little positive response from Football Clubs, we called time on the MySeatz journey due to a lack of traction.

Why?

After our de briefing on the failings of MySeatz, we offer the following advice from our experiences for those looking to offer products or services to Football clubs:

Don’t be seen to compete

It sounds obvious, but even we didn’t think we competed with the Clubs. Our self perception was that we empowered clubs by giving them an off the shelf network of fans to tap into. They viewed us as potentially taking fans that were already theirs, and reducing their income by selling cheaper tickets to those fans.

Clubs like control

Feeding off the previous point, Clubs want to retain control over how they sell their products. Third party suppliers can in no way be seen to compete with, or cannibalize sales of the partnering Club. We recognized this and made our service as flexible as possible with no commitments or upfront payments being asked of the clubs. This wasn’t enough.

The clubs wanted control over our network of fans, however without control over our network we had very little leverage, so we were unwilling to allow them direct access to it, which in turn created another barrier to partnership.

Clubs accept empty seats

Clubs understand that empty seats will always be an issue, and many of the clubs we spoke to seemed fairly content in this regard. The general consensus was that whilst they had measures to increase attendances, none of these would be prioritized over the de valuing or cannibalizing of full price ticket sales of regularly attending fans.

The “We’ve done it this way for many years” approach

I don’t want to over emphasize this point, because respectfully, there are many clubs doing many new and innovative things. However, there were certain clubs who were particularly unwilling to consider new ways of approaching an issue, such as ticketing, which has traditionally been managed the same way for some time (although the internet/mobile has changed their distribution channels of late). With these clubs, we didn’t get much of a look in.

Empower the Clubs

On reflection, a better version of MySeatz would have been to provide a “platform as a service” white label solution to empower the clubs to directly offer their own deals using the technology in our ticketing system, without the brand of MySeatz. They could then use the system to further build their own network of fans, rather than feel like we were offloading their fan network to MySeatz.

In the end, there’s a whole lot of opportunity out there for new products and services to offer Football Clubs in terms of ticketing, merchandising, marketing, data analytics, for those ready to disrupt.

In our case, empowering rather than outsourcing would have been a better strategy.

Best of luck to the next hopefuls.

John Henwood

Fans of the Australian Hyundai A league are being given the opportunity to help pick an ‘All-Star’ team to face Man Utd in a friendly in July.  The ANZ stadium has sold out it’s 77’000 allocated tickets in preparation for the match which will make up part of United’s pre season training.

Fans have already selected who the coach is to be and voted in Melbourne Victory head coach Ange Postecoglou. Along side his selection, fans will make up 50% of the vote of who makes the cut in the team through an online selector, 20% will be made from an ‘All-Star’ Committee, a further 20% from the PFA team of the year and 10% from Postecoglou himself.

The online selector allows for fans to pick from all the teams, choose a formation and also pick a captain.

Any amount from each team is allowed and from any nationality. They don’t have to be purely Australian.

Over 10’000 fans have already used the team selector and with over a month still to go to pick a squad that number is likely to continue to rise. After you’ve made you selections and submitted, users are invited to inform their friends or highlight the team they’ve picked through Facebook and Twitter.

Allowing for fans to pick who makes the squad is a fantastic bit of fan engagement. Not only does it bring the fan closer to the selection process but it also helps to unite rival teams. By allowing a fan selection percentage it will make it hard for any set of fans to cry bias and to avoid the game based on team loyalty. This way, the FFA have insured that the stadium is sold out, that TV views will be high and that (likely) kit and memorabilia on the day will be bought in the bucket loads.

Coach Postecoglou has already said that his team is “going to have a go at Manchester United” and with a fan selected set of all stars we’re hoping they win too.

Could you ever see this working in the Premier League? If so, who would make the team?

This article was written by Christian Baker from www.weplay.co

Guest Review:  Tom Kelk is a tech/sport blogger and Account Exec at global social media agency We Are Social.  You can find him on Twitter @TomKelk, LinkedIn and his blog.

The watching of sport has developed rapidly over the last few years. It is now the norm to ‘dual-screen’ when watching a game. Whether that be on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, viewers like to engage to a greater extent with a broadcast in the modern day. Whilst all the aforementioned social channels do this job, there is no market-dominating app that congregates all the conversation one a single game into one ‘second-screen’ experience. This is exactly what SportStream intends to achieve.

They already service NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB; their next target is football – specifically the Premier League and MLS. This is not a surprising next step as the football community is already well-represented, and is continuing to grow in social media. There was a 126% increase in the Premier League’s Facebook and Twitter following in the year 2011-2012 and this trend has continued in 2013. SportStream intend to capitalise on this extended conversation and also apply it to the growing MLS following.

SportStream is effectively Twitter, Facebook messaging and Sky Sports statistics – all rolled into one. The app allows a user to flick between games and engage solely in the chat from that particular game. Whilst this is a nice feature, and may work well in NFL and NBA, chat is aided by the breaks in play and that is my concern with relation to football. Will people want to be that engaged in a deep conversation about the game during play? I’m not so sure.

To counter this concern, SportStream have tried to curate an experience for the user based on who they follow on Twitter and Facebook. This also applies to the game you’re following, gives you notifications over which game is hotting-up and also recommends influencers for you. A “sophisticated semantic engine automatically identifies and tracks influential Twitter personalities, bloggers, sports journalists, teams, players, Facebook friends and fans” which should add an extra dimension to your second screen experience.

Another area SportStream are heavily pushing is their in-app, in-depth visual statistics. They offer:

• “Graphic timeline of plays: Each match is summarized by a graphic timeline of key plays, including goals, player substitutions and cards, all marked by intuitive icons. Fans can follow each turn of events and see who made the play and when.
• Visual stats: Graphic display of the numbers for each team’s shots on target, touches, saves, passes, possession percentage, etc.
• Headline stats on a constant bite-size loop: The names of players who scored and the minute mark at which they made the play will scroll continuously under the team’s logo so fans can have the most vital stats at their fingertips.”

Whilst in-game statistics are probably an essential for this type of application, I have a concern with this focus as a USP. Do the bulk of football followers want in-depth stats? They are interesting, but the feature works far better for American sports where statistics play a far more important role in the discussion of a game. In my opinion the statistical detail is one of the least transferrable USPs for SportStream and should be included more as an added extra.

There are a couple of nice additional features include an in-app tweet composer which automatically adds the hashtags relevant to that game:

Also, the allowing of a private conversation to develop in a separate area is an interesting extra. This feature could be adopted well by users, especially as it’s designed as quite central to the app and how it functioned. I can definitely see myself becoming embroiled in a debate and this offers a great outlet.

The problem for SportStream is that I can see users log-in once or twice a week when their team is playing and that being all. Will users become addicted to using the app under that usage? Possibly not. Will users fully immerse themselves in each and every game or would they like to follow and comment on the game on Twitter whilst also considering other topics? The latter seems more likely.

The challenge for SportStream is to give users enough reason to switch from their current Twitter clients. Most users have settled into how to discuss a game on Twitter and may be unwilling to switch this routine but it should be given a chance. It is a very interesting app, has a lovely UI and gives us a different sport-viewing experience. It’s a free app (only on web and iOS at the moment) and I would certainly recommend giving it a try, see what you think.

Want to learn a bit more? Check out their slick HTML5 site: http://sportstream.com/

Guest Post:  Tom Kelk is a tech/sport blogger and Account Exec at global social media agency We Are Social.  You can find him on Twitter @TomKelk, LinkedIn and his blog.

Knowledge of Chinese social media is sketchy in the western world but UEFA football clubs are wising-up. Recently Shanghai-based agency, Mailman Group, released a review into the top 14 UEFA European football presences over three Chinese social channels; Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo and to a lesser extent, Weixin. So to follow it up we spoke to their CEO, Andrew Collins, to get some more insights…

Without the platforms familiar to most of us, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, this entirely parallel social media ecosystem has emerged. It is an ecosystem that boasts 500m+ active users and over a billion registered accounts. There has been a significant footballing investment in the Asian social market in recent times and judging on the results in Mailman Group’s report, this trend is set to continue.

The 14 clubs were selected based on their popularity on the platforms. These included the expected clubs such as FC Barcelona, Manchester United, FC Bayern, AC Milan, Inter Milan and Real Madrid. Alongside this, five further British clubs made the study: Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City, Tottenham and Liverpool. The research base was completed by Juventus and somewhat surprisingly, Valencia and Malaga.

As can be seen, Spanish, Italian and British clubs are leading the way in working with social media but there is an ever widening spread of clubs showing their interest in exploiting the Asian football-following market. These European clubs have shown increasing efforts to make a name for themselves on Chinese social media and this is demonstrated by 57% of the clubs analysed having official presence on both Sina and Tencent Weibo to connect with Chinese fans online.

Just the one club included in the study had no official social channel; Manchester United. Andrew explained this as the same reason for a lack of an official Manchester United Twitter page – that Manchester United is a unique club and much more private on social media than any other team.

Whilst there are plenty of unofficial presences on Sina and Tencent, these have a far lower impact on fan growth than an official page might. For this reason, Manchester United have an ‘official following’ of just 400,000 – a tenth of their Manchester rivals.

All 14 teams’ accounts were analysed across 5 verticals: total follower numbers, official presence, engagement rate, localization and popularity. Unsurprisingly, the top four performing clubs were arguably the current best four European clubs: Barcelona, Manchester United, FC Bayern and Real Madrid.

Despite Manchester City boasting an interestingly large number of fans (over double that of Barcelona), their engagement figures are lacking. We asked about this high number and whether there had been peaks in the follower numbers after winning the Premier League in 2012, which would fit with the research on reasons for supporting a side, but there were not dramatic peaks during this period. Indeed, Manchester City have clearly invested heavily in Chinese Social Media as their following figures have continued to rise “like clockwork”.

What are some key take-outs from the study?

Mailman Group analysed the mindset of football fans on Chinese social media and discovered there are two central motivations behind choosing a club: glory supporting and superstar players. As a side note, it was found that only 1% of fans made a decision based on a club’s visit to China.

The influence of superstar players was seen as significant by 40% of the Chinese football fans when deciding upon their club. This is outlined by Lionel Messi’s following of 14m, which is over 4 times the amount of the largest-followed club – Manchester City. Mailman Group noted that clubs were far more successful when including their superstar players close to their digital strategy; currently, few clubs are doing this well.

The influence of ‘superstar players’ also applies to the presence of Chinese players at European clubs but to a lesser extent. Hidetoshi Nakata, for example, is arguably one of the most famous Asian footballers and has a following of 3 million on Sina Weibo.

Glory supporting was a key factor in 42% of Chinese fans’ club choice (combination of ranking in the league and club heritage). Indeed, many Chinese football fans support multiple teams and switch loyalties depending on achievement on the pitch.

When asked the question about whether this would negatively impact the attempt of smaller clubs to embrace Chinese social media; Andrew insisted there is a market for smaller clubs, and that the multiple-club support can indeed be an advantage.

It does seem that there are plenty of loyal fan groups for smaller clubs, and whilst these are not in the same magnitude as the 14 analysed, they are a good base for a successful social media strategy.

Mailman Group see 2013 as a crucial year for those operating on Chinese social media. Whether or not they are currently focusing on social media platforms, They believe that there needs to be more attention paid to tactical social media; for example, engaging in Mandarin is key to success in China for European football clubs.

Currently, European clubs are not taking their China content strategies seriously enough. They are not engaging well with fans on a personal level, and are focusing too heavily on follower numbers over engagement figures. This is highlighted by Manchester City’s activity which leaves them top following figures table, yet bottom of the engagement table.

Content needs to be varied, and interesting for maximum gain, but there has been notable success with merchandise-related content. However, most clubs do not offer their Chinese fans the online store to purchase from. It is also interesting to note that 69 % of posts were highly-localised (i.e 90% of posts translated into Mandarin) which does show a certain commitment to Chinese social media from the top 14 UEFA clubs analysed.

It was revealed that the localised posts were receiving ten-times the engagement of posts in English. This demonstrates the importance of investing in translation for individual posts. Content strategies will also need to take into consideration the interesting trend of female followers on Chinese social media. In stark contrast to the western market, over 30% of Chinese football fans on social media are female. We are awaiting the engagement differences between men and women, which will be key to content planning for football clubs.

Here are the three key tips for football clubs looking to embrace Chinese social media in 2013, Andrew said:

1. Launch player accounts on Tencent Weibo and incorporate them into a club ‘group’ with consistent exchange of content.

2. Exploit the huge opportunities offered by Weixin in 2013. The mobile platform targets real users – each of them identified by their mobile number – in a more relaxed (ad free) online environment. Indeed, users only add their actual friends on Weixin, whereas Sina/Tencent users have a much wider/more random circle (similarly to Twitter). 

3. Partner with Chinese companies, for example run campaigns with the support of Sina/Tencent in order to maximise reach and penetration.

What the insights provided by this study have proven is that whilst European football clubs have made big strides in 2012, this is simply the tip of the ice-berg. Chinese consumers have an extremely strong interest in European football and these insights are a wake-up call to not only the 14 clubs in this study, but all other clubs in Europe’s major leagues. There is a huge opportunity for European clubs in 2013, and it is an opportunity they need to start taking seriously.

Click here for the full study, it is well worth reading.

This seven-part series has considered whether sport PR needs the introduction of a bigger and a more detailed social media policy to prevent reputation damage and conflict arising between the individual and the organisation they represent.

The hypothesis set out for the research sought to prove how  ‘Social Media policies in sports organisations need to address abuse by individuals to avoid negative effects on corporate reputation and control corporate image’. PR theory was considered to understand the demands of corporate reputation and how they are affected by the use of social media, and found wanting when it came to understanding the unique relationship between sportspeople and their organisations, as well as between clubs and their fans.

Secondary research laid the foundation to illustrate what kinds of stories are published via social media. Content analysis revealed the extent and nature of the problem, with three different categories of twitter traffic identified – tweeters, who help a corporate reputation, twits who are relatively harmless but not helpful and twats, who can be positively destructive.

The content analysis conducted on eleven sportspeople demonstrated, overwhelmingly, that inappropriate social media use is common throughout sport. That is not to say this use is always a negative, rather it includes missing opportunities to enhance the corporate reputation of one’s team. Footballers are the obvious target considering their global impact, but it is up to their corporate communicators to set policy and lead by example. Football already has a somewhat tarnished reputation and the fact it does not apply social media guidelines to common practice inevitably makes reputation management even more difficult.

The coexistence of social media and the traditional mass media will not be as easy to achieve in the arena of sports, as it might be in many corporate environments. Sportspeople have to be careful and review their own use of social media reconsidering the use of communications experts to guide them.

After all, a sportsperson is not a communication professional, and some help will be required to understand the risk to reputation.  Self-regulation or self-censorship by sportspeople of their use of social media is an acquired skill, and needs corporate guidance. Quite simply, sportspeople need to be shown what ‘good’ looks like.

In a world where sport is increasingly commercial, global and driven by business principles, risk and reputation management may well prove to be the driving force behind a new approach to social media. The desired integration and alignment within companies of sportspeople and management require that a reputation must be built both ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’.

Corporate Communicators may well be the initiator and driver of implementing a social media reputation approach, building a leading coalition with sportspeople and management. Bringing valuable insights on stakeholder opinion and potential risks to reputation to the boardroom and to the sportspeople’s minds, corporate reputation should be given the attention it deserves and earn corporate communicators a standing invitation to overall reputation strategy discussions. Introducing a social media policy should be the first big step in addressing online reputation management.

Corporate communicators should therefore be prepared to take the next steps. This research believes that the below list of recommendations are essential in making the best use of social media:

-       Introduce the purpose of social media

-       Be responsible for what you write

-       Be authentic

-       Consider your audience

-       Exercise good judgment

-       Understand the concept of community

-       Remember to protect confidential information

-       Bring value

-       Productivity matters

-       Prepare to face consequences and possibly expulsion

Further research is needed to confirm the findings and draw greater validity and authority should include the following:

-       Widen the analysis by looking at the explicit relationship between corporate reputation and twitter traffic over a much longer period, across a broader range of sportspeople, and involving more than just the UK,

-       Deepen the research, by applying the above framework to one specific club in which several different sports people are tweeting, to quantify the actual impact on corporate reputation of tweets, twits and twats.

-       Break down the elements of corporate reputation and the role of power that resides with investors, rather than fans, and see whether social media has any impact

As this research and blog posts have proven, doing nothing about the use of social media is no longer an option.  Corporate communicators and senior managers need to act now before more of its sportspeople become ‘Twats’ and before it has significant effect on corporate reputation.

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.

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