The first Mashup of 2012 (last one here) and this start to January has been a very eventful one for social media and sport in the news.  Some of it has been positive as social becomes more intertwined in major sports event and this week sees the start of the Australian Open tennis down in sunny Melbourne.

It has also been a time for apologies and fines in equal measures as sports stars take to Twitter to let their views been known.  Some has been a case of some careless banter and have received no more than a ticking off, while for others it has been much more costly.

If you haven’t caught our look into the future of social and sport we ran recently, you can via the links here for the USA/Spain Social Media 2012 predictions and for 2012 Predictions in the UK.

Anyway, there is much to get through so here we go (click on titles for full articles)….

Mark Williams set for disciplinary over twitter comments

Snooker star Mark Williams is set for disciplinary with the governing body over the use of offensive language on Twitter.  The players were warned about the use of social media platforms during the summer by letter from the board.

Snooker Star Ronnie O’Sullivan faces fine for Twitter comments

Carrying on the snooker theme, the star who always seems to get on the wrong side of the snooker laws has been threatened with a fine.  This time it was not for anything said about snooker but the 36-year-old, and three-times World Champion, criticised the Welsh glamour girl for going to the High Court to clear her name over claims she had tried to blackmail the Manchester United star over their six-month fling.

FA Cup game highlights available in iTunes

The FA has taken to step of making the FA Cup highlights, something that has always been reserved for TV and the broadcaster websites, onto iTunes.  You can now buy a ‘season pass’ to watch highlights from every round and from last season final.  If your a fan of cup football then this looks like a great purchase.

How the Australian Open is acing digital

The 2012 Australian Open Grand Slam tennis tournament may just be the most digitally connected major sporting event of all time.  This Mashable article looks at how the fist major tennis event of the year is showing the way for the rest of sport in 2012.  A Slamtracker already provides real-time updates of qualifying play that began on Wednesday, and fans can relive and share their favorite moments via Facebook and Twitter through a database of classic matches.

Wales captain Aaron Ramsey takes to Twitter to clarify comments

The Arsenal midfielder took criticism for saying he was disappointed at players not being consulted over Gary Speed’s replacement. But in a series of tweets, Ramsey clarified his comments to defend what he had initially said.  It should how Twitter can be used to defend players reputations and come at at the press for what they see as quotes being taken out of context.

Oxford City sack Lee Steele for homophobic tweet

A footballer who posted a homophobic remark on a social media website has been sacked by his club.  Oxford City striker Lee Steele made a comment on Twitter about the gay former Wales rugby player Gareth Thomas.

Tweeting about Thomas’s appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, Steele, 38, wrote a “strongly-worded” message about being in a bed near the contestant.  Oxford City manager Mike Ford said: “On this occasion Lee’s had to pay for his error of judgement.

Leo Messi shares Ballon D’Or win on Facebook with most shared post ever?

The Argentinian genius strolled to his third World Football of the Year award in a row last Monday and to celebrate this achievement his sponsors adidas put together a video with the man himself.  The video was released solely on Facebook and YouTube with no other promotion around it.  Since its release on Monday night it has racked up 1.9m views on YouTube together with 372k likes, 45k shares and 41k comments!  Is this the most ever in the sports world?

Rory Lamont apologises after Twitter blast at Barack Obama

Scotland and Glasgow Warriors winger Rory Lamont has apologised after describing Barack Obama as a “whore” on a social networking site.  The rugby international has used his Twitter account to make disparaging remarks about a number of politicians.

These have included the United States president, Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  The Scottish Rugby Union has described the language as “inappropriate” and the 29-year-old has apologised via Twitter.

Premier League Social Media stats – January 2012

Finally, here is the last infographic by Freestyle Interactive to enjoy showing the lastest social media stats from the Premier League….

This is a new app that I was made aware of and thought would be good to get your thoughts on too.  It is made by the guys at Slipstream who work with the likes of Volvo Sailing and British Triathlon.

Sportsday.co is an idea to bring tweets into one place where you can watch all the information about your team; follow games, transfer news, team updates, etc in an easy to view and aesthetic manner.  Something not really possible via Twitter lists.

The dashboard means you can follow all teams tweets (from anyone mentioning the official team account) or just the one that you are interested in.  The idea is to make more available through the site as time goes by so that it includes more content.

As Dan Griffey, Director at Slipstream, told me;

“We made it… as a proof of concept and intend to develop the app further to include more sports (and a dashboard to show sports / leagues / clubs) and eventually a mobile app.

We have added some features, including permalinks (http://sportsday.co/#!/mcfc) and stats, and will evolve the stats so that match day trends can really show through. We also plan to hook into Foursquare events for each of the main stadia.”

It sounds exciting and even now it is easy and enjoyable way to follow what is happening in the football world.  Its an idea that could evolve into following individuals within teams and even reporters/PR staff from them too. That would mean you would get all the breaking news from one place.

Unfortunately for me my team, Manchester United, dont have an official Twitter account (aside from the little used PR one).  Thus I have to stick to Twitter and Tweetdeck for my news for now.

Its a great idea and looks to work well.  What do you think of it?  Here are some screenshots of the site…

Following on from last weeks table that gave a first glimpse of what the new “Who’s Talking About This” number that Facebook now gives on every Page on the platform, here is a look at the last week and how it has changed.

Instead of it being a one off look I want to have a look at how this works over a longer period and answer the question on everyones lips….does it actually mean anything??

This will take some time to answer and I dont think we can make any judgements after two weeks.  After a few more weeks I’ll take a more in-depth look to this question and see if it is a metric that clubs (and brands) should take seriously or not.

For one it is hard to know if there were any quirks in the first weeks numbers as there had not been anything like this before or whether the International break meant that clubs had less to talk about (no match write-up, photo’s or team news).  It could be a mixture of the two but the lack of local action would certainly have impacted.

If you look at the change from last week to this, just about every page has suffered a major drop (all except Man Utd, Liverpool and Wigan).   It is going to take a while before we get a solid figure by which to go by but there will always be outside influences with some being obvious and others not so.

To reflect these changes I havent changed the positions by the numbers for this week.  Instead I thought it would be a fairer reflection to use an average of what we have seen so far.  This means there are smaller shifts in the positions in the table that we would otherwise.  I think the % from this week are going to be more accurate and expect similar next week too.  The idea will be to build up to a monthly figure which should give us more accuracy in the long term.

It is interesting as well to see the % gain in new fans that clubs are achieving.  There is actually only a small difference between each club with the gain being between 0.7% (Wolves) to 3.4% (Aston Villa).  Most sat in the 1-2% mark showing that there is small organic growth.  If a club uses some new marketing or advertising to boost numbers then this should be apparent in the numbers and easy to spot.

I hope you find this useful and will ook forward to your comments as always.

(W.T.A.T. = Who’s Talked About This)

(E.R. = Engagement Rate)

It has been well publicised recently that the world’s richest football club has taken the step of getting a YouTube brand channel.  To many this may get a ‘so what’ reaction and many of the articles so far have only mentioned the news but not looked into what this means to the club and for football.

If this had been in any other industry it would not make the news as most decent sized businesses have their own channel that they spend extra on to make it look cool.

But this is football and so far they have stuck to basic marketing strategies and the biggest marketing costs they will have is a club website.  Most have now (with some prodding) ventured into the new domains of Facebook and Twitter but YouTube has been largely forgotten about. But why?

This is a hard one for clubs.  They are watched on TV by millions of people, at least twice a week these days, with the games being beamed all over the world.  But, and it is a big BUT, they don’t own any of the match footage.  This is controlled by the Premier League and broadcasters and there are numerous deals in place.

One slightly odd possibility is, though I’ve never seen the contracts (strangely enough), is that any match footage is not allowed to be shown on social media platforms.  It may sound strange but am 95% sure on this one that is true.

So this leaves clubs with only their own content to use.  What this does is narrow down the field of who is likely to produce their own content and use a video platform to the big clubs.  Those who have their own TV studios and channels, usually on their website.  Those clubs such as Man Utd, City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool.

One thing to point at this stage is that gaining a YouTube brand channel is not cheap and certainly not free (sorry to those were getting excited about what they can do with a channel).  This is another restrictor when it comes to which clubs will follow suit with City.

What City have done, and managed to leap in front of the rest in the process, is take it seriously as an additional revenue generator and seen the possibilities.  They started slowly with a normal ‘official’ YouTube channel, much the same as any of us can set up if we so wish.

This allowed them to give away content that would otherwise sit on their CityTV channel being played out to a small audience.  When you are building from scratch to develop a global brand as City are, then reaching out to new fans is a must and YouTube allows that to happen.

Now they have over 4,000 subscribers to the channel and deliver regular (good) content that fans are interested in then they have been able to take the next step. A Brand Channel!

So what does this allow them to do now?

Basically it allows the club to customise how their page looks and what it can do including the channel banners, background image and branding box.  They can also moderate comments and automatically redirect people depending on there geographical location (could be a good one for the future).  It also opens up the possibilities with gadgets (opening up YouTube’s API), syndication (channel can live anywhere on the web) and metrics.  I am a fan of ‘annotations’ which allow the linking off to other videos/sites via clickable links within the video, something you only get with a brand channel.

This last one is key to any brand being on the platform.  It gives you great information on how videos (and the channel) is performing.  It can also tell you more about the content you are putting up and how engaged with it people find it.

They have already made changes to the page with links to areas of their website.  I especially like the map integration where you can buy tickets for upcoming games (as you can see below)…

There are opportunities to get even more creative as time goes by and we’ll see how it goes, as am sure other clubs will be doing.  What it does open up when it comes to revenue, I’ve finally got round to mentioning it, is the advertising/sponsorship opportunities it presents.

They can look at running sponsors messaging on their site, incorporate annotation links within videos, have a company sponsor their page and open up another opportunity, link off to sponsor channels/videos….. there is a lot they can do to monetise this space.

Here’s what those involved had to say about the partnership;

Richard Ayers, Head of Digital, for Manchester City (who has been nominated for a DADI award!), said:

“Manchester City is having a phenomenal year of growth and development online. Our goal is to deliver a market leading experience for fans in terms of online video.  That means delivering the great content we make to where the audience is – i.e. on YouTube. This deal is the first move in laying the foundations of our syndication strategy and is part of a series of deals to expand our online capabilities. The ability to extend our reach and to increase accessibility to audiences is great, but we’re also looking forward to exploring the differentiating factors of YouTube, like using annotations, making bespoke interactive video and, more than anything else, becoming part of the thriving YouTube community.”

Jeff Nathenson, Head of Sports Partnerships for YouTube, said:

“We are excited that Manchester City has become the first English Premier League club to become a commercial partner with YouTube.  They are proving to be an exciting club both on the pitch and in the digital media space.  We believe this kind of deal will have a global impact, allowing them to reach new fans in new territories with compelling original content.”

To finish, here are some examples of cool brand channels and what City could look to achieve (if they want to spend the money on doing it).  Its great to see them pushing the boundaries and hopefully they will pull others with them.

With the brand new introduction of the ‘whos talking about this’ function on all Facebook Pages as from last night, I thought that I’d put together a Premier League table (before anyone else does!).

It is interesting without delivering many shocks.  The bigger clubs with large followings get the most engagement…nothing new there.  The gaps between some of the clubs, or lack of them in some cases, is more eye opening and you can see that Norwich City do a great job with a small fan base.

The hope from Facebook is that this will encourage those who administer the pages to deliver content which is more sharable and have comment comment, like, etc rather than just spam with poorly thought out posts.

To benchmark Man Utd‘s feat, their main rivals in size on Facebook are Barcelona who’s engagement score is 561,727 and Real Madrid  with 815,437 (by far the best score).

Here is the league as it stands today (stats correct as of Friday 7th Oct 2011).  Love to hear your thoughts…

Having blogged about how sports and teams can use social media for a while now, the most surprising thing I have noticed has been the lack of fan generated content used by sporting bodies and institutes. Arguably, the greatest ingredient of sport is the fan element – a collective identity that all share the same fanatical ideology over a game.

The greatest ingredient of social media is that it literally connects people together and transcends the usual barriers of location, wealth and even language. Yet, many sports teams still seem hesitant to really understand this, and as such, seem to ignore that they have potentially millions of content creators ready to help their club out.

Yes, sports social media has come a long way in the last 12 months, but it is still incredibly one way broadcasting – particularly with UK football clubs and their social media presences. If clubs really wanted to be truly social, they would scrap their digital marketing strategy (Which is probably out of date), and worry less about ‘brand’ and more about ‘fans’.

Just imagine the possibilities of tapping into that network of talented and eager fans. One need only look at YouTube or fan forums to see the colossal amounts of fan art (some humourous photoshops, others utterly brilliant displays of art), the myriad of match reports on fan blogs, videos taken from matchdays, video compilations celebrating their sporting heroes, Facebook campaigns for social & ethical issues the fans want to support, photography of events on Flickr and the endless discussion that dominates Twitter, Facebook & Forums. The list goes on.

Sport doesn’t necessarily need to drop their employed website journalists or multimedia team, they just need to make space for their fans on that team. By all means, have the website editor write the match report, but why not ask a fan to write one as well? Or at least use quotes from Twitter? Perhaps call for budding photographers (on their DSLR or iPhone) to send in their photos to be added to the official websites gallery.

Rethink the way the websites works. It is no longer acceptable to just broadcast match reports, spam with merchandise marketing and host some awfully designed e-ticketing client (Why is it so hard to find seats together?!). Instead, sports teams should be using fan video (obviously with permission) from the stands, promoting fan written articles and most importantly using social media channels like Twitter, to talk AND listen to the fans. Marketing departments, want to know what the fans want to buy? Well ask them!

Social recommendation and referral is a huge part of marketing now, equally, social has become ever-present in the way content is written and distributed. It isn’t enough to simply sit and broadcast, get involved, leverage your online communities and empower your fans to help build your social media presence.

After the post at the start of this week with all the Championship clubs we have here in England (and Wales) it was inevitable that I would do the same for the English Premier League.

Having gone back through the list I did on the site for last season it is apparent that many have changed account names whilst others have been formed.  The most recent addition appears to be from West Brom, who launched theirs at the start of this month (has news & goal info but no interaction with fans), whilst Arsenal still lead the way with heading up to a million fans now.

There were two I could not find an official account for;  I know Man United have a PR account that started a couple of months ago but this list is more for the general, official club accounts rather than a specific department.  The other one is Swansea City who I could find no trace on Google, Twitter or their website.

Again, if you know of one on here that is wrong or there is one in where there is a space, then let me know and I’ll update.  I did notice that one of the accounts, Newcastle, appears to be a straight feed from its website and little else (not best use).

TIP: For anyone from a club reading this, if you can make it as easy for people to find your twitter account as possible (on website, leaflets, posters, email signatures, stationary, etc) then you will see that you reach more fans and get more out of it.  Some of the clubs I’ve been looking for have been hard to find….if I’m struggling imagine what the chances are of casual fans finding you?  Integration within the club activities is key if you want to make it work properly for you!

One other thing to note – aside from the big clubs there was only one other who have an authenticated account….. Norwich!

Anyway, here’s the big list (up-to-date as of 10^th Aug)…..

It certainly has been an interesting week for followers of Sports Social Media, as Premier League midfielder Joey Barton was released from his club (Newcastle United) after having a very public bust-up with the club via Twitter. As a consequence, every media outlet and journalist has been talking about the ever-growing popularity of social media amongst professional footballers. On one hand, this has been excellent for us that have long been trying to promote the profile of social media within the game. However, on the other hand, it’s a shame to see that yet again the press has instead focused on highlighting negative stories rather than the good (Which admittedly are still too few and infrequent in the UK).

One positive element to take out of the whole Joey Barton debacle was a comment from David Sheepshanks, former Football Association board member and current head of the National Football Centre . Sheepshanks said in a Daily Mirror article,

“My view is football has got to adjust to social media and not just here at St. George’s Park [Where the National Football Centre is based], which is all about learning, but also at club level.”

“I hope the programmes will be instituted at club level which will better equip young players to deal with the sort of things that happen.”

Bravo Mr. Sheepshanks.

Far too many seem intent on pointing the blame just at the players. In my opinion, the clubs share an equal responsibility for what their players tweet. The sooner clubs realise that a Tweet is just as influential (and potentially damaging) as a quote to a journalist, the sooner they can start trying to figure out how to educate their players and help them understand, and be careful, on social channels.

Banning social media amongst players, as a few clubs have done so already,  is a short term quick fix that will most definitely never stick. The ever-changing nature of the game means that players constantly transfer between clubs whether on permanent deals or loans. How can clubs expect players to immediately disconnect with their faithful fans all of a sudden? As long as clubs continue to ban, players will never understand what they are doing wrong, nor will they see the potential value that good social media offers.

Clubs must take responsibility for their players by setting aside time to bring in some experts (Wolves recently brought in a media law firm) and educate the players. Inform them of the value of social media, how to use it, how to talk to their fans, what is best practice and what is not. Use existing case studies to demonstrate what isn’t acceptable. Offer players a social media advisor, so they can ask questions or check whether the tweet they want to send out is ok. Provide them, please dear god, with a social media policy – so at the very least they have something on paper at hand (as well as acting as legal document that the player has agreed to adhere to the clubs internal policy). Even give the manager some training and guidance!

These are not difficult initiatives, nor are they expensive. It is unbelievable how most clubs haven’t even got the basics yet. Clubs need to adjust to social media and they need to get on board now, otherwise players will continue to act up.

It looks like the move of Wesley Sneijder from Inter Milan to Manchester United is becoming inevitable, even his sponsors Nike (who also sponsor Inter and United) think so! 

In a move that looks a tad premature and has still not been adjusted by the sponsor even though it has go0ing arounbd the internet for a day or so now.  The problem for them is that they have altered the SEO on their website, so now if you search ‘Nike football Wesley Sneijder’ it comes up with links to their website and info stating that “Wesley Sneijder plays for Man Utd and wears the Nike T90 Laser III.”

It does hark back to the England Rugby Grand Slam video which was leaked on YouTube before the final England game this year in which they lost to Ireland and didnt achieve their ultimate goal.  I’m sure that officials in Milan will be fuming if this reaches their ears, though judging by the papers today it looks like a done deal that will be confirmed in the next 48 hours.

Its not been a good week for the sports giant.  This comes on top of them being targeted in a Greenpeace campaign and reaching the front page of The Metro this morning under the headline “Nike staff: We cant stop bosses beating us”.  Their PR team will be in overdrive in the coming days it seems.

As an Man Utd fan I can only keep my fingers crossed that Nike are right on this one and he joins Young, Jones and De Gea in the United line up next month.

Here is a screengrab of the results…