How much control do you give to facebook?

For a while now I have been thinking about facebook and how much sporting organisations in particular but business in general, are giving over the control of their customers to facebook.

A few people have got me thinking about this more and more.

@sammartino why would you use facebook ads to drive traffic to the Facebook site building their loyalty

@problogger  social media sites are the spokes and your website the hub – you want to use the spokes to bring people into your hub

@danny__bishop advocating people setting up shops within facebook to keep the process seamless and stop them from thinking as much about the sale.

A person from my work saying maybe we should get up ticketing via facebook and not bother about an online shop.

I don’t think this is going to have any answers but more starting to think about my position.

I am a big fan of facebook to connection with fans/customers and  building fan engagement, but there is part of me which worries about the reliance we’re having on facebook an how little control we have over this channel.

On the other side – it’s a case of fish where the fish are – the numbers of people on facebook are just phenomenal and you have to be there, making the purchase process easy by keeping people in facebook makes sense – but for how long is what  I wonder.

Here is my list of pros and cons – do you agree, how much do you think we should be relying on facebook?

Pros	Cons
Number of people on facebook	No control over what facebook will do with pages
Limiting the but barriers to purchase	Not driving people to the content on your website
Finding out  more information on who your facebook followers are	Managing limited inventory such as ticketing, table bookings etc
Fishing where the fish are	Integrating application data into your business’ database
Seamless from promotion on facebook to selling	Impact of facebook money for selling – how will this effect cashflow

Kim Trengove Tennis Australia Digital Team

Kim Trengove was the second speaker from Tennis Australia Digital Team which incorporates TA and the Australian Open .

As a former fanatic (Boston Tie 1999, France final 2000 and Spain final 2001) and tennis lover I was thrilled to hear Kim speak.

Tennis Australia does most of its digital content in-house – this she believes allows or Better quality and more engaging content.

There are eight core members of their digital team, with additional resources during the Ausopen. They create video, photos, radio and news content. Tennis Australia during the Ausopen have started paying for a freelance photographer so they have the rights to the images.

During the 2011 Australian Open they live streamed the qualifying rounds plus the draw and charity day matches. They have over 300k unique visitors during the five days before the open started – giving a great lead in to the Ausopen.

Tennis Australia are currently partnering with youtube with over 5 million youtube views.

This give added content such as interviews in the cars with players – giving insight into how they top level professional lives and how they prepare for matches. It helps to provide content which isn’t hindered by current commercial rights.

In the lead up they also run the ‘change of ends’ film festival where people make a video that’s ninety seconds long.

Kim stressed this has taken time to gain traction but is now building into a real event with the better video being shown on channel Seven and around the ground on match days.  They are hoping it will come to rival Tropfest.

Stats for Tennis Australia

Medium	Ausopen	Tennis Australia
Facebook	300k	18k
Youtube	5mil	1.2mil
Twitter	29k	4,800

Staff of Tennis Australia, player support staff and players are all encouraged to be active on social media.

They also consider the audience when doing updates – twitter more news orientated, not more than five updates a day on Facebook.

At the Ausopen there were the IBM twitter scouts who the ausopen twitter accounts knew and interacted with openly and regularly.

Tweet-ups were organised for Garden Square as well as facebook meet ups.

Discounts were provided on merchandise to people who checked in via facebook places and foursquare.

Facebook Advertising

Used simple messages like “Ausopen likes Raffa” to drive likes to the Ausopen facebook page.

Mobile

Iphone Ap – had over 700k downloads in 2011.  AO views was added into the ap to give more interactive information into the ap.

Ausopen program was made into an iPad Ap at a cost of $5, this was able to be done as Tennis Australia decided in insource the whole program for 2011, previously it had been outsourced to News Limited. During this time it was the most popular paid download in the ap store.

AO Radio was also available streamed off the website, in the ap and as a narrowcast at the ground.

Observations and the future:

• Having Facebook likes and twitter followers doesn’t equal bums on seats
• Need to build networks in the real world to complement their interaction in the virtual world
• Looking to train members associations to create more content at a grass roots level – probably using WordPress as simple and easy for most people to use
• Directing people to specific places for giveaways on game days
• Working closer with youtube to increase content and monetise content

Digital Sports Summit Kyle Spencer Warriors

First up as Digital Sport Summit was Kyle Spencer Executive Director Team Marketing at the Golden State Warriors.

Kyle took us through some of the key growth stats for facebook and twitter.

Medium	2009	2010
Twitter	75 mil	175 mil
Facebook	350 mil	700 mil

Biggest increase has been mobile – 50% of twitter usage is via  mobile and over 200mil youtube views on a mobile every day.

By 2014 the expectation is there will more web browsing via a mobile than on a desktop/laptop computer.

Facebook has become one of the top 3 refers to the Warriors website – after google and the nba website. It is integral to their success.

With new ownership, Warriors had a rebranding exercise but found the new brand was being leaked. To mitigate this they held an online scavenger hunt to find the Warriors logo two weeks before the launch, with a piece of the logo being unveiled at each point. 

The final prize was a season ticket which would be announced at the draft party – one of their key sales driver for that period.

They condensed their website to a splash page during the promotion and had clues across the various social media to engage fans. Data was gather which gave them warm leads for the draft party.

They knew the game had to be fun and engaging, utilising all social media and video clues to generate web traffic during this time.

Over 6,000 people registered for the game and over 4,000 attend the draft party – their most successful.

Kyle stressed gaining followers/likes is a strategy to move people into customers.

Tweedia Day

This was an initiative undertaken by the Warrior to engage with sports bloggers and social media journalists.

It gave these people access to areas the same as traditional media such as

·         Covering practices

·         Attending shoot outs

·         Game day access

·         Locker room access

These people were seen to have a different spin to traditional media and create hype in a new sphere with increased credibility.

Each person had to submit an application to gain a media pass for one of the games.

This helped in a number of ways

·         Bloggers and social media commentators don’t have ‘space’ issues like traditional media

·         They  brought a different spin to the ‘media coverage’

·         Created a relationship with the bloggers

·         Bloggers are now more likely to check facts with media department before publishing

Facebook Places

With the relationship the Warriors have with Facebook they have been able to increase their mobile presence.

Referrals from friends is one of the most powerful and people showing they are going to a Warriors game

Offering deals to patrons to check in on facebook places during a game. Offers such as

·         10% off merchandise,

·         Exclusive experiences such as meeting players /coaching staff after the game

Sport has the ability to offer once in a life time moments to people few other industries can.

Kyle stressed you still have to heavily promote check-in before the game and at the game with booths set up at each game to help people to check-in and get access to the offers.

Key limitation is the network capabilities for people to check-in but they average around 750 per game.

Four of the top six grossing merchandise products for the Warriors were featured in their facebook deals.

In closing Kyle stressed

1.       Need to get go of the conversations and accept negative comments will be made

2.       Take on board the negative and action them were possible

3.       People are having conversations with or without you – be part of those conversations

4.       Have fun with social and digital – you need to have a brand personality

5.       If a social media campaigns fails – don’t worry too much take it on board and try something else

6.       Know each social media channel and it’s strengths – use twitter to break stories, facebook only post occasionally

Cultivating a Culture of Failure

In 2000/01 I was fortunate enough to work for www.lastminute.com in the UK.  During this time I worked very closely with Carl Lyons – Marketing Director, and had a great amount of contact with co founders Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, along with countless other talented people.

There were many things I loved about my job but the thing which has stuck with me most is the  business had a culture of failure. It was OK to fail…. and there was no fear of it. This culture started with Martha and Brent and permeated its way through the whole company – it was scary, thrilling and inspiring.

That’s not to say we didn’t want to succeed, and we weren’t striving for the best, but we were allowed to try new things. That’s not to say we could  waste resources or not think through decisions but there was a real sense it was OK to make mistakes, try new things. There wasn’t a fear of failure culture but a let’s try stuff culture.

After leaving was probably when I realised how freeing and inspirational this was.  No company I have worked for since has had such a supportive culture and such a feeling you could just get out there and try new things.

Buinesses need to realise it’s OK if every idea you implement isn’t the million dollar idea. By supporting the implementation of new ideas, refining ideas, it allows you to make the good better and the better best . Also it allows you to try ideas out and let them go if they don’t succeed without fear of retribution. The most important thing is to learn from your mistakes.

Other businesses I have worked in with have a fear of failure culture and, in my experience, have less creativity and less likely to make the million idea happen because people are just too scared it may not turn out perfectly, so they don’t bother trying.

I am a big believer you learn a lot more from your failures than your successes, and really hope I am creating in my current role no fear of failure and  cultivating a culture of innovation and ideas.

Synoposis Nick Marvin Perth Wildcats

Nick is the CEO of the Perth Wildcats basketball team, he was recruited for his experience in turnaround management as opposed to being  a sporting specialist. He was brought on board to the Perth Wildcats to turn around their profitability and playing future.

All the TV ads in the world won’t move to you from a Carlton fan to a Collingwood fan you need to move people up the value chain. It’s very rare for people to change teams it’s for life. The commitment begins early and it set up my family direction or experiences kids have at school/in the community. On this basis the Perth Wildcats do 250 primary school visits per year – helping people to capture them for life.

Social Media is not all the answers!

It’s also not all about being successful as a club. You don’t have to win to have fans. The Perth Wildcats were in the finals for 20 years, but when Nick tool over they had a declining membership. He cited the AFL examples of non successful clubs like St Kilda, Collingwood and others who with very few premierships have managed to maintain and grow their membership bases.

Sport Nick said it about engagement – it’s tribal belonging.

28% of men and 20% of women citied they were facebook fans because of the sense of belonging

22% of men and 29% of women said because of the exclusive content

In general people follow less tha 5 brands and 72% of people follow less than 4.

Perth Wildcats have a number of staff utilising social media including:

• Coach
• Players
• Team manager
• Community Manager
• CEO

This helps to give a multidimensional view to customers of the organisation.

During a time of great change at the club Nick wrote an email to fans every week to ensure they felt part of the decision-making processes he was going through.

They have found a lot of success with doing offers with ticketmaster with special codes for twitter and facebook followers. Research shows people who are facebook and twitter followers are more likely to buy.

Nick believes you can’t have ghost writers people are looking for authenticity online and you lose credibility if people start to think you’re not who you say you are.

Business Start up Ready Reckoner

I have done a small tool in excel for people who are looking to set up some type of consulting business.

You can plug in how much you charge per hour, how many clients you see and then put in expenses.

The tool allows you do some basic analysis on revenue and costs in the first few months and work out what you can afford to pay in rent and alike.

What the tool looks like is on scribd sorry I can’t work out out to get a download of just the excel file.

If you would like a copy you can email me anna_spanna71@hotmail.com also happy to do any ammendments if you would like.

Synopsis of ProBlogger

Part four of notes from Digital Sports Summit – hope I’m not boring you all stupid and you’re finding this vaguely useful!

Darren Rowse is a Melbourne Blogging institution, he gave some great tips on blogs but this transalates on how to drive traffic to any website. Darren runs three blogging websites:

• ProBlogger
• Digital Photography School
• twitip

He was of my favourite speakers of the day, having heard him speak before, it was just amazing to see the face on my boss when he saw the traffic and revenue Darren brings in.

If you are useful your readers form bonds and attachments to you – Darren gave an example of when a blog follower of his came running up to him at a conference in tears saying ‘I feel like I already know you’.

People come to participate not just download information.

Blogging give you a voice, community forms around your blogs and voice.

People will pay for content if it’s engaging and exclusive.

Use your blog to sell yourself.

Your blog is your homebase – twitter, facebook, youtube, flickr they are spokes to the wheel that is your blog. Many people abandoned their blogs for twitter and other social sites, but you don’t control them, you do control your blog. It’s also advisable to purchase your own domain so people can follow you wherever your blog is hosted and you’re not dependent on any particular platform.

There are more people on facebook, so while twitter is cool the reality is the masses are using facebook.

Be useful in other places – you can drive traffic to your blog by commenting on others, but remember to be useful, don’t comment for comments sake but be useful in what you have to say.

Listen to what your followers have to say.

There is no secret it’s about basic skills – it’s so much more powerful when you listen. Make sure you listen when you’re being talked about –ensure you’re clearing up misconceptions quickly if/when they start.

Build Community

• People want to interact
• Ask questions
• Run polls
• Invest in your readers and be engaging

Be Personal

How to interact in a personal way

Find ways to be personal in your tweets

Tell Stories – good stories are gold, make sure you’re linking your blog to videos and other blogs

Leverage what you have

Use twitter, linkedin and facebook to hook into your blog, use your current network to build your blog.

Be Playful

• Get away with more when your playful
• Humour and irreverence are accepted
• Darren did a blog 5 things you don’t know about Problogger written in the voice of his two year old

Be Passionate

• Show passion
• Model to your readers the by behaving the way you want them to behave

Don’t abandon the familiar 500k subscribers of this 45% of these are via email, people still use email and it’s an easy and convenient way for your readers to find out about you.

If I solve problems people will come back

Solve problems

Do reader profiles and think about what their top 10 problems would be and work out how you would solve them.

Give readers three ideas and ask them which one they prefer

Read comments to find new topics

Always ask  – does this post, opportunity, new channel, make me closer to those on my homebase or who I want to attract to my homebase.

Digital Sports Blog Part 3 Mobile, Fantasy and Print

Part three of my synopsis of Digital Sports Summit cover three speakers on mobile, fantasy sports and print media to digital.

Cricket Victoria

Anthony Harrison from Cricket Victoria took us through some mobile application and web side of things.

Mobile penetration in Australia is at 115% Internet is 80% mobile is clearly the future. The Bushrangers decided on an iphone app development to meet this growing marketing.  IPhone applications allow for offline usage, discoverability and push technology as opposed to pure mobile web which only allow for pull technology and you must be online to utilise the functionality

He took us through some examples of both Virgin Blue The Age Mobile site ABC IPhone Application for each he stressed you need to design for the mobile and not just copy for desktop interface. Mobile requires simplicity and function over form for a lot of the useability.

The Bushrangers application was developed for the Sheffield Shield finals it has player bios and news with real time stats and fixtures. The goal of the application is to help increase the team and player awareness so the top three players are known entities in Sport in Victoria.

Fantasy Sports Peter Jankulovski Vapor Media

Fantasy Sport came out of the US with model in baseball and American football. While it started in the offline world, the power of the internet has made it into a multi billion dollar industry. They have moved to be as much apart of the watercooler talk as the games themselves.

They ensure fans of a sport can be involved in all aspects of the game not just how their team is going. In Australia the market is made up of

• 65% AFL
•  20% NRL
• 15% the rest horse racing and other sports

Dream Team had

• 73k 2004
• 294k 2009

Super Coach

• 91k 2006
• 350k 2009

According to the stats 52% play to compete 32% play to socialise with like minded sports people From these fantasy games other websites have been developed to support them such as fanfooty.com.au and dreamteamtalk.com

Who play fantasy games and how are they playing?

•  87% male
• 13% female
• Live in Victoria (due to AFL bias) professionals, skilled trades and students
• 43% are aged 19 – 34 and 26% are under 18
• 42% return 26 times during the season – showing its stickiness and involvement.

Schools are starting to use the fantasy games to help with maths classes, working with the trend rather than banning it. Mobile is the growing platform high number of the iphone app @ $3.99.

Future developments Ranking against facebook friends against each other Draft style application for ‘true fans’ which deepens the relationship.

Finn Bradshaw Super Footy

Finn talked about the requirements to teach journalists about new media, holding a story for the backpage now can mean you’re too late to market with the news. Also need to be convinced as to why they need to be on social media themselves connecting with readers on twitter.

Super Footy has seen 50% year on year growth and at the heart of this is Super Coach fantasy game. SuperFooty run live chat with journalists, it provides a place for people to share and also a focal point for where people can come. Finn believes people come to the heraldsun.com.au because they are known to get the content right.

Journalists are learning a buy line isn’t everything – they can interact with readers for automatic feedback. Need to package up unique content, Supercoach has an exclusive online column with has over 60k readers. They keep coming back every week to read it.

You need to provide journalists/content providers with tools to provide immediate stories, IPhones, laptops and where applicable IPads and video so they can do on the spot stories and interviews. Even if you’re not first, by letting people back in the office know what’s going on they have time to prepare articles so if you’re not the first you can be the best still.

Synopsis Jonathan Simpson Essendon Football Club

So part two of my notes from the Digital Sports Summit.

Jonathan Simpson had a great presentation which started out with us having a number of things under our chairs and he had people speak out each one and then related what each one meant for social media. He told us he wasn’t an expert at the beginning and like most of us has learnt on the run making mistakes but also wins along the way.

Note: Essendon Football Club is the only AFL club who chooses to remain outside the AFL/Bigpond/Telstra online network.

The Social Media Kit

Picture of Glasses

These represented vision and strategy. Essendon Football Club (EFC) set up Action Learning Groups who were given six months to work out two key projects set out by the board.

1)      Virtual Connection Strategy

2)      Match Day engagement

The best part about this was the involvement plus the mandate from the board when it came to implementation.

A letter of the alphabet ( I got H)

This is about the requirement for social media people to be multi-lingual.

1)      You have to be able to speak in ROI type numbers to the board

2)      Engage in two way conversations with Fans

3)      Deal with marketers and IT

4)      Educate all staff on the value of social media – why are you on Facebook again!

When you have 60k facebook fans you have to be able to take the rough with the smooth and respond to questions. Two way conversations mean you have to listen.

You have to explain to terms like CPM, SEO and what hash tags are and why they are important.

What is fan development how will help others  in your organisation reach their KPI’s and what it will bring to the business long term.

Key point  Content of Choice / Platform of choice – relish fans and the way they want to interact with you.

Toy Soldier

Be prepared for battle! With boards, staff and fans….

It’s time consuming, social media is 24 hours a day.

People will ask why are we opening up the voice of the fans?

You need to be able to harness twitter and facebook ( and other social media) to feedback to fans what they want.

For example EFC ask members what they wanted in their membership packs which helped develop the offering.

Cash

You have to make money!

While you have to show you are going to make money, social media is a long term vision for a long term sustainable transaction.

Collecting data through social media is vital to your success.

EFC gained 10k new contacts via social media and this was crossed referenced with their usual database sources. The value is in the data and understanding customer lifecycles.

EFC have done 20% offers to facebook fans and increased sales.

On Boxing Day they sent out an offer for merchandise to all members which resulted in a massive increase in merchandise sales online.

Scarf

Remember your fans! Be fan-centric

This whole strategy is still about getting people to go to the football. You must have an offline presence which your online presence compliments and enhances.

Chocolate Heart

LOVE WHAT YOU DO!

Be passionate, stay entrenched as a fan yourself!

Dice

Take Risks!

Social media is about taking risks, trying stuff out and being prepared to suck it and see. You will make mistakes but that’s OK as long as you learn form them.

Remind the board they asked you to go out and do this!

Make sure you do more than just PR on twitter and facebook – you have to engage!

Jonathan also explained the decison Essendon have made to stay out of the AFL/Bigpond/Telstra network. While they forgo significant revenue from the AFL, they believe their ability to service sponsors and their own advertising model as well as the flexibitily it gives them equals and outweigh the benefits of being on the AFL network.

Synopsis of Jeramie McPeek at Digital Sports Summit

Wow I have just returned from Digital Sports Summit in Melbourne. What an amazing day…

It was great to be inspired by others, hear what they’re doing and for me thinking great I am going OK got a long way to go but on the right track!

I’m going for a synopsis of the day – I wrote copious notes…. and I think it’s going to have to be a few posts as this one is now pretty long….

First up was Jeramie McPeek from the Phoenix Suns who was the key-note speaker.

He showed us a shot of TV Companion which is what appears to be – and I’m not a basketball follower – an adjunct to you watching TV with stats and plays which you follow while you’re watching the game. It allows access to chat, social media integration and highlights.

The Suns use their Facebook and twitter pages to provide social media followers:

• with money can’t buy experiences
• the ability to vote for the MVP

On their website the Phoenix Suns they have created unique registration only content which includes behind the scenes look into:

• team press conferences
• post game speeches
• draft night war room
• team coaches
• team on private jet going to interstate games
• Suns players in their homes and with their families

Jeramie talked about their propriety fan site they built and giving fans the ability to upload their own pictures, videos and messages. This takes a lot of time and moderation and this was done because they wanted to have control over their own content and traffic.

It means you have the page impressions and can serve ads of your sponsors. Initially they didn’t’ have a big presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

Over time his view on this has changed his view similar to that of @problogger use your website as the hub and the social media methods as the spokes. (more on @problogger later in another blog about the day)

Phoenix Suns have a twitter roster, with members of the adminstration team as well as players tweeting. This gives fans insights into:

• How the whole organisation works
• What players are doing out in the community
• Photos from the in-house photographer

Eight of the Phoenix players are on twitter – this is a medium they find easier to embrace than other online media. Jeramie believes this is because it’s just an extension of SMS which all of them do on a regular basis and it has much lower barriers than blogging or doing web chats. Because they are answering personally they also have a higher interaction and closeness to their twitter fans.

In their twitter Phoenix Suns make sure they are engaging in two way conversations retweeing and answering tweets, not just broadcasting.

Their foray into Facebook started with them taking over an existing fan site. They worked with Facebook and the fan finding out who ran it and when they found out he was in Hong Kong sent a fan pack with signed merchandise and a game day shoe. By doing this and explaining to the existing fans what they had done they successfully took over the site with a large number of fans but where able to grow that fan base.

Suns post more on twitter than they do on Facebook, as people tend to want more personal posts in their Facebook than twitter. Also they appear to have more negative feedback from Facebook than twitter (note to me is that because ‘real’ fans are following on twitter and ‘lesser’ fans on Facebook? Different target markets different voice?).

While they don’t have a formal social media posting policy the general rule is as long as the fan is respectful and provides an honest opinion the post will stay. If they use profanity or get personal it will be deleted. Jeramie suggests your tone will set the standard and to maintain your professionalism and then fans will also.

Suns have started to monetise some of their tweets, by doing tweets on the match day game board with the sponsor logo at the end of each tweet.

Applications Sun developed have included answering a few questions about yourself to determine with Suns Personality you are, including the Gorilla mascot which was then posted to fans Facebook pages helping to build more fans.

Jermaine then talked about the tweetups Suns have set up for tweeps where they can purchase tickets to all sit together and then meet with Sun’s personalities after the game including the coach, the players and the CEO (president probably sorry can’t read my notes!). All these events were also sponsored giving sponsors a more one on one relationship with fans as well.

What next?

Foursquare applications – check into sponsors/partner locations to win prizes

Keep up with trends on mashable and other social media commentators  

Look at what others are doing in your sport and other sports

(I said similar to this in my digital life blog)

Question time answers

NBA have a rule players can’t use social media 90mins before and after a game.

Suns have taken players through guidelines for social media – based on common sense remember what you’re saying is going to the world.