the social media fox

Engaging fans: Lessons from the Sports Industry

Thoughts around this topic have been flooding my mind over the last two weeks. It started when I read a tweet Jeff Pulver wrote dicussing his SocComm conference on June 23-24 (see what people wrote about the last SocComm). I responded to the conversation and brought up the idea of this post as a panel.

This week I received some interest from others in the sports and marketing communities and realize my panel idea could be useful for many audiences. I think it’s time to do a deeper dive and see if this thing has legs.This blog seems like a good place to start - hopefully, other people will contribute ideas and feedback, too.

The broad concept is to bring learning lessons from the sports marketing industry to answer specific questions around this topic. The four buckets I’m thinking of right now:

1. Content. We all get that ‘Content is King’ but what content drives traffic? sustains readers? promotes conversations? converts to sales?
2. Distribution. Everyone wants to push content out but how do you do it well? and how do you do it to scale? What platforms are best, easiest, cheapest? When is the best time and how often? What process works?
3. Engagment. How to help users move from passive to active - moderation best practice for dealing with lack of conversation and different personality needs.
4. Achieving success. What can be achieved? How long will it take? What are the best metrics to measure progress? What if a tactic isn’t working?

Are these topics of any interest to you? Why or why not? What am I missing?

PS I’m reading this wondering if it’s too pedantic? Does this need to be a higher-level discussion on content consumption habits, integrated marketing strategies, and examples of bleeding-edge work in this space???