Sharing Game Day Experiences With Fans Via Social Media
Posted on Apr 30, 2010 by Jackie Adkins
Today, I hope to continue what I’ve been doing with the past couple of posts by sort of throwing out a few ideas to you guys and having you expand on them in the comments section. It’s sort of a communal brainstorming session centered around a common goal.
And today, that common goal is taking the awesome experiences that fans have when attending sporting events, and using social media to bring that game day atmosphere and experience to fans all across the world who weren’t in attendance.
After all, with the crazy nice televisions that are coming out, one of the only things that keeps fans coming out to live events is experiencing the atmosphere around the game, instead of the game itself. Heck, my fiance will go to sporting events with me and miss half of the action because she’s caught up in everything going on around us.
By reminding your fans of this awesome experience of attending the games in person, you can hopefully set off a trigger, making them want to attend the game instead of kicking back and watching it on their 65 inch LED television. So now for the fun part, how are some ways that you can do this?
For starters, you can work on creating team generated content that you can send out on the team’s official accounts. This is relatively easy, since you have control over the messaging and content. Get a couple of your marketing team members to carry around a Flip cam or digital camera and just walk around the stadium/arena and capture stuff. Heck, you could even hand over a Flip cam to your mascot or cheerleaders. Fans may be more willing to act excited around them than your college interns on your marketing team. You could even turn this into a contest where the fan in the best photo wins a prize package. Then, you could post this content on Flickr, YouTube, or wherever your little heart desires.
The real special sauce, however, is encouraging your fans to create content during games, share it with their friends, and do the work for you. This isn’t lazy, it’s smart. People trust their friends more than you (unless you’re their friend), so this fan generated content is much more valuable.
The big question though, is how?
Well, if you want someone to act a certain way, you usually have to give them some sort of incentive. Sometimes, people have incentives already. They want to show their friends what they did at night (and if you make your team’s brand one that is respected, you can help this along) and use pictures video as video evidence of how cool you are (you know it’s true). But, you can use prize incentives to motivate fans too. Maybe after each game, you ask fans to upload photos from that game to Facebook or to tweet them out with a hashtag. Then you pick one of the uploaders as a winner (free tickets maybe, so that they can take pictures all over again!)
Another idea is to invite different fans each game to be a guest blogger for the night (whether this be a written blog w/ photos or a video blog). You could comp their tickets and just ask that they record their evening to share on your website. This way, you could get many different perspectives from fans based on who you select. The experience a young, 20 year old professional has at the game will be very different than that of a family of four. You better believe that if they’re up on your website, they’re going to email it to everyone in their address book to catch a glimpse of their 15 minutes of fame.
Heck, you could even take some of these video clips from this and other promotions and include it in a video you send out prior to the season looking for new season ticket holders.
So, those are a couple of ideas to get us started. What are some ideas you have to enable and empower fans to share their experiences at your games? Have you seen any great examples?
Image by Willamor Media
