New Media Mogul

How to fail at social media strategy

Published August 26, 2009 Citizen Media , New Media Leave a Comment
Tags: facebook, socialmedia, strategy

I happened to notice a good example of what I thought was a company failing to understand the power of social media, and whilst looking to maintain control of their own publicity they have effectively cut off a powerful medium where others could do the publicity for them. Let me first explain the background to this story:

One of the ‘big two’ Australian supermarket chains operates an ancilliary petrol station in Balwyn in Melbourne where they provide regular grocery shoppers with 4c per litre off their petrol for purchases over $30. At this particular outlet, for at least the past three years, an eccentric young Irish man has worked there who has a unique customer service style, yet one that is appreciated by most of the petrol station’s customers.

Recently this man was enshrined through Facebook with a group page that featured people’s favourite quotes of his, images of him working in the petrol station and even his shift times so that if people so desired, they could get their petrol when he was working.

After having a couple of friends tell me about it, I was one of 536 people to join the group. Yet probably less than a week after joining, I got this message from the group’s creator:

at the request of [the supermarket chain], we have been asked to remove all photos and make the group private, or altug could lose his job. if he does lose his job, i think a good old public riot is in order.
we will have some new pictures up soon enough, but any of altug in his [supermarket chain] gear or in the store have to be removed.

stay in school and give my kind regards to the ghetto

The supermarket chain’s reaction seems quite inexplicable to me, as someone who has been studying the impact of social media for two years now. Large companies generally have media and communication departments that adjudge publicity to be either brand enhancing or brand detracting. This was a free and wholly customer instigated publicity movement, surely the best kind.

The makeup of the group was mainly of people who were already regular or semi-regular customers of this particular petrol station, simply reflecting on the weird and wonderful experiences they had had of being served by this young Irish man. Sharing memories was likely to keep them coming back to the petrol station to see the individual, who by virtue of working there, was heavily associated with the supermarket chain.

Now this move has created some backlash against the supermarket chain, such as:

[The supermarket chain] is good at spoiling some fun, it’s not fun spoiling goods

Bloody [Supermarket chain], dont they realise that Balwyn [petrol station] & [the young Irish man] are institutions of the local area??
Peace out…
I dont know about [the supermarket chain]. This is the best free advertising the can get and is also wonderful customer feedback on staff. If he loses his job i’ll give hime one.

The last Facebook user makes an excellent point, it could have been great free advertising. And considering there are other petrol stations in the Balwyn area, including one run by the other major Australian supermarket chain, a viral campaign on Facebook (as the group looked like it was turning into) might have increased business for the petrol station.

This might have occurred if friends of the people joining the group had been curious about it, looked at the group, appreciated the humour and decided to visit that particular petrol station rather than one of the others in the area. Now the group has been deidentified and although people in the know (which obviously most members of the group are) will still know exactly what store the young Irish man works at, there is no opportunity to introduce new audiences to the individual or to his place of work.

There are a few reasons I can see why the supermarket chain might have made the decision that they did:

Not being able to control their own branding and image. This is the reason why most organisations are shy about social media. Yet in this case the hijacking of the supermarket chain’s image by users on Facebook was a positive and almost entirely brand enhancing move. As I have identified earlier, their subsequent moves at stopping it have created a negative sentiment and have been brand detracting.
The other reason I can see comes from an intimate knowledge of this supermarket chain, having worked for them on and off over nearly five years. They strongly emphasize a team environment (as most organizations in this sector do) and as such, they may not have wanted one individual to become bigger than the team or store itself.

My response to the second point above is that the young Irish man has been well known in the Balwyn area for several years, and the Facebook group was simply extending his fame into the online world.

Anyway, I am going to seek to have the supermarket chain read this blog post, and perhaps try and get some insight from them as to why they have taken their particular actions. So watch this space…

Smart phones for smart citizens

Published August 16, 2009 Citizen Media , New Media Leave a Comment
Tags: New Media, public space, smart phones, user experience

I recently took the plunge and purchased an Apple iPhone. I’m not about to go into a long review of the merits of the handset, but I will say this. It’s not the first smart phone that I’ve owned, that honour goes to the Nokia N95. I found the N95 to be a very useful handset, I used to check email and browse the web on it whenever I was away from my computer. The user experience of the device wasn’t good enough to use it anymore than this, and whenever I had the option of using a fully fledged computer, this would be my preference.

The iPhone changes this. Now I find myself instinctively reaching for it to do numerous online tasks that are now quicker and easier to accomplish using this smartphone. The iPhone is no flash in the pan, it’s heralded a whole new era of user experience on the mobile phone, with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Google’s Android and Nokia’s Symbian smart phone operating systems looking to catch up to the custom version of OSX found on the iPhone.

The interesting thing as far as this blog is concerned, is that as people make the transition that I have, and begin to prefer the user experience of a smart phone over a more traditional computer, what sort of possibilities this presents for media creation and interaction.

It has ramifications for the way that people interact with public spaces if their lives are going to become more dependent on these devices. It also means that entertainment that takes place within public spaces has to think about how smart mobile phones could be used to create a richer degree of interaction between the audience. It might be that a sophisticated approach to engaging smart phones translates into a sophisticated approach towards other new mediums.

I’ll keep watching this evolving space and update you when I can!

New media strategies for professional sporting organisations

Published March 11, 2009 New Media , Social Networking , Sports Media Leave a Comment
Tags: marketing, media strategies, social media, sport, twitter

To wrap up this series of posts on professional sporting organisations and marketing, I’m going to look at how social media might aid them in their marketing processes, using the model I discussed. It should be noted that I haven’t as yet talked to any professional sporting organisations about social media, and when I do, which I hope will be soon, then I may have different ideas about this aspect of my research.

Sport is after all a game, and there is no guarantee that a certain team will win week in and week out. They can only hope to recruit the right players and the right coaches, hope they are better prepared than their opposition, play an exciting style of game and go from there. But in the end it comes down to chance.

At present professional sporting clubs have very explicit interactions with their customers. Customers either see the team play at the ground, on television, or might interact with the club through their website. These are very structured interactions, and there’s a real separation between what the sporting club does in public and what they do behind closed doors.

There has to be this separation because image management is a huge issue for professional sporting organisations (both leagues like the AFL and individual clubs), but there could be a more subtle separation facilitated by social media that allowed a sports club or organisation to effectively manage its image while still making fans feel more included in the processes of the club.

Imagine if professional sporting clubs used Twitter. For example, Carlton could have tweeted before its recent NAB cup semi-final against Geelong, ‘Should we play Chris Judd this week?’ Although it would surely be inadvisable to take popular consensus over the opinion of professional coaches and other experts, it would make fans more included in the machinations of their club and potentially make it easier for professional sporting clubs to establish and maintain relationships with their customers (fans).

Interestingly, Ebbsfleet United has gone all the way with social media and made an offer to its customers that in exchange for owning a piece of the club they get to be involved in the day to day decisions, including picking the team. The football club is a very minor one in the grand scheme of things, playing in a division that is four below the Premier League but interestingly after embracing this concept they have achieved their best ever result to date, winning the FA Trophy.

Ultimately, a tightly controlled interaction between professional sporting clubs and customers (fans) could make maintaining a relationship an easier process. With more insight into the running of the club, the emotional connection (if indeed it does exist) might be strengthened due to the customer feeling more important in the process of the club, and when times are tough, careful explanations and behind the scenes looks at why the club is performing badly may make fans more accepting of the inevitable slumps that every professional sporting club goes through.

Sport’s inner emotive qualities?

Published March 5, 2009 Fan Culture , Sports Media Leave a Comment

In my last post to New Media Mogul I talked about the challenges that professional sporting organisations face in marketing their sports to customers. I identified that although many traditional marketing principles relate to professional sport, there is something that exists that sees even those teams who don’t win games continue to survive. While sometimes this is because the governing body refuses to let them die, and provides additional funding to see them through, there is something to be said about that as well.

There is surely an emotional core to sport that professional sporting organisations attempt to capitalise on in their marketing efforts. For one thing, it’s why a team like North Melbourne in the AFL has ‘Stay Troo’ as it’s membership drive slogan for 2009, a play on stay true and the club’s moniker, the Kangaroos. In other words the club is appealing to the loyalty of its supporters to buy memberships, even though it has now been ten years since the club won a premiership.

In a similar vein the Western Bulldogs membership slogan for 2009 is ‘Are you with me?’ a similar appeal to loyalty, pride and identification with the team. This is a team that has not won a premiership within the last 50 years, and in any other form of the entertainment industry that sport is nominally a part off, couldn’t hope to survive. It would be akin to a band failing to produce a new record in 50 years and continuing to tour with their old songs – eventually you’d think that their fans would dry up.

Instead they keep on turning out, suggesting that they have a deeper connection with the club that is not just based on winning games, winning premierships and value for money. The noted academic on sports matters, Richard Cashman, suggests that wrapped up in sport is a pervading sense of nationalism, because the way a nation plays sport can define both what it is and what it is not. Cashman cites Anderson when he says that nations aren’t necessarily physical, but can be imagined, and therefore the Western Bulldogs and North Melbourne can be defined as a nations.

Embodied in this feeling that Cashman describes is no doubt a sense of loyalty to this club – indeed he describes it as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ that involves a shared sense of history and values.

It’s clear that not everyone gets so embedded in a sporting club, and some professional sporting teams do come and go – clearly because they haven’t marketed themselves properly and have failed to form a strategic relationship with their customers in the manner I talked about in my last post. But perhaps over a longer period of time this changes and people become more deeply involved with their sporting teams, so that it’s no longer just a consumer relationship but an emotional one as well. To me this makes the marketing of professional sporting teams a different process to other entertainment products, and explains why clubs continue to play each week in the face of extended periods of poor performance.

Marketing professional sport

Published March 3, 2009 New Media , Sports Media Leave a Comment
Tags: marketing, New Media, professional sporting organisations, relationship marketing

Recently I’ve been considering the ways in which sport is marketed as part of my approach to the area of research I am pursuing. For while it is my ultimate aim to study the transition of professional sporting organisations into the new media landscape, marketing is such an integral part of what separates successful professional sporting organisations from those that are less so.

And indeed if sporting codes weren’t marketed correctly, there would be no media interest anyway, because there would be no customers (fans), and therefore no need for the media to disseminate information about sport.

Before I go into detail, what is starting to become apparent is that sport has unique properties (which I probably won’t go into fully in this posting, but instead the next) that make sporting teams attractive to customers (fans). And although professional sporting organisations still have to follow traditional approaches to marketing, there is an emotive aspect to sport that changes the dynamic between organisation and customer in this instance.

It also strikes me as apparent that there are ways that sporting organisations could use new media techniques to strengthen this relationship and make their marketing efforts more effective. I’ve more or less talked about this before but I will go into this further in a future post as well.

To explore some of what I mean about sport’s unique marketing properties I have paraphrased the following points on how to establish a strategic relationship between a customer and a company from the book, Leading Through Relationship Marketing by Richard Batterley.

In italics I will annotate his descriptions with how I think they relate to professional sporting organisations.

Section A to B

The prospect is unaware of the product or service or has never thought of opening a relationship with the company

Point B

The prospect sees some form of stimulation (say a press advertisement) and recognises the product or service may have some relevance for them and considers what a relationship with the company would bring them

How does a professional sporting team become relevant to a customer? Particularly a low performing team who has never achieved a sustained period of success. These types of teams still manage to attract customers who either attend matches or purchase season tickets. There must be a sense of tradition in following this team, or local pride, or empathy on some level that makes sport a unique marketing product.

Point B to C

The prospect’s expectation and anticipation is heightened as they consider their needs.

Point C

At this point the prospect realises the product or service offered might provide some value to them and they request further information.

While professional sporting teams tend to attract more customers during periods of success (Hawthorn has the most members of any Victorian AFL club this season after their premiership win), there are still nearly 20,000 people who have signed up as Melbourne members. Melbourne has endured a number of unsuccessful seasons in a row, and any other marketable product that had failed to deliver for so long would surely be finished by now.

Section C to D

Again expectation and anticipation increase the strength of the relationship while the prospect is waiting for the information they have requested.

Point D

This is when the prospect expected the information they requested to have arrived. If the company is responding to the initial invitation to enter a relationship they will have provided the information by this point. From here the relationship can take two alternative routes.

Here’s the good news track

Section D to E

Having received the information sought, and it meets their expectation, the potential customer is in a position to make a purchase decision. Part way through this section they cross the decision line ‘I will buy’.

What is a customer’s expectation of a professional sporting team? Is it to win, or to play the game with skill, or to play fairly? This is where sport really seems to become different to other marketable properties. A band whose concerts constantly failed to live up to expectation would be finished, yet a team that fails to win games over a sustained period of time can still expect to see people turning up to watch.

Point E

The relationship is cemented! The prospect buys! And now becomes a customer!

In sport the relationship can be cemented even when the product (sporting team) fails to live up to the buyer’s (fan’s) expectations.

Section E to F

In this section of the relationship the customer is enjoying the product or service they have decided to purchase and the strengths of the relationship is growing (assuming the product or service meets their expectations)

How does a professional sporting team meet expectations? Does it need to win a premiership to achieve this? Does it merely need to play fairly? What are fans expectations of sporting teams?

Point F

At this time in the relationship the new customer is so satisfied with the product and the supporting service they are receiving they become an advocate and start recommending the organisation and its products or services to others – so convinced are they that the organisation will deliver a similar level of relationship to their peers!

Do sporting fans ever engage in this sort of behaviour? I guess to an extent, but not in the same way that I might recommend that someone buys an Asus laptop or an iPod, or uses iTunes to manage their music collection.

Now, the ‘other’ track!

Section D to G

The prospect still feels that they should have received the information they requested by now – but they haven’t. As a result, their expectation and enthusiasm for opening a relationship begins to slow down – not reverse yet, just slow down: recovery is still possible, but it will not be easy.

With bad marketing this can happen to sporting teams, but I think this is different to another sort of product. While it might mean that someone doesn’t worry about becoming a member of that club and buying a season ticket, it won’t stop them being a supporter of the club.

Point G

If the organisation doesn’t deliver the information by this point, the prospect’s initial expectation isn’t met and the gap between expectation and delivery creates frustration and strength of relationship begins to decline

Section G to H

Nothing has happened so the strength of the potential relationship is damaged and takes a negative turn. It is still recoverable – but only just, and it will take a lot of expensive follow up to save the prospect’s expectation of the relationship.

Section H to I

The rate at which the relationship is declining is increased and almost nothing can be done to recover the situation.

It would be interesting to know whether there are people who refuse to continue supporting a sporting team because of continued poor performances. Enthusiasm can wane for professional sporting teams but in my experience it is uncommon to hear about people refusing to support a particular team any longer.

Point I

The point of no return! All is lost. The previously potential customer has crossed from feeling positive about the organisation and its products or services to a space where they actually begin to feel negative about them – contact may aggrevate the situation!

Section I to J

And now the situation is declining even further towards the relationship graveyard. The once prospect starts talking negatively to their peers about the organisation and becomes very cynical about failed promises.

There are many frustrated supporters of professional sporting teams, particularly of teams that perennially underachieve, however in my experience these fans continue to attend matches and will still be supporting the team if and when things finally turn around.

Point J

Gone. Lost forever. The formerly potential customer has made the decision they will never buy from the organisation, no matter how good the products and services are. Best left well alone!

The rise of technology in sports media

Published December 16, 2008 Fan Culture , New Media , Sports Media Leave a Comment
Tags: history, sport, Sports Media

It’s interesting to think about the role that technology has played in the evolution of sports media. I feel that there are distinctive stages in the history of the engagement between fans and sport where changes in technology (or in other words changes in the dominant medium) have eventuated in changes in this relationship.

In the first place there was the spoken word and this was a time when sport was predominantly local and representative of a single community. The team was the mouthpiece of this community. This is where the preoccupation of professional sporting teams with image management comes from.

Then came newspapers and people could not only keep up with the results of their own team, but other teams as well. This is probably where the preoccupation with statistics and records comes from, as previously it would have been hard for fans to keep track of these as clubs may not have had the resources. Media organisations did however, and realised that fans had an appetite for them.

Radio was the next leap forward in the way sport was disseminated, and once again changed the relationship between sporting organisations and fans. For the first time a dichotomy was created between watching sport at the ground and listening to it at home on the radio. However it was probably not a strong dichotomy because radio was not a visual medium, therefore the experience of consuming sport at home missed out on one of the vital sense.

However the radio era did globalise sport to a certain extent. Although not cosmopolitan, it made Australian audiences more aware of sporting contests that were taking place overseas, particularly in places like Great Britain. Here I’m thinking particularly of the 1934 Ashes series were over by over descriptions were telexed from the UK to a studio in Sydney and recreated as though they were really happening.

Television changed things again, creating a visual aspect to consuming sports at home, but in a sense it was also a step backwards because when television was introduced the technology was not in place for many live broadcasts. However, this is probably the era where sport was truly commoditised when its considered that the Olympic Games launched television in Australia. Ever since there has been a strong relationship between the two.

Truly live television created a true dichotomy between watching sport at the ground and watching it in the home, and solidified sport’s place as a television (and media) commodity. It was in this era that battles were fought over sporting rights, as media moguls wanted the best live sporting content for their networks. This gave sporting organisations previously untold riches and brought a new professionalism to games.

The era of cable and satellite television brought more channels and consequently more sports. For the first time audiences could experience regular sporting contests from overseas on a regular basis, instead of special events being broadcast and weekly highlights packages being offered in the meantime.

This is the era in which sport truly started to become global. Thanks to satellite and cable television it is now possible for global fans to immerse themelves in the experience of watching and following a sporting team without being at the ground to experience it.

Finally the era sport has now entered into is that of social media or Web 2.0. This is beginning to create a bottom up rather than top down approach to sports media, as fans have even more choice about the sorts of sports media they consume, and the ability to customise it. It is also further locking in global sporting teams by giving fans the tools to form networks and communities with like minded sports lover, consequently created a virtual analogue of the community feel that has always been a part of sport.

Technorati Tags: sport,sports media,media eras,history

Reflecting on the recent Andrew Symonds incident

Published December 12, 2008 Social Networking , Sports Media 1 Comment
Tags: social media, sport, sporting organisations, twitter

So it’s been a while since I’ve last blogged on New Media Mogul. Lately I’ve been busy helping to put together an exhibition on media technologies in the home, which I made a film for that I will upload to this site when I get some free time. Although this has not been directly related to my PhD, the increased prevalence of media technologies and the way in which they are used directly impacts on the area of research I am undertaking.

The latest thing I’d wanted to blog about was the recent incident where Andrew Symonds again found himself in hot water for getting into an altercation with a hotel patron in Brisbane, after only just returning to the Australian cricket team after an enforced layoff.

Typically the mainstream media reported it, and the incident made front page news in several newspapers and online news sites. Of course opinions were written about whether Symonds should be allowed to stay in the game, and there was the usual examination of any issue like this.

Twenty four hours later it was reported that Symonds’ version of events, in which he was the victim of the incident, was found to have been what actually happened and as of today Symonds is still playing cricket for the Australian team.

What’s interesting to think about here is how professional sporting organisations like Cricket Australia, which seemingly spend more time on image management than anything else would have approached the incident if it had occurred in a landscape dominated by social media.

Imagine if people started ‘twittering’ or blogging about what allegedly took place at the hotel. (E.g. Aussiecricketlover Just seen Symonds hit a bloke for six, no cricket bat involved #cricket).

How would Cricket Australia respond? Would they twitter back? (E.g. CricketAustralia investigating Symonds incident and will let you know shortly). Without the thousands of words of copy and countless hours of television coverage of the Symonds incident at their disposal, would they be able to repair the damage to Symonds’ reputation as readily?

This is something that sporting organisations have to consider as social media outlets like Twitter become more prevalent. Considering that Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull both ‘tweet’, it is becoming a powerful communication tool. But because professional sporting organisations are unique, in that it isn’t just about getting a message out but also maintaining an image, it becomes trickier for them. The next phase of my research is going to look at what strategies they might use to negotiate this.

Olympic radio stations suffer in the ratings

Published September 11, 2008 Sports Media Leave a Comment
Tags: globalisation, olympics, radio, ratings

The latest radio ratings in Melbourne, which were conducted during the period that the Olympics were on make for interesting reading. I’ve taken the liberty of comparing the market leader, Fox FM to the four stations that specialise in sport, so for a full breakdown, you can go here.

Station	Audience Share (Survey 6)	Audience Share (Survey 5)
FOXFM	15.1	14.2
3AW	14.9	16.6
SEN	5.2	5.4
3MMM	6.5	6.7
ABC774	10.0	10.2

Fox FM is more or less a youth station that specialises in popular music, and features a number of popular comedy shows, Matt and Jo for Breakfast and Hamish and Andy. All the other stations 3AW, SEN, 3MMM and ABC774 specialise in sport.

3AW and 3MMM didn’t cover the Olympics, but did feature regular updates and had programming that tied in with the Olympics. 3MMM’s breakfast show Pete and Myf featured the Pete and Myf Games where the co-hosts competed for medals in different events. 3AW, being a news driven talkback station, featured regular updates from Beijing. ABC 774 and SEN had full coverage of the Olympics.

From a still incomplete content analysis of the way in which the mainstream media covered the Olympic Games, there were constant appeals to people’s sense of national pride, and even attempts to invoke regional pride (for example stories from Perth would make mention of Western Australian athletes competing in the games). There was also an inbuilt expectation about whether the particular teams that I covered, football’s Olyroos and basketball’s Opals, were medal chances or not.

Perhaps as I am beginning to explore the idea that sport is becoming increasingly globalised and is moving away from its communal and regional roots , this argument is demonstrated in these radio ratings. In this very concentrated event that is the Olympics, the mainstream media’s employment of these frames only dissuades people from watching and listening.

Sport and globalisation

Published September 10, 2008 Uncategorized 1 Comment
Tags: globalisation, social media, sport, sport media

I caught an interesting broadcast on ABC Radio National the other week. The show was called The Sports Factor and the guest was Professor Toby Miller of the University of California, Riverside. You can view a transcript of the program or download the MP3.

The program led me to do my own thinking about the impact of globalisation on sport and new media as well. Sports fans are readily adopting the Internet as their preferred medium for accessing sporting information, but they’re not necessarily using social media. Those that are using social media, are probably the type that Bourdieu termed ‘connosieurs’ – those who identify strongly with a team or perhaps the game itself, almost at the level of an idealised abstraction.

From the results of my survey on people’s use of sports media to date, it would seem that the majority of these users are engaging with social media either because they feel that the mainstream media misses issues to do with their sport and they’re glad to have a forum to raise them in, or because they feel that social media makes a better medium for discussing issues than talback radio or newspaper opinion pages.

Amongst these users it feels as if their use of social media is heading in two different directions, and they have two distinctly different rationales for their use of the medium. There are those that are going with the tide that is globalisation and those that are going with it.

Those who are going with the tide of globalisation are likely to be younger users who have either grown up with pay television or frequent access to the Internet. These fans are part of the era where sport has become a commodity – a form of entertainment, that is used to sell broadcasting rights and merchandise. In that marketplace, their local sports team isn’t necessarily the best product on the shelf – instead of going for the St Kilda team who play a mediocre brand of Australian rules football, they might choose Arsenal who play an exciting brand of association football.

Pay television with its 24 hour channels of international sport and the Internet with its rapid access to news and statistics have introduced these people to this global sporting landscape. Social media has taken their access to sport a step further, and given them forums, blogs and social networks to connect with others and share their thoughts on their favourite sport. What is often observed in these forums is a simulated match day experience – fans will discuss team selection and match-ups before the game begins, and then when the match begins, they will sit with their computers watching the coverage on television and post comments, sharing the experience of the match with fellow fans all around the world.

Then there are those that are going against globalisation. These fans seem to be the kind of people who grew up when Essendon played all its matches at Windy Hill, and Footscray (not the Western Bulldogs) played all its matches at the Western Oval (not the Whitten Oval). This was a time when sport was the pinnacle of community representation, and stars of the local football team were that suburb or region’s pin-up boys.

This anti-globalisation sentiment can be immediately felt in the names of some of these sites; for example Punt Road End is Richmond’s unofficial homepage, and recognises both their traditional home at the Punt Road Oval and their new ‘homeground’ of the MCG, but the emphasis is very much on Punt Road. The site feels very much like it is trying to recapture the sentiment that has traditionally made Richmond what it is; not only in the name, but in the section that is attributed to Jack Dyer, arguably Richmond’s most famous player, and the dedicated history section that can be found on the site.

Within the forum itself there is also the ‘Blast from the past’ group for sharing footy memories, and the group for general discussion of Richmond is called ‘Dyer-tribe’, another reference to the famous ‘Captain Blood’.

When it comes down to it, these fans exhibit similar behaviours to my ‘pro-globalisation’ group mentioned above, watching the football on television or radio, computer at hand, making comments and barracking on the match. But in the case of Punt Road End at least, it feels as though the site is trying to reconstitute a sense of community surrounding the Richmond football club that is being lost as sport is becoming increasingly commodified.

New Media Mogul

How to fail at social media strategy

Smart phones for smart citizens

Sport’s inner emotive qualities?

Marketing professional sport

The rise of technology in sports media

Olympic radio stations suffer in the ratings

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