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.

I’ve been involved in a side project that looks at the etiquette surrounding the use of media devices in public spaces. This grew out of some field work I was involved in, interviewing people face to face about the ways in which having a mobile phone aided their use of Melbourne’s public transport system.

Time and time again I would get to the end of the interviews, ask people for any further thoughts and have them ranting about the rudeness of people talking on their mobile phones whilst on the train or tram. So it seemed like something that was worth following up.

It’s something that now being taken seriously too. The Western Australian Public Transport Authority recently launched a campaign to gently remind commuters that they should be more considerate when using their mobile phone or iPod.

Our survey (which you are invited to take part in) aims to create a typology of what makes good and bad media etiquette. I’m also quite interested in looking at whether the experience for digital natives and digital non-natives is different; whether digital natives might be more tolerant towards the way in which others use their media devices, and whether this tolerance might be growing with younger members of Generation Y (of which I am one).

The other interesting thing here is that it is not as if many ‘non digital natives’ have grown up without media devices in public spaces; transistor radios and Walkmans have been in existence for many years.

I’ll post some of my analysis here when I get to it…

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.

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.

In the meantime I am conducting a survey on the way people disseminate sporting information through the media landscape, looking at how people use traditional media sources, and newer social media outlets and the ways in which these are used in combination.

So if this sounds interesting to you, then click here to take my survey.

Thanks!

They set up a blog so that they could inform customers of what was happening with their iPhone negotiations with Apple, and so that Apple could hopefully see how much Three’s customers wanted the iPhone. It was an interesting ploy and one that seemed to really polarize people.

Some people were grateful that Three were being so open and honest with them, in keeping them informed about developments on the iPhone and allowing them to interact directly with Three and other Three customers.

Other people saw it as a desperate marketing ploy to get the iPhone on the Three network, and found it pathetic that Three couldn’t have negotiated with Apple themselves and instead had to turn to their customers to try and convince Apple that Three should carry the iPhone.

Others saw it as a cynical marketing exercise, either as a different take on the ‘register your interest in the iPhone’ pages that the other carriers have had, or a move to see just how many customers they might lose if they weren’t to offer the iPhone.

Three is obviously not a ‘media-facing company’ in the traditional sense, not relying on the mainstream media to generate an income. But it would be interesting to see what sort of reaction people would have to a blog set up in a similar fashion by a media-facing organisation like the AFL. If the league was to suddenly directly interface with its fans and ask them questions about elements of the game, would the fans accuse it of admitting that it was out of touch with its public, or would they see it as an opportunity for greater involvement in the development of the game.

The Three blog is shutting down as of 5pm today, having been open for a week, and it is uncertain as to why this is actually happening. Once again this move has polarised people, who are either disappointed that Three hasn’t secured the iPhone yet or a wondering why the blog is really shutting down.

From this experience it is easy to see why media-facing companies are reluctant to embrace social media. There is so much more control possible in the mainstream media, whereas Three has had a real mixed response from this experience – there have been plenty of people singing its phrases, but also plenty of vitriol from people too, and there is a sense that this experience has devalued the Three brand in the eyes of some at least. I wonder if the same thing would happen to the AFL…