Tag Archives: Social Networking

IPL discourages media sharing by fans

Posted on May 5, 2008 | Leave a comment

The normal preoccupation of New Media Mogul is media sport – in the changing relationships between the media and audiences, there seems to be plenty happening within this sphere. There’s also a lot of money tied up in the media coverage of sport, making the situation interesting as new forms of media and social media movements supplant older, more established forms of media.

New Media Mogul has already featured numerous example of this but the latest comes from cricket’s Indian Premier League, as the tournament has banned news organisations the event from supplying photos to their own websites or the websites of any other organizations. Tcovering his would appear to be because they want all traffic looking for photos of the event to come to their own website and view them, where the photos are also offered for sale. Consumers can purchase a single, extremely high resoultion photo for $199 and by the looks of it download the photo and have it printed out or whatever else they may desire.

The point about this practice is that media sharing seems to be a way to encourage fan interaction with a sport in this new media age, and so making any media surrounding the sport exclusive to one particular site on the one hand, and then so expensive to obtain on the other hand seems to have turned fans away from the IPL, at least in an online sense.

For a tournament that was so hyped and so talked about amongst cricketing fans the world over, to date the league’s ‘fan page’ on Facebook has only managed to secure 713 people and the paucity of media available on this page is telling, with only 9 fan pictures contributed. In comparison, one of the AFL’s most popular teams, the Collingwood Football Club has 3,695 fans and in addition to this 91 fan pictures have been contributed.

IPL is doing better on other social media sites with 243 results found on Flickr, although many of these seem to be team logos and screen shots, so they don’t count as genuine contributions of fan media. Likewise on YouTube there is plenty of media, but once again much has been repurposed from television and is not genuine fan contribution.

It has been reported that attendances at the matches are not what organisers of the tournament expected, with many tickets having to be given away to ensure that games have sufficient spectators. So it is unclear how large a part the decision to make all media content surrounding the tournament exclusive to the IPL’s website; thus ensuring that the enthusiasm that fan made media brings to an event is somewhat diminished; has impacted on this lack of attendance. But it is becoming increasingly clear that fan culture as displayed through social media is becoming an important element to the success of sport, and in particular media sport.

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Posted in Citizen Media, Social Networking, Sports Media

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Attention all sporting organisations: social media is an effective weapon for promotion, use it wisely

Posted on April 7, 2008 | Leave a comment
Firstly, thanks for reading New Media Mogul’s first post in nearly three weeks. As much as I enjoy maintaining this blog, sometimes personal issues get in the way and that’s exactly what happened here. With any luck, this new post will mark the beginning of many months of uninterrupted blog posting. Now begins New Media Mogul’s latest post:

In a sign of the changing times, Swimming Australia has taken the step of warning its athletes that images they post to their Facebook pages are effectively in the public domain and they should be careful with the types of images they upload. The need for this warning has risen after swimmer Stephanie Rice, and her fiancee, fellow swimmer Eamon Sullivan were depicted as a ‘hot cop’ and a sumo wrestler while attending a dress-up party. These photos were uploaded to Rice’s Facebook page and have now found their way into the mainstream media. If you haven’t seen them already, check them out here, courtesy of The Daily Telegraph.

While it is understandable that Swimming Australia does not want their swimmers presented in a negative light, and wants a clean cut image for its swimming team, nobody was doing anything wrong here. While the photos of Stephanie might take on certain sexual connotations, she is simply a girl who is having fun at a party. And if people see these photos and find her sexy, is that really such a bad thing?

It seems that Swimming Australia has failed to understand the opportunities that are on offer here. Every sport needs personalities – people who transcend the sport, and boost ticket sales because punters turn up to see these people perform. Swimming has had a history of ‘pinups’ – Keiran Perkins, Ian Thorpe, Grant Hackett, Susie O’Neill and Gian Rooney to name a few. But with the exception of Hackett, these people have all retired and swimming needs to unearth some new personalities to ensure that the sport remains popular.

The other point is that most of these swimmers have carefully manufactured media profiles, with carefully selected exposure to mainstream media texts. But consumers are no longer buying this the way they were five years ago – these days they want to see real people with real personalities.

Stephanie Rice is a real person with an appealing personality, and the photos that have found their way into the mainstream media demonstrate that. Swimming Australia should not be afraid to let swimmers with personalities such as this emerge on the new media landscape of Facebook and other user-generated content sites. In this era of viral marketing, it is possible for athletes like Stephanie to attain a media profile without spending a cent.

This type of marketing appeals to the voyeuristic element that is creeping into media – spawning reality TV shows such as the latest big hit, So You Think You Can Dance. Swimming Australia could give their swimmers the freedom to use social media sites in whatever way they consider appropriate, and see new stars emerge within this medium to keep swimming as one of Australia’s premier sports.

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Posted in Social Networking, Sports Media

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The truth about social networking

Posted on March 6, 2008 | Leave a comment

If you read back to my very first post on New Media Mogul you’ll find my thoughts on Facebook and the way social networking is changing our lives and the way we communicate. Now in a competition sponsored by Sprite called ‘The Truth’ a satirical and humorous take on life in five years time is presented, as we run our lives exactly like we run our Facebook and MySpace pages. The scary thing is that I think these guys are onto something, but anyway, enjoy!

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Posted in Social Networking

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The Ties That Bind?

Posted on February 4, 2008 | Leave a comment

I was listening to the Huey Lewis song ‘Happy To Be Stuck with You’ and the line that goes ‘We share the same phone number, all the same friends and the same address’ got me thinking. Couples who are living together are really not so inexorably linked as they once were – they might still share a landline number and a physical address, but almost certainly they will have their own mobile phone number, their own email address and individual access to other communication services such as social networking sites. I don’t actually know whether there is any research that demonstrates the effect of this move towards communication infrastructure that is individualised and unshared on how people form relationships and maintain them, but it seems interesting to me.

It’s also a segueway into a discussion about what is happening to the media landscape. Just as couples sharing a house used to be limited to sharing the same communications infrastructure, and as Huey Lewis suggests, this made them happy to be stuck together, perhaps it was also true that these same people were happy to be stuck with the services of various media companies because there were so few alternatives. Now that there are alternatives, it will be interesting to see how fickle the loyalties of media consumers will become, and how fractured the media landscape will become, as large operators are replaced with a myriad of small operators.

We’ve already seen The Bulletin shut its doors for the last time, and reading between the lines, it seems that the fickleness of media consumers was to blame for the demise of this once extremely influential publication, with PBL Media citing falling circulation numbers as more and more people turned to the Internet for their news and opinion. It begs asking this question then – what are people looking for in their media and is continued excellence in production of innovative and original content the key to survival in the digital media age?

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Posted in New Media

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