Tag Archives: sport

New media strategies for professional sporting organisations

Posted on March 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

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.

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Posted in New Media, Social Networking, Sports Media

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The rise of technology in sports media

Posted on December 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

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.

 

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Posted in Fan Culture, New Media, Sports Media

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Reflecting on the recent Andrew Symonds incident

Posted on December 12, 2008 | 1 Comment

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.

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Posted in Social Networking, Sports Media

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Sport and globalisation

Posted on September 10, 2008 | 1 Comment

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.

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