A business-minded look at digital and social media in sports
Listen to episode 265 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Jordan Moore, Chief Creative Officer and Broadcaster for USC Athletics.
83 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles
Blame Wendy’s. Somewhere along the way in this early social media epoch, ‘brand’ was largely defined by social media presence. The copy, the comments, the tone, the personality — it added up to a sizable (perhaps too big) portion of a brand.
The elements of a brand for a sports team do include all that social media, sure, but brand is something that transcends a single department, let alone an individual on the keys, and the path to brand development does not follow a linear path. So it was illustrative to learn from Kyle Payne, who, as Senior Manager for Social Media and Content with the Arizona Diamondbacks MLB team, has seen the brand evolve, the fan touchpoints multiply — and the need for alignment throughout every part of the organization to make it all resonate.
Every sports team has its windows of opportunity, when messaging will hit and travel further and more deeply. Look at any season, but especially in the 162-game marathon of a Major League Baseball year, and even the best teams and best players are a series of peaks and valleys, spikes and flatlines (the old adage is that if you fail about 7 out of every 10 plate appearances, you’re an All-Star). That’s not to say teams can’t drive significant interaction and fan connection during the troughs, just that the surface area for success and transformative engagement increases when the team is winning. And that’s when you have to be ready to swing.
“Especially with the baseball season, which is 162 games, you’re going to have win streaks, you’re going to have losing streaks, and you’re going to have good home stands, bad home stands, road trips — all these things that I feel like you have to really kind of learn when and how to capitalize when things are good and learning how to either make the best out of a bad situation,” said Payne, who started out with the Diamondbacks as an intern and has been there ever since. “I mean, we’ve had some really rough seasons while I’ve been here, and so I think that teaches you just as much about when and how to message certain things to fans as a winning season does.”
The Diamondbacks have had their up-and-down years during Payne’s tenure with the team, with platforms and people coming and going and evolving as much as the players on the roster. But talk to Payne, and there are undeniably foundational values the DBacks hold dear and a social media philosophy that is fungible but has a baseline that everyone on the team understands. It’s tempting to swing for the fences with every post and piece of content, but it’s important to know about the team you’re playing for before stepping up to the plate (yes, I love sports analogies). A common talking point integral to club cohesion is the process of onboarding new hires, especially those who will be speaking and creating on behalf of the brand that’ll be around longer than any one employee or player on the team.
“When we hire new people, we have a coordinator come in or an intern even, there is a gradual learning process of trial and error of, yep, that does sound like us or, you know, we might have to peel that back a little bit, or maybe we sound a little more excited for this play or this sort of moment,” described Payne, who gave hgih praise to his former boss, John Prewitt. “I would say it’s really critical for us to just still, I think, sound professional. I think that we’re we’re not someone that’s going to have a bunch of typos and grammatical mistakes and so casual that, you know, we might be alienating certain fans. I understand that that might also appeal to certain demographics, but I think we’ve just decided that we’re going to use proper grammar. We’re still going to try to use complete sentences when possible…
Payne continued: “We definitely take what I would call calculated risks from time to time, and there have been a lot over the years that I’ll either reach out to approval or bounce off of my counterparts or my trusted group of people that I really value their opinions around the organization and things like that or my bosses, whoever it is and kind of go, Hey, what do you think? Does this sound like us? Does this make sense? And sometimes we get the sign off and it goes great.”
What do you imagine when you think of risk taking in marketing, brand, and social media? It may be something of the ‘savage’ category, whether a snarky reply or trollish creative. It could be a tweak in copy and word choice, or decisions on elements of the game to feature. But what we’ve seen more in recent years are intentional, relatively omnichannel activations of ‘risks,’ activities that can redefine a brand and alter the way fans perceive the official personality of the team.
The ‘calculated’ part is meaningful, too. It just feels right — listening to fans, hearing the players and coaches — the vibes point you in the right direction. So as the Diamondbacks kept winning during the 2023 season, Payne and his colleagues and everybody around the team could feel something sizzling.
“I think [our authenticity] was what [drove] our success in the postseason with some of our videos that were definitely more out there in terms of what we had put out in the past,” said Payne, referencing the attitude-filled videos that broke through so well during the postseason. “They were a lot more aggressive, but it was authentic to us and the team. It was how the players were feeling, it was how the coaches were feeling; like they felt like, ‘Hey, we’re kind of being slighted here. People are underestimating us.’
“So the videos weren’t us creating some imaginary storyline that didn’t exist that we just thought would be funny, it was stuff that was actually being said, and it was hopefully portraying how our fan base felt, how our players felt, how our coaches felt, how our whole front office felt and I think that was why they ended up working.”
It was the videos that caught my eye more than anything. More than some trolling meme or some all lower-case snarky retort. That cohesiveness between what the social media team was seeing, what was coming from the players, and what made its way to the video producers working the cameras and the Premiere timelines culminated in content that made baseball fans realize the vibes the Diamondbacks are putting out there. This alignment and execution is worth examining and appreciating — because that attitude and those brand statements are so powerful when they’re consistent across fan touch points. There’s no magic to achieving such continuity, but you know it when you have it.
“We’re really fortunate to have developed a strong working relationship where it’s give and take and [the video production team] is contributing ideas for us, we’re contributing ideas for them,” said Payne. “So that’s how those videos for us, I think, all kind of started; it wasn’t necessarily we sat down one day and went like, we need to like create a video with this kind of thing. It was just, as we’re talking about projects over the course of a season, as the personalities for each of them shine through on different things trying to kind of just highlight that and play into it and not kind of run away from it or not try to sterilize the content that we’re doing.”
Things reached a pinnacle when the Diamondbacks took on their division rival the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers were the perennial winner, the team at the top everyone was always chasing, or so the narrative went. The DBacks could hear it, their players felt it, fans talked about it — and instead of retreating from the perceived inferiority syndrome, the ‘act like you’ve been there before’ aura — this generation of Diamondbacks players had not been there before, had not vanquished the empire in LA. So they leaned right into the conversations and, as Payne wonderfully put it, let the Diamondbacks ‘personality shine through our content.’
“There’s like a rivalry there,” said Payne of the matchup with the Dodgers. “It’s a little bit, you know, there’s that big brother-little brother syndrome that people like to talk about or whatever you call it. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t personally agree with it, but let’s talk about it, let’s have those conversations and then I think naturally your content kind of shines through with that.
“And our voice in terms of copy will be impacted by those conversations that we’re having. The videos will come through with maybe a little bit more of that edge or that kind of back and forth, the suspense — we acknowledge that there had been disappointments in the past in LA leading into that series. We didn’t run from the history, but then we had that history kind of helping us guide how we were going to continue creating stuff throughout that series. And then it paid off.”
While the long MLB season referenced earlier often means every emotion-fueled win streak is met by an equally emotional streak of losses, there is, for all intents and purposes, no tomorrow in the postseason, no lazy Wednesday afternoon getaway game against an East Coast cellar dweller. It’s a time to fire every bullet because that window of opportunity is open every day. Payne and his team recognized the moment, league championship runs don’t come very often. What the team did during those weeks could define the DBacks for a generation of lifelong fans.
“We kind of just were like every single day let’s just try to do the absolute best that we can highlighting today and if we run out of ideas down the road, then we’ll worry about that at that point…I think for us, we got we got kind of back to our basics a little bit by that time. But in the postseason it was just like, go all in all the time and we’ll rest when the season’s over.”
There are special times in sports when a team captures fans with rapt attention, emotions open and eyeballs on everything the team is putting out. Those are the moments when everybody on the team must be ready, operating with the same signals, because that’s where the biggest wins originate, the statements that can resonate with fans for years to come.
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On episode 264 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Kyle Payne, Senior Manager, Content and Social Media for the Arizona Diamondbacks MLB club.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Listen to episode 264 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Kyle Payne, Senior Manager, Social Media and Content for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
67 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles
Marketing and ‘engagement’ used to be an exercise in faith. Maybe you judged the success of content by word-of-mouth from one’s immediate network, from positive feedback and write-ups by the press and marketing Illuminati, or by an uptick in bottom-line metrics that you surmised came as a result of great content.
Then digital media came along, followed a decade later by the more engaging (there’s that word again) social media and all of a sudden there was a tangible measure of success, a scoreboard that told you whether that fire content was also deemed great by the consuming audience.
The leaders in social media were, and largely remain, the stat stuffers. They mastered the system, making game plans that would light up the scoreboard, creating the foundation for what defines successful social media strategy and results today. Aaron Eisman was young in his career when he got to witness, and became part of, one of those early leading organizations — Bleacher Report. There, Eisman picked up lessons that still serve him today. In a recent conversation, he reflected on how, with every sports account activating around the same major sports storylines, B/R stood out.
“The Social Moments team [at Bleacher Report] was the viral meme team, I guess you could say,” said Eisman, who also worked with Turner Sports and the NFL Network before starting his agency, Eisman Digital Consulting. “It was a team of 10-12 people literally sitting in a room a couple of times a week and they would just think of viral moments or they would create an idea before it happened. Like, if the Cubs are going to win the World Series, what are we going to do social media-wise to make it look really exciting and dope?
“We were playing chess and we were always steps ahead of the competition. We were always getting ready to do checkmate while they were just starting their chessboard.”
So much of social media strategy is being ready for anything and everything. Planning to be extemporaneous. There’s a place for timeless content, to be sure, alongside the real-time, reactive, opportunistic content. As the industry matured over the years, everybody began to think more like chess, trying their best to anticipate two or three moves ahead, the circumstances that would play out — all while keeping in mind the ultimate goals and mini objectives to achieve along the way.
“Ultimately when you think proactive, reactive, evergreen, breaking news — any of these other creative metrics and things that you think of in your head about how the content should be or what it should be, then you’re going to really advance as a social media team, and just think ahead of the curve,” said Eisman.
The final destination — the definition of success — is not the same for everyone. But the scoreboards on the platforms all read the same, we’re all reviewing the same box score, context notwithstanding. The metrics do serve as a feedback mechanism; is great content really great if not enough people see it? As long as the dominant social media channels continue to dominate, you’re largely playing by their rules. And, what hits on those channels tends to influence user behavior, consumption patterns, and preferences in general.
All that’s to say that social media strategy, while not slave to the metrics, is certainly influenced by them. It’s a feedback loop that leads a strategy to success.
“If the strategy is building out the right content, then the content should hit, and if the content should hit, then the numbers should prove it,” said Eisman, who has run Eisman Digital Consulting for nearly five years now. “The numbers don’t lie, so the analytics should tell you… the analytics should reaffirm or adjust the overall strategy. So it kind of works in a cycle almost between those three aspects.”
It’s tempting to get swayed in the silo of individual posts, to be seduced by the serotonin of a post’s objective performance. But it’s important to appreciate the forest for the trees, too (a cliche, but it’s apt here!). The success or failure of individual posts, of a day in the life of a social media strategy is fleeting. The half-life for the majority of these things is so short. That’s why it’s integral to understand what we’re doing all this for — what are the goals, what should the short-term strive to add up to in the long-term?
In an evolving world where overnight success is possible, where a single TikTok video can catapult an account from 1000 to 100,000 followers, it’s important to articulate the actual goals. Sometimes it is more followers, sometimes it isn’t. Eisman and his team encounter a diversity of stated goals working across clients for Eisman Digital and strategize accordingly.
“People want different things: to help grow their social media account or grow other goals they have. So how we get there is you want to figure out the goals of the person or the client you’re working with then you figure out the strategy of how to get to those goals,” Eisman explains. “And some of it’s not overnight. I mean, one of my biggest clients right now is a golf training app and they more care about the process of what the content looks like.
“If it takes time for us to create the great content, it’ll take time, but we don’t need to push out a great post every day because sometimes it leads to more followers, sometimes it doesn’t and we’re accepting of that.”
As social media has matured over the years and long ago transcended the remit of the archetypal ‘intern,’ social media strategy is now part of the bigger picture, expected to deliver against the organization’s true, bottom-line goals. So social media cannot and does not exist in a silo. It often works in tandem with all of the organization’s other marketing and engagement channels — there’s, umm, synergy (sorry, had to use that word). So whether you’re leading an in-house social and digital media team or running a social/digital media agency like Eisman, it’s critical to step out of those siloes.
Eisman expounded on the subject: “There are different forms of marketing, social media is one of them, but do you want to do a newsletter or do you want to do ad placements on Google? Do you want to do paid social or does your organic post that does well numbers-wise deserve to be boosted and put money behind it? And influencer marketing, there are just so many forms of marketing these days when five, ten years ago, probably more ten years ago, it was your general marketing people, your public relations people, and maybe you had 1 or 2 social media people ten years ago, and now it’s completely changed into social media needs to be a beast for organizations.”
While we marvel at the exponential growth in importance and power of social media in the last 10-15 years, it’s just as necessary to understand that social media is not the answer to everything. It’s not a magic pill. So as Eisman, or any social media leader, works to set and execute against goals for a given company, part of that is understanding where social media has less influence on the ultimate outcomes. There are plenty of precision holes to pick, but, generally, the promises that we want social media to proselytize need to be kept on the other side.
“There are some KPIs and metrics that social media can hit very easily and we can go after those growth metrics and stuff and those engagement metrics and those impression metrics and all that stuff, reach metrics, whatever you want to call it,” Eisman explained,” but sometimes we can only accomplish so much on social media. It’s got to be the product that has to sell…it has to be good.”
It’s true that we now have a better understanding than ever of what works and what doesn’t work. But with that greater insight comes more complexity as the new challenge is connecting all those disparate dots that comprise the bigger picture.
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On episode 262 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Aaron Eisman, Founder and CEO of Eisman Digital Consulting..
In this episode, Aaron offers a plethora of insights and lessons from his years in sports social media, including learnings from his time with Bleacher Report, Turner Sports, and the NFL Network, and from the past four-plus years running his agency. Eisman also authored the book The Evolution of Sports Social Media.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
The LA Chargers have really good social media.
You may have heard that before. Whether you’ve followed their content and channels closely or just caught a few viral posts, you can see that the reputation is earned. The content, the copy, the vibes, the cleverness, the originality — it’s all there.
But reputations aren’t bestowed, they’re earned. To channel the recently retired college football legend Nick Saban, the process takes care of the results. When you build the right culture, hire the right people, and foster creativity, alignment, and the right instincts — that’s how teams achieve greatness.
I recently spoke with Jason Lavine, Vice President of Content and Production for the Los Angeles Chargers, the chief gardener (to invoke a metaphor that came up in the interview), tending to a team that bears such fruit. While I typically try to focus in on a key theme or two in these podcast write-ups, there was so much good stuff I couldn’t decide, so we’re gonna look at several of the key factors that drive the Chargers’ social and content success. There’s much more in the full interview, but read on to learn about the fuel of the 🔥. Settle in, take notes, and share the magnificent lessons and insights below:
Constructing a content and social team is an under-discussed part of the industry. One could scan org charts across sports and see different sizes, titles, and structures (let alone the stuff you can’t see — like budgets, resources, cross-team shared staff, external agencies, etc.) and see variance across the board. I asked Lavine about how he thinks about the make-up and construction of his team:
“How we hired five years ago is very different than how we hire now. How we hired five years ago was you had to be able to do everything because we didn’t have enough people. My focus at that time was video. Now, you know, we have an entire social team, a rather large one, but we didn’t before. But when you’re hiring social people, we’re hiring people who understand social first. We’ll hire a video team to make video and we need people on that video team who understand how to make what the social team needs to be successful, that are not running in silos. They run together. There’s an incredible amount of overlap in having success.
“You want that person to obviously be able to know how to edit in some capacity because everyone on video on the social team in some ways has to write because of how it is, but we don’t expect them to sit down and cut a hype video, right? We’ll have people who can do that. Your talents dictate where you go.
“You trust the people you hire to do their jobs find the people they need and cultivate the right talent…
“But I don’t believe in generalists overall. Like, in our department, that wouldn’t be helpful. If you’re good at a lot of things, you’re probably good at nothing; at a young age, you can’t be, it’s impossible. I think when you’re hired here, we’ve identified a specific skill set and trait in someone that we think can help us, that they possess that someone doesn’t possess. That’s what we’re identifying in someone at this point, when you have 30 people in content.
“And then it depends. [For] social, we certainly are looking for a specific type of brain, and then depending on what they’re doing in video depends on what we’re looking for. If they’re being hired for storytelling then we’re looking for a specific sentimental type of edit. We’re looking for someone who has really good sound design qualities [and] can pace…we’re definitely not platform-specific in any way. We typically look at it as create the best possible content, which we have a plan for, which we understand, and we’ll figure out where it goes based upon where it needs to go, and it all adapts from there.”
There are so many channels to serve and so much content to create. Figuring out content packaging and distribution is an increasingly important part of an effective, efficient strategy. Amazing content is only half the battle, getting it in the right places with the right presentation is equally important. Take note of the last line in this excerpt, too, it’s vital.
“If it’s a hype video, it’s going everywhere. If it’s, a customizable branded piece of content, like camping out where we build a set and we sell that set to Toyota, and we build this really cool set and we put players on it, we’re doing interviews — we know that’s for YouTube to start, but we know it’s going to be cut up into smaller pieces, creating a social, engaging way for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Then we know that little parts of it, far smaller parts of something like a branded content that are just really funny, unique parts of it could go to TikTok, but TikTok is its own typically UGC style…
“You kind of just understand what works. But we also know based upon what something is, if something’s a good piece of content it should go everywhere, but how it’s distributed and what it looks like when it goes to those platforms is why we hire a social team and why they’re so good at what they do. How you package something…you can have a good idea, but a good idea doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how you’re going to package it and you don’t have the team members you have to package it properly. Copy, if you don’t have good copy, you have nothing, then it’s not going to get engaged with.”
It looks easy to the fans that see the finished products. But the process and project management to produce content is anything but easy. There’s the important balance of working through bigger, more time and resource-intensive projects alongside daily content, while also capitalizing on ephemeral reactive opportunities, strategic pivots and risk-taking, and saving headspace for the key tentpoles that pepper the calendar. The reality is that you can only plan so much, part of the process is creating the circumstances that allow for creativity to strike in the moments that come.
“We build a frame of everything and typically throw that frame out pretty quickly depending on what’s working, what’s not. [For] training camp, draft whatever it is, you have to come in with a frame; otherwise, people are not going to know what to do with their time. They’re going to be sitting there, right? So they’ve got to know where we’re going. The rest of it, the reactionary content, the stuff that you can’t plan for, that’s why you pay people well and try to cultivate the right place because it’s the instinctual content, the instincts in human beings that create a certain type of product, knowing in the moment what to create, that we try to teach and adapt and learn so we can make the stuff that’s going to go viral. Now, if it’s a meme postgame, we plan all those scenarios out obviously in advance, but you never know what’s going to come up that you’re going to try to create in the moment based upon what happened. So you gotta have the right people in the right mindsets and not expect everyone to come up with everything to be able to have the best product for the best possible situation…
“We’ve cultivated a certain culture I believe in, that we believe in. So, depending on what it is, yeah, there’s a rather thorough evaluation process if we think something’s going to work or not, but we typically give people the freedom to find out what’s going to happen. You know, we might think something’s not going to work, but we still want them to try it, especially if they’re young. We want them to learn; just because we might think something’s going to fail, maybe it’s better if it does go on the platforms and in a way, quote-unquote, fails, whatever fails means. I mean, if someone tries something and they’re able to take something they thought of from conceptualization to the finished product and it posts and it doesn’t do well, so what? But at least they tried it, right? So there’s a time and a place for everything.”
The Chargers don’t have meetings to discuss their ‘voice.’ That’s not to say the team isn’t thoughtful about the tone and nature of the brand that so many fans love. The brand transcends any individual person and any platform. It’s also important to understand a strong brand is that it’s not just copy, not just videos or photos, not just presentation — it’s all those things, and it’s all for a greater purpose.
“You don’t create a culture by talking about culture. You create a culture by having people that are like-minded, and then you have an organization that supports creativity — that creates culture. Then from there, like I said, it’s watering the plant and giving it sunlight, meaning you’re making sure that your department heads understand what they’re responsible for and what they’re expected to do. They’re given the tools to be successful at it and that you’re cultivating talent because you have to be able to hire people to do a job and then when you’re trying to manifest a voiceover video or younger people in a social department, so Megan isn’t the one doing it every day so she can have a life at some point, you have to be able to identify what of your voice is repeatable and how to repeat it, and then find people who can create the product for it. It’s not a matter of sitting in a room and telling people, ‘This is the voice;’ I don’t think we’ve ever once had an open discussion about that…
“We are here to humanize a brand, to connect a brand and its players to this audience, to this city, to cultivate a fan base, to create generational fandom. That is what we talk about. The actions to accomplish those goals come from creating really good content, from understanding your audience, from understanding data, and having really smart people who know how to make really diverse content, right? And of course, our voice is funny. It’s personable. We tweet very serious things in no capitalization, right? We try to be as if, you know us. We want our brand to be attainable, to feel like you know who we are as the Chargers…
The other thing I’d say to that quickly is you can have a voice and you can have a plan on social, but if you don’t have a video team that can support it then it dies because it’s not consistent.”
In an era when millions of users can view the same TikTok, and then scroll on to the next TikTok in their feed, virality is not a marketing strategy. Engagement is valuable, followers are meaningful, but the Chargers ultimately want to build fans. That doesn’t mean everyone is gonna want to dive into the x’s and o’s, there are multiple ways to be a fan and to drive authentic brand affinity.
“What we are trying to do is create the best product that can stand out so people can see who we are. You’re going to become a fan of our team if you’re a football fan, hopefully. Or maybe Justin Herbert’s on your fantasy team or the other way you’re going to become a fan of this team is through engaging, creative content and having a voice that relates to the person next door to you, to someone who’s on Reddit who might think, man, they get it. That’s cool. I respect that and I’m going to follow them. And maybe someone who’s ten years or 12 years old who sees a meme or sees anything, he’s like, I like that, that’s cool. And then they start looking at our players and they go, oh, I like these players because they’ve been humanized on our platforms, right? And then they come to a game and they have a great experience. And then you become a fan…
“There’s a variety of different ways you can be introduced to a brand. Our belief is the more we can do that’s going to stand out above the rest is going to help us be introduced to people who don’t know who we are…
“In our mind, we prefer to focus on finding the audience that does want to see that at a higher level, because typically — now, bear in mind this isn’t true for everyone, but football content has a ceiling, other content does not. So if you’re trying to reach more people and get outside of your ecosystem, you’re going to have to create non-football content, a lot of it which we do. Then your football content, if you want to not have a ceiling and you want to reach a broader audience, then you have to find the right people to partner up with to make sure it does get consumed.”
Everyone is not destined to aim for the #1 ranking on any of those Complex lists of best social media teams in sports or the like (to say nothing of the substance of those lists in the first place). Every team has a different set of variables, resources, objectives, and situations. That’s not to say reputations don’t matter and don’t help, Lavine recognizes that the Chargers’ earned reputation of their social media helps create positive feedback loops and self-perpetuating benefits. It also means players and partners are happy to work with them because they trust the team will do right by them and that fans look at the Chargers content with the expectation that it’s good, even before seeing it. So, yes, reputations
“[Teams having different goals and resources and situations] is why I don’t like when people say we’re the best, because I think we’re the best in our situation. I just I think this is product-driven, situation-driven, context-driven — like, yes, we’re good at what we do, but I bet you if you put a lot of people in our situation they’d also be good at what they do. Everyone does the best they possibly can. We’re not special. We’re lucky, we’re fortunate to be able to keep a group together for a long time. And certainly, you know, we come up with some good ideas. I don’t like those Twitter rankings that come out that say, you know, we’re number one on Twitter. I don’t like those things because I don’t think that’s fair to the 32nd team on there because you don’t know their situation. You don’t know what that person’s going through. We want to make the best possible product for our fans, and we are fortunate enough to be in a situation where this organization appreciates what we do. That’s not everywhere. Some places don’t get it, and I feel bad for them. And I tell anyone who’s super creative, come work here. We are super fortunate to be in a place that allows us to expand what creativity means and work in an organization that allows us to try different things.
“I don’t believe in rankings, but I want people to perceive us as the best. And the reason why you want that, first, is we need to cultivate the right voice and create a really good product that people would respect, and we do that because if you have two stand up comedians, one’s Kevin Hart and one’s a no name and they both say the same joke, who’s going to elicit a better response? It’s going to be Kevin Hart. We want to be the Kevin Hart in the space, we want to create the product that we want to have a reputation so good that we can make something that we don’t even believe in and people are still going to think it’s great because it’s us and that we do get nowadays. That is very helpful to building something that can maintain no matter what happens. The audience trusts you, the people around you in this space trust that what you’re making is the right thing when we’re not even sure what we’re making is the right thing, but they believe it is because that’s the person who said it because Kevin Hart made the joke…
“Our reputation, once it’s validated, it’s validated and it’s remains validated because we don’t make a lot of mistakes when it comes to what we do. But we don’t make a lot of mistakes because people trust us. So that’s why you fight so hard to have a certain reputation, not because we want a ranking above anyone else, but because of what it means to validate the product and then help you monetize it…”
Reputation may be more about intangibles and how others ‘feel’ about a given team’s execution, but data tells an important story for each team internally when it comes to evaluating and measuring success. ‘Going viral’ is not a KPI, it’s typically a welcomed outcome that can affect other KPIs, but there are more tangible goals that get analyzed and that affect planning. Fandom and revenue trump virality and reputation (not to say they’re all mutually exclusive), and there are a lot of data points that fuel strategy and views of performance.
“We take in our own data, and this is not only impression tracking as it relates to revenue driven opportunities, but also just we track and price everything so we have an understanding of the value of our product. Then if it’s not sold, we have an idea of what we think it should be doing in impressions. And then we look at weekly, we have goals that we set ourselves and across digital we have goals. Social following goals, audience goals, engagement goals, demo goals — 12 to 24 is a significant audience for us, so we try to understand how people are consuming that product if you’re 12 to 24 and we look at like, okay, this YouTube Short did 50% retention over a minute for 18 to 36. Why did it do that? And you got to understand those things. It all depends on the piece of content and what you’re trying to achieve.
“When we think about digital and posting on our site our focus is editorial and photo, not video. So we’re going to have very different goals. We’re going to try to understand those barometers based upon what we think can be successful and we’re going to change what we do and adapt what we do based upon what people are consuming and what the data is telling us.”
There are going to be long days working in sports. It’s the nature of the work one has chosen. That doesn’t mean everyone should be on a path to imminent burnout, it’s just that any conversation of work-life balance needs to come with the understanding that, some days and some weeks, you’re gonna have long days. Work-life balance doesn’t mean a certain set of work hours and non-work hours it’s more about life having balance, that there are things and times one can spend time and headspace on and enjoy that is not their work. Lavine provided his thoughts on work-life balance, from his own experience working in sports for over ten years and being a leader in it for years, as well.
“I would tell others to figure out what makes their balance be their balance, because that doesn’t mean you have to leave at 5 p.m. every day for work life balance. Work life balance comes in what you find peacefulness in, what makes you happy and doing those things no matter what they are is important. I always make the joke with my parents, but like during the Mets season, the staff knows this, the baseball game is going on every day. 4 p.m. that the Mets game is on. You can come in, we’ll talk, but I’m watching the Mets at work, it’s happening because it makes me happy. That’s work life balance to me. Doing the things that make you happy either at work or not at work. And as long as you do whatever is important to you, then that’s great. I would highly recommend anyone getting into this business to work their ass off if they want to accomplish anything, and if they think they can get anywhere in life working 9 to 5, they got something else coming to them. You got to bust your ass if you want to get somewhere in this world, doesn’t mean you got to work 9 to 7 p.m., 8 to 7 p.m., 8 to 8 p.m., 8 to 10 p.m., seven days a week. It means you got to find what works for you as an individual, as a human that makes you happy and do those things. And then if you do that, it will all work out…And take your breaks” (Jason discussed the value of taking breaks, too)
We’re coming to an inflection point for sports content, where a rising proportion of players don’t need the platforms of the teams and leagues as much as the other way around. A player could spend an hour on an off-day filming behind-the-scenes content for a sponsored series with the team’s production staff or they could spend that hour with their own staff or agency producing content that they own for their channels with their sponsors. Lavine and I could have done another full episode on exploring this subject and he offered some initial thoughrts, including where the talented internal team resources fit with potential ‘collaborations’ with players.
“I think you’re going to continue to see players own their own content. That’s just going to be what’s going to continue to happen. Players are going to become more independent entities, and how we adapt as content teams to work with them is going to be super important, because, you know, you’re not going to be able to just do a podcast with three guys on the team. They’re not going to go for it. They’re going to do a podcast, they’re going to go work with Wave Sports and do what the Kelces did and get paid a million bucks. They’re not going to work with us. So our content has to adapt at the time so that’s something that’s just going to continue to evolve, I think that’s and that is probably where my focus is now is thinking about how do we fit into the bigger picture? Do we create the content for them in their individual platforms? Can we become big enough as an agency to do that? Those are all things we have to look at…”
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It was a pleasure and a privilege to learn from Jason Lavine on what drives and continues to propel the Chargers to perform so well with their content and social media. While they may not have yet reached the pinnacle on the field, rest assured that Lavine and his team have a winning plan! Ths insights above are just a portion of the full discussion, check out the full interview to hear it all!
Listen to episode 263 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Aaron Eisman, Founder and CEO of Eisman Digital Consulting.
In this episode, Aaron offers a plethora of insights and lessons from his years in sports social media, including learnings from his time with Bleacher Report, Turner Sports, and the NFL Network, and from the past four-plus years running his agency. Eisman also authored the book The Evolution of Sports Social Media.
78 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles
On episode 262 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Jason Lavine, Vice President of Content and Production for the Los Angeles Chargers NFL team.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Listen to episode 262 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Jason Lavine, Vice President of Content and Production for the Los Angeles Chargers NFL team.
Lavine oversees a stellar team that includes, among others: Megan Julian, Tyler Pino, David Bretto, Eric Smith, and Allie Raymond.
PS: Check out my newly launched platform, Slyke, for crowdsourced content curation around any singular subject. For example, here is a collection of NFL Schedule Release Social Media Videos (any year) — take a look and add to it!
95 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles