Digital and Social Media Sports
A business-minded look at digital and social media in sports
Listen to episode 229 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Aileen McManamon, Founder and Managing Partner of 5T Sports (an International Sports Marketing Firm; Management Consulting and Solutions for Professional Teams, Leagues and Venues).
Listen below or on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
77 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Connect on LinkedIn
When did you start planning for your retirement?
Maybe it was the first time you faced down years of student loan payments. Or when you opened that Roth IRA. Or perhaps when you looked into your company’s 401(k).
We spend more years planning for retirement than actually being retired from our careers. Except for professional athletes. They’re not thinking about building a career that’ll last past their 30s — they can’t, really, if they want to be among that top 0.00001% of their sport good enough to make a living playing it.
So the harsh truth is that the majority don’t make it or don’t make it long. And then they have to enter the real world, starting from scratch — so they think. They’re behind their peers in their generation, some believe. But it’s easy to focus on what athletes may lack, better to reframe by accounting for the unique advantages they have, the experience they get, and the skills they develop. This is what Dr. Caleb Mezzy is working to do and we recently discussed his research, findings, insights, and recommendations.
“You are an athlete for a period of time…,” said Mezzy of the opportunity-laden window of notoriety athletes have during their playing careers. “When you’re an athlete, you have this open door to just say, ‘Hey, I’m a player on this team, I’m gonna be in this town, would you like to meet?’ And you can meet any professional in the world…
“Maybe you can get 7 or 8AM coffee with some high-ranking CEOs in California or in Arizona or Las Vegas, whatever it may be. Those are strategies that we can put into place.”
It’s also about skills — “transferable skills,” says Mezzy, who is an Assistant Professor of Sport Management and Business at Neumann University — skills are appealing on a resume and go beyond reading a Cover 2 defense (but there are analytical thinking skills evident in doing that, too!).
“Transferable skills are such a huge part of athletes going into the workforce…,” Mezzy explained. “Because they work so hard to get here [and] they don’t know how to articulate the skills that they’ve acquired into a different [occupation]…
“Bridge that gap, tell that story, I think that’s the beauty there…Look at what transferable skills can we bring to the table because of what we did, because of who we were, and now where we’re going?”
Social media changed the game, too. And as generations of athletes with more social media savvy and propensity enter — and leave, whether by their choice or not — their pro sports career, social media can be a key lever to pull. No matter what an athlete may want to do after their playing career, an audience has value. And if athletes play their cards right during that special window of time, they can accrue a lot of capital.
“I think that their digital presence plays a role. I think that the ability to network and find other people, other careers, kind of like the exploratory phase of career development could really help them in their next phase in life,” said Mezzy, who also runs an athlete transition practice, Grit and Glue.
“[Retirement] is an ongoing process because the minute you get drafted or signed and you’re on a team, it’s inevitable that you are going to retire…
“So at that point, when you know it’s an ongoing process, there are different things that you could be doing along the way. A lot of that could be digital-focused. You build up this audience so that when you do retire that you have an audience that you could [activate].”
There’s a phrase that entered the lexicon in recent years, a phrase that Mezzy and I talked about — more than an athlete. When you think others see you only as a pro athlete, it’s natural to get wrapped up in that identity. Many of us non-athletes can relate, too — to the point where it’s difficult to separate one’s identity from their job — but most of our jobs don’t have such an early expiration date. So it’s up to athletes to appreciate and work to cultivate their own ‘more than.’
“They don’t lead with [being a former athlete], and I think that’s the thing,” said Mezzy, talking about how ex-athletes represent themselves in their more white-collar post-playing careers. “Because we always talk about identity and it’s what you do, not who you are. I think if you don’t lead with it and you’re like, ‘This is the value I bring here,’ that’s great.
“I’m thinking of all these different players as we’re talking about it, because that player I’m talking [about that works in] financial and wealth management, is gonna be posting about how to manage your taxes for the upcoming season. Or ‘if you’re an MLB player who just got drafted, this is what you should do with your first paycheck.’ So he’s looking at it from both lenses — ‘I manage wealth and finances, but I also come at it from I was a former baseball player.'”
All this is moot if athletes don’t buy in. If they keep that tunnel vision — which helped them reach that elite level — at the expense of an uncertain career and future. And they have to be willing to ask and answer the tough questions, about what care about or want to put time into after their playing days are through. Because, as Mezzy said, “The minute you get drafted or signed and you’re on a team, it’s inevitable that you are going to retire.” There’s an identity, a skillset, and strengths that transcend the court or playing field. There’s a fully formed person beyond a name, number, and roster listing.
“When I talk to these baseball players and I say this stuff, they get to a point where like, ‘All I know is baseball,’ and that’s not true,” Mezzy said, with conviction. “That’s all you think you know, because that’s what you’ve done, but what can we talk about things that you’ve learned during baseball that will spread it and then we could open them up or dive into those little pieces of fabric to really find out who you are as a person?”
Athletes may not be able to play their sport forever. But if they play their cards right, they can set themselves up for life.
On episode 228 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Caleb Mezzy, Assistant Professor for Sport Management and Business at Neumann University, founder of Grit and Glue, and co-host of the Beyond Baseball podcast.
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 via Apple or listen on Spotify or Stitcher.
Brands used to have all the power. This was true in just about every industry. That’s not to say individuals didn’t matter — there were celebrity spokespeople and other ‘stars’ that received acclaim, often in third-party media. But that all began to change, gradually, as the creator economy arose and social media was more about individuals than brands.
And even in college athletics, where we’re not all that far removed from team-wide social media “bans,” the convergence of the power of the individual was always an inevitability.
And, just like that, decades-old paradigms in college athletics were transformed — student-athletes on social media wasn’t a distraction or a risk, but the next big thing in the arms race we call recruiting.
“Texas (Longhorns Athletics) really got behind the opportunity for athletes to make the most of their time there and be representatives of the university,” said Marc Jordan, who worked in social media at the University of Texas Athletics before joining NIL platform INFLCR. “I think as soon as the recruiting part of it caught up where they recognized that recruits were following their athletes and that the more active and the more available and the more that their athletes were on social, the better it was for recruiting.”
There was a positive correlation between athletes posting on social media and schools getting exposure for their programs to the audience that matters most to coaches — recruits. Even while athletes were barred from monetizing their burgeoning social media brands, there was still value in growing their followers and accounts for a potential future payoff. The mutual benefits meant future recruits could be enticed by seeing not just cool content on athletes’ Stories, but also by the prospect of getting access to such cool content themselves when they played there. Water slides and barber shops only go so far for a generation that virtually worships top social media creators.
Then NIL monetization came and the floodgates appeared ready to open. For Jordan and his Texas colleagues at the time, they knew many student-athletes would be ready to dive in. But these were just kids; 18-21 year-olds that had spent their lives mastering their sport and their bodies, but with little to no experience managing a potentially professional social media presence.
“We would work with different teams and we would work with different departments to prepare their athletes, get them onto a better posting cadence, have them understand what’s good and what’s bad, the difference between editorial and commercial content, and reasons why you focus more on that editorial,” said Jordan, who now works with schools across the country that utilize the INFLCR platform. “[We were] making sure that they didn’t just become the NASCAR of Instagram where there are just logos everywhere and there’s no value behind it.”
It’s all easier said than done. There may be colleges with decades or centuries of experience teaching kids traditional academics and decades of time in teaching student-athletes about sports performance — but they never had to worry much about teaching a diverse set of hundreds of athletes of different backgrounds and experience what it meant to build, monetize, and manage their name, image, and likeness. That’s why many have turned to a number of technology and services platforms that have rapidly arisen to serve this need, most notably INFLCR and Opendorse, which together work with hundreds of colleges across the US to help athletes monetize and build their NILs. For Jordan at INFLCR, he’s found an important part of helping athletes is to create a learning system that will actually work for them.
“I think in the past I’ve been naive to think that we could give athletes, you know, here are 20 steps to NIL success. No one’s gonna go through 20 steps. No athlete is going to go through and do that,” said Jordan. “We’ve offered some online courses that are quick, that have allowed athletes to learn very quickly — but breaking it down to here are four steps that you can do, here are the things that you could do in the next five minutes that will help you down the road, and then letting them learn as they go; adding more as they do the initial steps, but not trying to overload them too quickly, because there’s one thing these athletes don’t have [is] time.”
Athletes (and, well, students in general) may not get too excited about their chemistry or English lit class (some do!), but when you start to talk about making money from their NIL, ears perk up. This is when the fun starts, when athletes go from potential pitchmen for their sports programs to start-up businesses in their own right — the business of being them. Just like they work with a team dietitian to break down their nutrition, a strength coach for muscle, and a position coach for their sport — it only makes sense for athletes to get down to the food-log and film-study level of developing a strategy to make their NIL the best it can be. This is the kind of analytical work athletes can get behind, because success can be life-changing. But it’s not easy. Jordan starts at the foundation, discussing who the athlete’s social media audience is and how that changes the day they commit to the school and step on campus.
“We talk to [the athletes] about [brand] and we also break down kind of their audience because we [approach it] for what [their audience] is that day,” Jordan explained. “So let’s say they want to build their brand in a certain area, we talk to them a little bit about, ‘Okay, well, think about your social media now.”
Jordan went on to explain the different segments that often comprise an athlete’s audience, from their childhood communities to fans of their high school team, fans of their college team, and everyone in between and beyond. But as athletes get more intentional about their soon-to-be professional brands and who they want to be, it can be a challenging balance to serve the various buckets of their social media audience while also evolving themselves as a person and a brand.
“As you are figuring out content and as you’re figuring out brand building, [you need to understand] that when you post things and when you want to get interaction, you have to at least satisfy one of those buckets or groups,” said Jordan. “But the more of them that you can get interested in that type of content, the better and higher engagement it’s gonna have.
“So as you’re adding in different things — like, if you’re interested in music in fashion — understand that those are gonna be harder things to build early on because you’re adding a new type of audience into your current following…We want to make sure that they are setting up their audience to care about them for when they aren’t competing anymore, and for when they do go in [and] enter the workforce or they retire and sail off into the sunset — we just wanna make sure that that audience sticks with them.”
As these NIL initiatives evolve — and boy are they evolving quickly — they will gain more tentacles. A water slide or a lazy lagoon or other quirky amenities constructed to woo recruits requires little upkeep, let alone department-wide integration, compared to NIL programs. There are parts of college football programs, for example, that exist in a virtual silo, almost completely removed from the rest of athletics. But NIL practices — they work best when everybody is on board, focusing on making the flowery promises of their press releases come to fruition.
“The only way for these programs and these things to work is for them to have substance,” said Jordan. “The recruit will be able to see right through any cute announcement or any branded program if there isn’t any substance behind it…
“We need this symbiosis between [INFLCR] and the athletics department.”
College athletics programs are no longer just fostering student-athletes. There’s an influencer-like, brand-building, NIL developing practice that’s part of the program, as well. And it’s only getting bigger. The recruiting pitch will be less about the novel amenities the program has and more about case studies on how they’ve helped student-athletes make money and build a valuable brand. For many student-athletes, their four years of college sports could be among the most lucrative of their lives, monetarily and otherwise. That time presents an opportunity — it’s the responsibility of their institutions to ensure they’re able to make the most of it.
Listen to episode 228 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Caleb Mezzy, Assistant Professor for Sport Management and Business at Neumann University, Founder of Grit and Glue athlete consultancy, and co-host of the Beyond Baseball podcast.
Listen below or on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
80 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Connect on LinkedIn
On episode 227 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Marc Jordan, Manager of Product Success and NIL Services for INFLCR (part of Teamworks).
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 via Apple or listen on Spotify or Stitcher.