Digital and Social Media Sports
A business-minded look at digital and social media in sports
On episode 231 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Harry McIntire, Director of Digital for SPORTFIVE (agency that works with the biggest sports teams and brands in the world helping with globalization, fan engagement, sponsorship, and more).
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.
We’re in the remix era of social media. Trends, memes, duets, reactions — a powerful seed of content begets a tree, which can turn into a forest. Content snowballs, with creators from across the world, in different communities, and from various subcultures, with original POVs, adding their unique take. No snowflake is alike, to complete the analogy, and AI-infused feeds seek to deliver the precise snowflake that’s perfect for you, the content that seems targeted to an audience of one — you.
So what’s a media behemoth, a decades-old brand like ESPN to do in this space, where they’re one of many voices on social, working with the same sports content and stories everybody else is? There’s no easy answer, but in many ways ESPN is spreading and discovering seeds, helping plant the trees across an array of diverse sports fan communities. I loved the way ESPN’s Senior Vice President, Original Content & ESPN Films Brian Lockhart put it on a panel at the ESPN Edge Conference [click to watch] in October 2022.
“How do we open source [a] story,?” he said. “Maybe deliver this to a different partner that has an authentic voice on a different platform. “That same piece of IP can have new life breathed into it and hit different for different audiences.”
For much of social media, user-generated content provides a lot of seeds. Whether it’s home videos, serendipitous discoveries of content, memes, and everything in between — fans are planting seeds all over. ESPN Vice President of Social Media Kaitee Daley applied a perspective related to Lockhart’s ‘open source’ idea in describing how they activate user-generated content and inviting diverse voices to put their spin on it.
“Nearly half of all media consumed is user-generated media,” Daley said. “This notion of someone down the street from me went and filmed their kid doing something incredible in the backyard and that’s going to perform as well on our channels as a really well-done highlight. When you think about how we approach that, sometimes I think people go ’Well that’s not innovative at all because anyone can do it.
“But what we’ve started to do on TikTok in particular is bring voices like Omar Raja to those moments. So we’re storytelling user-generated content in a different way and it’s made for that audience. They consume and they think ‘this is for me’ And that speaks to that inclusivity as well.”
So, yes, create your content and serve your fans. But also invite others to build off the content you produce or curate. When platforms like TikTok strive to deliver the exact right content to the tiny, exact cohort of users for which that video is a perfect match — trying to be everything to everyone is a losing battle by design. There are too many segments and sub-segments, communities, and sub-cultures — the forest is appreciated for its trees.
That’s one of my own key takeaways from hearing the insightful conversation on the ESPN Edge Conference panel.
Listen to episode 231 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Harry McIntire, Director, Digital for SPORTFIVE (global agency working with sports teams, media, brands, and a leader in helping sports organizations and partners globalize their brand).
Listen below or on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
78 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Connect on LinkedIn
TikTok has disrupted social media strategy for everybody.
Because anybody can go viral, every account is on a treadmill chasing that next big hit. The next video that’ll rack up hundreds of thousands or millions of views and engagements and capture the attention of lots of…people. It may not be entirely clear what it means when a post goes viral on TikTok, but the most strategically savvy brands, teams, and organizations have a strategic foundation for all their content — ensuring that virality has value.
The millions of fans that discover The Savannah Bananas on TikTok may not have a favorite MLB team, let alone know much about baseball at all. But with over 3.5 million followers on the platform, the Bananas know that every encounter is a chance to execute against their core mission to proselytize the sport; in brief, to spread the joy and the game of baseball.
“We have the sole goal to make baseball fun,” said Savanah Alaniz, Marketing Coordinator for The Savannah Bananas. “So anything that we do or post, we think how is this going to show making baseball fun?
“When I post something on TikTok, I hope that whenever anyone sees it that they think it’s so intriguing that they have to do exactly what I did the first time I saw the Bananas — they have to go to the account and see more and all the other things they see make them laugh and then make them wanna show their roommate or their sister or brother, dad — like, ‘Oh my gosh, look what this baseball team did.’…
“My hope is that we post something that just pulls you in, even if it’s not all the way, but pulls you in just enough to where you have to [wonder] what the heck is this?”
TikTok may be that first touchpoint for many fans. That first engagement or encounter may not lead to a purchase, let alone a lifetime of fandom — that shouldn’t be the goal, really. As Alaniz noted, it’s to pique that curiosity, get them to want to see and learn more. And the more they see, the closer the Bananas get to accomplishing their goals of propagating the joy of baseball and positioning the Bananas as the beacon for that message.
Social media was never about driving a sale. A ‘conversion’ on social media can mean a lot of things. And as exciting as it can be for Instagram Stories to add swipe-up links or for TikTok to try and sell tickets, we know better. Rather than chase the fraction of a percent that may click through, let alone complete a purchase, focus on the most powerful part of social media — giving friends or a community something to talk about. When content cuts through, the fans become the marketers, and the invaluable pathways of dark social take over — and the brand comes along for the ride as the purveyor of that social capital. In the global ecosystem of social media and digital-first (or even digital-only) fandom, being a ‘fan’ can mean a lot of things. It becomes even more clear to hear Alaniz tell it.
“We want the Bananas to be global,” she said. “We want every single person to know the brand. So whenever you’re walking on the street and you see an LA Dodgers cap, like you’re gonna recognize the logo immediately. [We want the Bananas] to be like that…just to be super popular. [Fans] may not be able to attend the game, yes, but they can share the video online with their TikTok or online with their friend. Then maybe that person is in a city that we’re touring to and then they can go attend a game where they like the team, they can buy merchandise…”
What’s the ROI of a smile? It’s difficult to say, of course, but we know a smile is a win on social. Smiles add up and smiles can help form a positive relationship with a brand or a sport or a person. The Bananas know that every smile conjured by baseball gets those viewers closer to recognizing the joy that baseball brings. So, in many ways, the Bananas are building fans and celebrating metrics, sure, but they’re also just chasing smiles.
“How can we reach a new audience of not only ticket buyers, but just people in general, baseball fans and non-baseball fans to be like, ‘Hey, baseball is cool, baseball is fun’,” said Alaniz, who has been with the Bananas since 2020. “We love the sport, we want it to keep growing, and bringing joy to people and reaching people that baseball wasn’t able to reach before.
“So I think that’s the big goal is to continue making baseball fun and then obviously we want everybody to know about the Bananas. They should. It brings a smile to your face.”
Just watch any Savannah Bananas video or even the ESPN+ series ‘Welcome to Bananaland’ and you’ll see the fun and novelty of the team. But TikTok is a heck of a beast to tame and once you think you understand it, something unexpected takes off while the thing you expected to perform well falls flat instead. Video trends or trending sounds can feel like the way to go, oftentimes, but it’s what you do with the trends that determines whether it leaves a lasting impact on the viewer. Something resonates beyond just another iteration of the trend they’ve seen throughout the scroll. I love the way Alaniz put it when describing how the Bananas approach TikTok trends, inventing the word ‘Bananafy.’
“We have a meeting every single day at 4:00 where we talk about what are two trends that we saw last night while we were scrolling TikTok in bed and how can we ‘Bananafy’ those trends?…”I think if you scroll our content, you’ll find a way that, yes, we completely gave in to a TikTok trend and we did it on the mound or something. Like, we just did the trend because we knew it needed to be done; the people wanted it so we gave it to them…”
But Alaniz continued, talking about what it means for the Bananas to ‘create’ a trend. The success of said trend is not necessarily going viral on TikTok with hundreds or thousands of imitators. Sometimes the best sign of success is videos of Little League parents showing off their kids having fun on the baseball field recreating something they saw the Bananas do.
“[We try] these weird things that have never been seen before in a baseball field [and] Little Leaguers are trying to do it. I think that’s pretty cool,” said Alaniz, who is still a kid herself, almost, having just graduated from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in 2022. “Will we ever start a super crazy viral trend like Charli D’ Amelio and Addison Rae? Probably not. But the Little Leaguers see it and that’s pretty cool.
“I think that’s more important than the masses.”
The Bananas are reaching generations of fans that didn’t know you could have so much fun by breaking the rules. Or creating new rules. If spreading the joy of baseball is the Bananas’ core belief, a key tenet of the doctrine is to err on the side of trying something new. Call it defiant innovation, naive exuberance, and not so much a rejection of the status quo but the absence of unconditional reverence for it — that is what has helped guide the Bananas to such massive success on the field, in business, and on social media. Alaniz feels that encouragement to take swings (to borrow baseball parlance) and it comes directly from the top in Bananas owner Jesse Cole.
“Typically you don’t have owners of teams telling you ‘Hey, break the rules, do this crazy thing. You see the line, now go a mile past it,’” she said. “You don’t have team owners selling you that. But Jesse gives you the confidence that you can do that, and it’s okay to fail at the Bananas because if you don’t fail a couple of times how are you gonna know what works and what doesn’t?”
It’s time to redefine what success means in social media strategy. To chase goals bigger than virality. To reframe failure as a pit stop and not a dead end. And to focus on the feelings and storytelling we want to inspire more than the metric. Because if you’re having fun along the way and leaving every fan with a smile, nobody will even care to remember the score anyway.
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Bonus: Because Savanah and the Bananas have crushed it so much on TikTok, I wanted to include her going into detail about their TikTok and social media ideation and execution strategy:
“[It’s] definitely a lot of scrolling. I call that my research. I do spend a certain amount, anywhere from like 15 to 20 minutes [or more] depending on what I have for the day. Just minutes of my day scrolling, seeing what people are saying on Twitter about certain things, or TikTok — what are the sounds that people are using? Or Facebook even, like, what are the PTA moms up to these days?
“So then I kind of figure out, alright, this is what the people are talking about. So I have a long-running list; I have a note in my phone and then I also have an Excel sheet, and then also I bookmark a lot of tweets. I bookmark a lot of TikToks to go back to, but I typically add links in my notes, and then I’ll add like a little note under there of just what I’m thinking of. Normally when I see a trend, I think in that moment, like, ‘Oh, this is what I wanna do.’ So like I said earlier, Caitlin and I have this 4:00 meeting every single day where we talk about what are two trends that we saw yesterday. That way we constantly know that we’re growing and learning new things. And half of these, more than half of these — 75% of them will never see the light of day. It’s just we wanna keep that creative muscle in our brains working and thinking of ways to Banana-fy trends or think of new trends.
“There have been times where I’ve just like sat and stared at the wall and kind of hoped that an idea would come to me and, like, it doesn’t really work. I would rather scroll. But yeah, there have been a couple times where I’ve just had to like sit and look at the sky and kind of wait for something to come to me. We also have ideas sessions. So that is where our team gets together, we’re told topics beforehand and we think in these buckets and these categories of trying to think of, like, hitter walkups that are unique or run celebrations, for example.
“So we’re constantly around here thinking of new ideas and working that idea muscle.”
On episode 230 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Savanah Alaniz, Marketing Coordinator for The Savannah Bananas baseball 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 via Apple or listen on Spotify or Stitcher.
Listen to episode 230 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Savanah Alaniz, Marketing Coordinator for The Savannah Bananas baseball team.
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
“I’d say 2020 is the year everybody got religion.”
So I plucked this out of a more extended response from Aileen McManamon, discussing sports organizations and their role, activities, and opportunities in driving progress worldwide. Be it sustainability, diversity, social justice — the power and, in many ways, the responsibility of brands in sports and beyond came to the forefront in the last few years.
McManamon is a Cleveland native (and big fan of Cleveland sports) and therefore has witnessed the fracturing of the Cleveland Browns fan base when they brought in the embattled quarterback Deshaun Watson. That’s just one of many examples in which the most loyal, unconditional customers of all — sports fans — have had a reason to question their fidelity to their favorite teams and athletes. That represents a wider trend throughout society of employees and consumers of companies not turning a blind eye, no matter how passionate their fandom and support.
“It’s not a blind loyalty…We’re becoming more critical,” said McManamon who founded 5T Sports Group, which helps sports properties, partners, and event sites drive impact. “And now it’s evolved even more forward because we know this particular generation of fans has a greater affinity to the athlete than they do to the team…You make space for even athletes that you’re not particularly a fan of, you might have never seen them play, but you just love what they stand for.
“So this is an interesting evolution of that is that what we find is the more that someone stands for, the more drawn people are to that.”
Something else happened the last few years, too, as organizations witnessed and participated in the broad reckoning of a multitude of issues in the country and the world — many brands tried to cover all of it. To make statements, promise results, and declare their stance on just about everything that the populace seemed to have an opinion about.
But statements catch up, so while it’s easy enough to put out said statements, consumers and fans today are skeptical of just statements. Statements without action are meaningless and oftentimes can even be detrimental. So how does an organization know where to allocate its scarce resources, attention, and genuine efforts?
“If you’re in conversations with your fans on social and if you have a good presence on social and you’re following that conversation, you’ll know what they care about more, and what they care about less,” said McManamon discussing the importance of listening to and knowing your fan base. “And when something happens in your community, you better be there on it, right?”
Sports teams and athletes really do have an outsized role in their community and the world. While the companies and athletes themselves have a modest bottom line, relatively speaking, their influence and the passion they inspire are unmatched. And the good news for the power players in sports is that doing good for the world is also good for business, now more than ever. But the incentive goes beyond driving customer or fan loyalty and beyond some sense of self-righteousness or even genuine altruism — it’s a matter of survival, in many ways. McManamon talked about how sports ecosystems — the teams, the locales, the venues, the economies — are microcosms of society, and therefore they have the ability to be a testing ground, proving ground, and force for progress.
“The sports industry is a component of everything going on. It’s still relatively small; as large as the sports industry is it’s still a small component of the overall economy,” she explained. “But the platform that they have is quite substantial. Where they should approach [sustainability goals] from is by saying, ‘We’re not doing this because, ‘It’s a nice thing to do, or it’s the right thing to do.’ You’re doing it at this point to preserve your business on the environmental side.”
Sports also have an outsized influence because there exists within sports an incredible capacity to unite. The prince and the pauper can still talk about that great game last night, and fans can agree that the rival team in the state sucks, regardless of those fans’ political leanings. That power goes beyond a broadcast platform, McManamon explained, making a salient point. And when you can harness that fandom fire and activate it in a directed manner, you can achieve an outsized result.
McManamon said it well: “Sports are not just kind of a stage broadcast platform, but also a unifying platform. When we go to see sports, that’s where you’re gonna see a professor and a plumber sitting next to each other, or a Republican and a Democrat…people are sitting side by side that are coming from very different backgrounds, but in that moment they’re united in that passion for the [team], everybody’s pulling on that same rope. So this is really the lever that our sports teams can use, the broadcast and the medium.”
McManamon continued: “We’re united in our dislike for the other team…So imagine things like getting your fans all rolling on a food bank challenge…this is where some of these things fall flat; they’re like, ‘Oh, bring a can [of food] to the game’…How about, ‘Hey, let’s beat the other guys. We’re gonna do better than them [on donating food]. Our team might lose today, but this is in our control as fans.’
“So you can really rally people around taking actions collectively. And even when it has a little bit of animosity to it, that’s okay because you have to press the emotional buttons that people respond to.”
Sports fandom engenders a particular sort of patriotism, but modern fans want their teams and players to live up to such passionate pride. Fans want to know that their favorite team is worthy of such affection. When forces for good intersect with the communal, competitive nature of sports, the world is better for it.
On September 17, 2022, the San Diego Wave and Angel City FC of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) set a single-game attendance record for the NWSL when over 32,000 fans came to see the game at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego.
Here’s a taste of the game, with a fan engagement bent. Check it out below
On episode 229 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, 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).
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.