Digital and Social Media Sports
A business-minded look at digital and social media in sports
Listen to episode 252 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Jess Smith, Vice President, Brand and Digital Strategy for Stewart-Haas Racing.
88 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles
Brand building used to be a one-way street. Something cooked up by the Don Drapers of the world. And, sure, brands were conceived and conveyed such that they’d appeal to consumers, but it was much more of an ‘at’ thing than a ‘with.’
And then social media came along and didn’t just disrupt the paradigm, it reinvented it.
Brand development is increasingly common in pro sports, as league expansion introduces new teams seemingly every few years. And the changed nature of relationships between consumers and businesses, between fans and teams — compounded by the increased demands from fans that the teams they support uphold certain values — has made the process all the more complex, but potentially powerful.
It was into this dynamic environment that Savannah Hollis stepped when she joined the Seattle Kraken to lead the initiatives on the front lines of fan relations — social media. The most recent National Hockey League (NHL) expansion team, the Kraken didn’t even have their name when Hollis came on board, let alone a voice, personality, and point of view. Amidst COVID and the widespread Black Lives Matter movement, the team had to confront important questions and issues long before they had a roster, let alone games or a logo.
“We started really thinking about as an organization, like, who do we want to be? “Who are we and what do we stand for?” said Hollis, who spent time with the Nashville Predators, Texas Stars (AHL), and Florida Panthers before joining Seattle. “I think one of the coolest things about us is from the very beginning, even prior to a lot of that, we wanted to be a little different. We wanted to make the game more accessible. We wanted to show that it doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is, what color your skin is — we want you to feel like this is a place that you could be and you could relate to and you could succeed in…
“One of the things that gave me hope to kind of go through was how we grew as an organization and some of the stuff that we did within the community and the storytelling and that engagement and the awareness and it’s just it’s been really cool and it set a really strong precedent for us…”
Championing approachability and accessibility carried through to the Kraken as a hockey team, too. Because if the team is truly a part of the community, that means just that — they’re a collaborator, not a dictator. So as the team tried to figure out where they should put their resources and who they should become, they asked questions and then sat back and listened.
“We really did want to engage the community,” said Hollis, whose role for the Kraken is Senior Manager of Social Media. “The amount of fan listening groups that our CEO and (also) at that point our head of hockey ops, who was Dave Tippet [did] — they would sit down and they’d do these fan focus groups. They’d talk to people, like, ‘What do you think about this? What do you care about? What do you want to learn?’…
“You’ll see we actually are getting ready to do this here in a couple of weeks, but once a year we try to do these fan content polls; we want our fans to help dictate what we’re doing because they’re the ones engaging with it. Like if you pay attention you’re going to see that stuff, but you also want to empower your fans to build a positive community, because I think the worst thing any brand can do is just be like, ‘No, we know what’s best’ and turn into that really corporate account who doesn’t actually engage or listen to their audience and then becomes irrelevant.
“The more you engage, the more you listen, the more you work with them, the more positive of an experience it’s going to be for everyone.”
That dedication to open communication continued on for the Kraken, too. Because the best thing a brand or business can do when they make important decisions that affect their customers (their fans) is to let them in on the process and explain their thinking. Noticing a theme here, yet? It’s one thing to say the organization is committed to being accessible, but while many preach it, fewer practice it.
So on the big day when the Kraken officially unveiled their name and brand, following months of speculation, focus groups, polls, and stories, the next step seemed obvious — invite the fans in.
“We were [thinking] like, okay, once we do the name, then what? And I was kind of like, ‘What if we did like virtual breakout sessions?'” Hollis described. “And our marketing team, our comms team took that, ran with it, and we had this really cool thing where we did deep dives with Adidas and the designers, we had our community team join on, we had hockey [ops] join on — it was so cool, all of these things that went into it that made it so successful.
“Because not only were we announcing this thing, but then we are offering people this really intense look into why we did it, what to expect, and really we showed them why they should care.”
So what does all this mean for social media? How does that philosophy extend to the club’s strategy on its social channels? For Hollis and her team, it meant thinking about how fans could feel represented within the team’s social media content, too. There’s still plenty of room for the heavily produced content featuring effects and sick dangles, but sometimes the best content instead zooms in on the fans experiencing the intensity and emotion. It’s palpable, it’s contagious, and it’s real. Hollis offered perspective on the content strategy framework.
“I mean, gosh, you could have this beautifully polished video that you’ve spent years working on and the concepts are awesome and it performs okay,” she said. “But then you have this raw video of like someone just screaming after an amazing goal and that outperforms anything you do the entire year. And it’s because it feels real. It feels raw and in the moment and it allows fans to to really connect with it. The other stuff, there’s still a place for it, it is still impactful, it still matters, but you’re starting to see a shift in what people care about, and a lot of times it’s authenticity.”
Authenticity is a buzzword, but there’s a difference between paying lip service to it and actually embracing it. That’s not to say teams should follow the lead of some of their more vehement fans lamenting a loss, but it does mean exuding optimism while at the same time acknowledging realities. Expansion teams aren’t supposed to be big winners right out of the gates. And while the Vegas Golden Knights broke the mold in their inaugural NHL season, the Kraken experienced a bit more of a typical debut, with losses more common than wins. Many teams still today, for better or for worse, will just type out ‘Final’ after a loss along with a score graphic, and then shut the proverbial laptop and walk away. The Kraken were determined to do it differently, though, to stay there alongside their fans, offering a positive outlook while still empathizing in addition to emphasizing the desire to win.
“I told [my social/digital coordinators], I was like let’s never just say ‘final’ [after a loss],” said Hollis, who noted the team leaned into humor that first season, too. “Let’s find a way to do something else. Like, if we have a bad game, is there something that we can do to still build up a player who performed well? It’s just something to do to poke fun at ourselves or to acknowledge that it sucks, right? Losing sucks. No one likes it and the team shouldn’t pretend like it’s okay.”
The honeymoon, and expected struggles, of that first season faded away as the Kraken began their second season, though. Hollis and her team recognized they couldn’t just run it back, that their fans, while still as excited as ever to have an NHL team in their town, would become more competitive and expect more. Year two for the Kraken’s social media would represent an evolution, too — still being the fun, lovable presence they were as newborns, but with an added edge that left no doubt — they expect to compete and to win.
“Going into year two we were kind of like, I don’t know if that’s going to fly for two years in a row,” Hollis recounted. “You kind of have to think about fan response because now fans are starting to get it. We made some moves in the offseason and we had (highly touted rookie) Matty Beniers coming in for his first season. The pressure was a little higher, the stakes were a little higher. So we still wanted to incorporate the tone and the lightness, but we wanted to also have fans recognize that we do have high expectations for ourselves, too. We’re not okay with being at the bottom of the standings. And I think we did a really good balancing that.”
And the team did start to win. The Kraken went on to make the playoffs and even took out the defending Stanley Cup champs when they defeated the Colorado Avalanche. As teams start to win nowadays, they often evolve their social media voice in a similar way, trending toward snark and savagery, putting more effort into highlighting their opponent’s loss than celebrating their own team’s win. But while Hollis and the Kraken recognize there is room for such snark in the strategy, they prefer to default to positive vibes, focusing on cheering the victory instead of highlighting the other team’s defeat. Such behavior conveys an example for fans, setting the tone for how this fan base wants to be in general and especially when they’re winning.
“There’s a time and a place for [savage and snark] for sure, but I think our big thing was we would rather build ourselves up instead of tear others down,” said Hollis. “There are certain teams where maybe we have good relationships with the [social media] admin so we can plan some fun back and forth or some fun banter. But at the same time, we want to focus on building our team up.
“Again, there’s always a place for the spicy comment here and there, but it’s not the focal point of our strategy.”
Hollis continued, explaining the long-term thinking that went into setting that strategy.
“So when we’re talking through this, we’re planning all this stuff, that was one of the big things that was kind of at the forefront,” she said. “Like, let’s find a way to keep building this up because this team is special and, you know, we’ve got it now, we don’t know if we’re going to get it again…So a lot of it was just let’s focus on building it up now, building these relationships now, building the goodwill now so that we have that kind of there [and] we can start forming those connections with our fans and really continue to grow them in an environment that is really positive.”
There’s no one way to build a brand, no one-size-fits-all for every team in every market. But certain relationship principles tend to prevail for the teams that drive lasting, unconditional connections with their fans. There’s symbiosis, a feeling of unity and community that makes fans feel they’re part of something, that their relationship with the team gives them positive energy, that life just feels a bit more lively because they’re together.
The Kraken may not have won the Cup (yet), but they went from an unnamed idea to a team and a distinct brand with a distinct fan base. They won something bigger, they won over a community, building connections that can last for generations to come.
On episode 251 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Savannah Hollis, Senior Manager, Social Media for the Seattle Kraken.
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 251 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Savannah Hollis, Senior Manager, Social Media for the Seattle Kraken.
81 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles
You peer at the footage on your device, squinting to try and make out the chorus of the song. Sure, you could look up the band on YouTube and hear it perfectly, but something about seeing this video sent from your friend at the concert makes it…different, special.There’s no logical explanation for this strange but perfectly normal behavior. But the same thing plays out for sports — a mobile shot from your buddy in the crowd adding a flavor that the official highlight on Twitter simply cannot. There’s a vicarious element to it, that even though you’re not there, you’re living through somebody else — a friend or, increasingly, a team’s social media “host” taking fans along for the ride on IG Stories and TikTok (and, years ago, Snapchat).But the idea of putting a face in front of a club’s social media presence, a guide for the fans, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was a new idea altogether when Aviv Levy Shoshan became the conduit to the club for FC Barcelona fans around the world in 2018.”They were really the first club who made a decision to hire a host, specifically for the Instagram channels, to cover all the first team trainings and also all the first team matches,” said Levy Shoshan, who would become as recognizable to fans as many of the players as the club traveled around the world. “Now you go to any second-tier team, to any random team channel [and] you click on a match day and there will be a guy or a girl hosting on Instagram, which is bizarre thinking about it. But back in the days like five, six years ago, it was not very common. You had the traditional presenter or host for the club TV [content], but not a social host. And now it’s very hard to think away this social figure.”He was a fly on the wall — until he wasn’t. The content became that much better, the experience that much more (here’s that word again) vicarious when the previously backgrounded character became an active participant in the content, the fans enjoying his POV as if it were their own. In hearing Levy Shoshan describe the experience, one can easily close their eyes and picture the kind of content that’s become so common in sports social media today.”I always really liked as raw as possible…It’s just, clicking play and seeing how the players would interact with you,” said Levy Shoshan, who is today the social media host for Dutch club AFC Ajax in addition to leading Double Tap, the agency he founded. “Because at the end of the day, if you are behind the camera, you’re behind the camera, no one needs to know, but once they interact, they interact with your direction. “So we had a lot of times that the players would come up to us or coming out of the parking and walking to the locker room and we would be there just filming and they would just come for a fist bump, you know? And now you see every team in the world [their] social media team is receiving fist bumps from their players. But I think it kind of started somewhere around there. And players also would start realizing like, ‘Yo, if I don’t fist bump [him], there’s no chance he will post me [on social]. So you at some point all 20 players would just walk past you and fist bump you.”That kind of eye contact and second-person (but feels like first-person) interaction is the stuff of magic for fan engagement. But anyone in and around social knows that such participation from players requires trust and doesn’t happen overnight. Levy Shoshan has worked alongside the biggest football players in the world for whom any misstep could blow up. So the best thing the social media person can do is, over time, ensure players know that not only will they be protected in the content, but that it will make them look good. Because social media is a conduit to the fans and by being active participants in the content, a player’s star only shines brighter as fans feel closer and more endeared to them.”I think it all comes down to respect at the end of the day,” said Levy Shoshan. “So what you said at the beginning, they know I make them look good. So there was a good proof of concept.”I was there for a few months, [the players] were all pretty cautious with me at the beginning, like, who is this new guy? What’s he filming? Is he going to post some stupid things? Is he going to make us look bad? [There is] a lot of cursing around the pitch, is he going to pick up on that? Is something going to leak? Then you see after a while that I’m completely clean and always make them look good no matter what, and [they] say, ‘Okay, he’s one of us.'”All of this comes together in remarkable fashion in the rawest of moments on the pitch. Levy Shoshan had the enviable experience of being a pitchside content creator during the World Cup, following Argentina as Leo Messi and La Albiceleste captured the title. He also played an active role when Antoine Griezmann celebrated a goal with a toss of confetti that mimicked LeBron James’s well-known chalk powder toss. As the magic moments compounded, with Levy Shoshan being the eyes and ears for fans at home — their ‘friend’ that just happened to have a great view of the show — the power of this content showed itself to be undeniable. The polished broadcast highlights are great, but they’re just not the same.”Of course you can see the goal on TV, but it’s nicer if you see it from someone filmed by phone, right? It’s because it feels like you filmed it or you interacted with it directly…,” said Levy Shoshan.He continued, describing a dramatic goal at the end of an epic FC Barcelona match: “[So] we’re losing 2-0, make it 2-2, Pique scores in the very dying minutes and he comes to celebrate in front of my face again. So there was screaming, there were these raw emotions that you cannot capture through the camera of a TV.”People want to live it like it’s their own phone, you know, it’s way more relatable than a TV camera.”Maybe we forgot about what makes social media special somewhere along the way. Sure, it’s great that broadcast replays arrive in the timeline in seconds, but that was never the point of what has become this social media industrial complex in the first place. It’s sharing the experience of others, feeling like you’re in their shoes, and having a ‘friend’ that’s there and taking you along for the ride.
LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH AVIV LEVY SHOSHAN
On episode 250 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Aviv Levy Shoshan, Founder and Head of Double Tap (Talent management & creative agency specializing in sport) and Host for AFC Ajax.
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 250 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Aviv Levy Shoshan, Founder and Head of Double Tap (Talent management & creative agency specializing in sport) and Host for AFC Ajax.
71 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Connect on LinkedIn
No function of a sports organization has changed more in the last decade than communications.
That’s not a bold statement, it’s just facts. In the earliest days, the newspaper reigned supreme, and ‘public relations’ emerged to facilitate and encourage newspaper and magazine stories. After print came radio and TV coverage. Then the internet and social media arrived — teams, leagues, and even fans had their own platform. Many leagues have their own TV networks to go along with the countless websites, social channels, and apps that teams have, coexisting with third-party and fan-led media platforms. It’s a lot.
With that evolution, PR became strategic communications, which coalesced into integrated communications — every department connected. Everybody’s in marketing, everybody’s in communications; every tentacle of a team or league has a story to tell and a platform to tell stories.
But just like the old aphorism that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (‘synergy’ for the buzzword-inclined), the inverse is equally as important, and not in a good way. The communications leader, with whatever title they’re toting, must serve as the conductor of a well-oiled orchestra, bringing harmony to form a cohesive, cross-channel story.
“What I’ve learned over the years is if comms needs to be the central clearinghouse for everybody’s going to do to support a particular thing — a news event, an announcement, a campaign — that’s great, we’ll be the scribe and we’ll put it all together, but we’ll make sure everybody is aware of what other people are doing,” said Jon Schwartz, a veteran of sports and brand communications and marketing, with experience at NASCAR, the NFL, Mastercard, the XFL, and more.
“[Nowadays] you’re seeing these efforts to put messaging and campaigns out in the marketplace are through the lens of integrated marketing and communications and the use of the PESO mode…PESO (stands for) paid, earned, shared and owned. So everything sits under that from marketing communications to lead generation to podcasts like this, to brand journalism like we just talked about, to earned media and community service and co-branding and shared media.
“It’s never been more important than it is now that all of these tactics work together under a codified plan that’s actually on paper.”
Schwartz was on the front lines of the rapid evolution of communications strategy; he had an up-close view and played an active role in seeing it through. NASCAR, the country’s leading stock car racing league, has been a success story of that new archetype of an integrated marketing and communications practice.
NASCAR was (and continues to be) one of the strongest sports leagues in the US, but it had to modernize in some ways to keep up with an increasingly diverse and aspirationally national audience. The organization has an incredibly loyal fan base, the most impactful corporate partnerships in sports, a growing social media operation, and strong media relationships and returns. So when it came time to take on something of a brand transformation, NASCAR succeeded because it was firing on all cylinders (yes, pun intended! Vroom vroom)
“For years, NASCAR did a fantastic job making it easier and more convenient for journalists to cover the race. And there was massive coverage…But ultimately NASCAR needed to evolve and it did….,” said Schwartz, who was Managing Director, Integrated Marketing Communications for years at the motorsports juggernaut. “We really ensured we had stakeholder relationship groups — we had people working on the digital and social side, we had somebody focusing solely on business, someone focusing solely on our work with the media networks, solely on sponsorship and really making sure that comms was embedded in every function of the business.”
Sports is unique from most other industries, though, because the producers of the product, the labor — the athletes — have individual and collective platforms themselves that rival or surpass that of the teams and leagues employing them. That’s ultimately a good thing for sports, but it adds another layer to the integrated strategy. If the athletes aren’t aligned, even the best marketing and comms strategy is rendered relatively feeble.
Schwartz had a front-row view, and indeed an active role, in seeing that scenario play out at the NFL, too. The league’s most important employees, the players, worked with some internal NFL social media staff to produce a video in which they stated in no uncertain teams that they felt the league was not doing enough in the Black Lives Matter moment and movement. It could’ve been a communications crisis, but for Schwartz it represented a lesson-learning moment and, indeed, an opportunity to help steer the NFL’s powerful platform in a direction for societal good.
“I think [it was] a lesson about how much the voice of employees matters…It was a moment I think of the people and it really underscored the importance of listening and responding,” said Schwartz of the video and the narratives that followed. “The league [had been] doing really good things with Inspire Change, its social justice platform, before that, but it really doubled down with it afterward.”
Schwartz gave illustrative examples, recalling how an integrated strategy came together to create meaningful results, specifically citing an initiative around LGBTQ+ support, which he’d volunteered to lead.
“I was able to get a few people together from marketing and advertising and the NFL Network and NFL media and the social media team and we created a really cool campaign…“The big KPI was doing it. Just doing it. Just the NFL getting behind a campaign for LGBTQ+. We didn’t expect the kind of impact, we didn’t expect a huge number of social media impressions. We didn’t expect to be able to pull off a public service announcement with Rob Gronkowski. We didn’t expect anybody to say yes and a bunch of NFL current and former NFL players did…
“A year after that, Carl Nassib became the first active NFL player to come out. And this year they’re doing a big merchandise collection with a big fashion brand around pride. So, yeah, it was an interesting time, but I think it reminded everybody of the importance of listening to the voices of employees.”
The connective tissue throughout Schwartz’s career, even amidst all the challenges and changes, is relationships. Forming relationships, sure, but also fostering them over time, and understanding how we’re more powerful together than we are alone. That’s ultimately the underlying foundation of all of this talk about integrated communications and marketing, about multi-faceted and cross-channel campaigns. Call it whatever you want, but it’s just appreciating that each of us brings something unique to the table and when we work together — actually work together — we can achieve incredible outcomes.