Brand – Digital and Social Media Sports

The NCAA’s Social Media Evolution to Develop and Distribute Student-Athlete Stories

The NCAA has been around since 1906. Social media has not. Bridging that gap, and doing so across 1,100+ schools, three very different divisions, and more than half a million student-athletes who come and go every year, is a unique challenge for Jaelyn Arndt and her team.

The NCAA has a broad mission, encompassing the support of countless past, present, and future student-athletes. And social media is undeniably one of the most powerful tools in the quiver now — but it’s only impactful if wielded to the fullest extent, efficiently and effectively. So how do you help usher a century-old institution into the social media age? Start with the basics.

“We have evolved and we’re being social on social, we’re doing best practices,” said Arndt, a former NCAA Division III volleyball player in her days as a student-athlete. “We have really dove into each platform, but now we are maturing in the way of that maybe not every piece of content needs to hit every platform. Or hey, if we’re going to post on Instagram but we also need it on Facebook, we’re building that content for the platform. So it may not be the same piece of media, but it’s the same story because we know what works on each platform. And I think that just came with maturity. It came with having boundaries and being able to say no, being able to say yes.”

Developing platform-specific packaging and approaches was step one. As Arndt noted, too, getting the NCAA to be more thoughtful about content production and distribution was an integral step; she added later that the organization has a lot of room to grow on TikTok, for example, but needs to dedicate the appropriate time and effort there to make sure they do it right. Alongside getting the content right, there’s the ever-important voice and tone.

In the earliest days of social media, voice, most often conveyed in copy, was mostly staid; then, through memes, GIFs, replies, and just pure content vibes, which gave way to eras of snark, absurdity, and everything in between. The NCAA has to be thoughtful, but intentional; careful but convicted. Arndt and her team appreciate the challenge of speaking and posting on behalf of an organization that wants to celebrate the joy and inspiration of college sports and student-athletes, but also leave room for straightforward and serious explanations of the rules and regulations the NCAA oversees and communicates. Arndt described the NCAA’s voice and presence on social.

“We kind of gave ourselves a character of the proud auntie,” said Arndt, who said the strategy is centered around ‘cultivating community.’ “So the NCAA is here to uplift you, support you. We are your biggest cheerleaders, but we’re also going to keep it real with you when there are new rules or new legislation that passes.

“We’re going to not talk at you, we’re talking with you. And those are things that come from comments. It’s engaging with the student athletes. It’s sharing their content. It’s doing social first. It’s being able to take a structured in-venue video and then creating a social-first piece that’s going to hit with our target audience, which is always the student athletes.”

As the NCAA has been molding its social media strategy, a massive college athletics media complex has continued to grow. Schools, as well as student-athletes themselves, are telling their own stories and creating their own content — and lots of it. Let alone all of the players in the larger media ecosystem, ESPN, Yahoo, Bleacher Report, FOX Sports, The Athletic, and tons of others. So where does that leave the NCAA? In an ocean of content, where and when should the NCAA surface?

“Where we sit, it’s really being strategic because we have access to footage that not everybody else does,” said Arndt, who also spoke about being mindful of covering and amplifying stories across all three divisions and across all sports, as much as possible. “Especially if someone has already been at a championship or we have all this footage that hasn’t even seen the light of day. So that’s a really easy way for us to come in on the story with our assets that no one else has.”

Arndt also spoke about this approach as it pertains to the biggest annual NCAA properties: men’s and women’s March Madness.

“You have to take advantage of where your credential gets you because these are our championships. We have the access and everyone is already seeing where the ESPN camera is, but are you back-of-house or are you getting locker room? Are you getting the legacy court drop? Where can we be that not everybody else can see? And that’s where you’re going to have those breakthrough moments.”

The NCAA can also come at stories with a unique lens. Because while most media outlets will skew toward athletic feats and storylines, the NCAA has a bigger picture frame and more diverse content buckets. As much focus as there is on the incredible achievements in pools, arenas, and stadiums (and the NCAA elevates those stories, too), the student-athlete experience is unique. The NCAA seeks to capture that, always ready with the story and the next level or two beyond, too.

“It’s a lot — you have to be knowledgeable of this story or this athlete,” Arndt explained. “Were they at a national championship? Do they hold an NCAA record? Were they a Woman of the Year or an elite scholar? Any awards that we give out, that’s kind of where we can chime in with our own storytelling effort, if ESPN or someone else jumped in there.

Arndt continued: “For us, it’s really about diversifying the feeds, getting different stories out there that hit different pillars for us. And then to me, it’s using our platforms to help continue to build the student athletes’ brands. You see these people and their amazing stories, and they’re trying to build out their followers. A lot of these athletes don’t become professional athletes, and so if they want to talk about what they want to do post-sport — yeah, let’s get that on our account because I’m sure someone here would love to hire you after you graduate.”

It always comes back to the student-athletes. They’re the main characters in these stories; they’re the humans whose achievements get immortalized in highlights and headlines, and whose emotions fans can’t help but feel viscerally and vicariously. So, one of the most important jobs for Arndt and her team with the NCAA is to study up on the student-athletes. They have to know about the stories out there worth telling, who could fit a certain structure or category that’ll resonate with fans and followers, and how best to work with the student-athletes who find themselves in the spotlight.

“Pre-production and research will always be your best friend, and I think people sleep on that a little bit in the social space,” said Arndt, who has been with the NCAA since 2022. “There’s just so much that goes into it. If you do your research on an athlete, you’re going to know which one is a social person and who’s not. So when you’re reaching out to make the ask to do a ‘get ready with me,’ I would hope you did your research, and you find that this person has done a ‘get ready with me’ once a week for the past five months, and you’re like, that’s the best candidate.”

The dedication to research and preparation came to a head in early 2026, as the NCAA had the opportunity to travel to Italy to work the Olympics and Paralympics, which were chock full of current and former NCAA student-athletes. The operation in Milan was a great microcosm of how the NCAA serves its mission, its members, and its past, present, and future student-athletes. Arndt described what the NCAA sought to do in Italy and the incredible output and success they were able to send and bring back home.

“Our goal was to, one, create content for the membership and conferences, schools back home,” said Arndt, who expressed excitement and anticipation about what the NCAA will be able to do when the Olympic Games come to LA in 2028. “So we would ask questions, upload it to a Google Drive, send an email out, notify them, and then [schools and conferences] could create, edit whatever content we got and post on their accounts. Second was creating content for the NCAA channels. And that was a huge success. We got to sit down with 63 athletes who came through and do interviews with them. It was literally insane.

Arndt elaborated further: “Diving into all of their stories, we made combo pieces, personality pieces. But it’s unreal to think about. For us, it’s really telling the pipeline of the Olympic athletes that start at the NCAA. Winter Games is fun because you have athletes who were track and field or a swimmer, and now they’re on the Team USA bobsled team. And you’re like, how in the world did you end up here? Tell us about that.”

The NCAA has been dealing with changes for generations. The internet gave way to social media, giving all schools and student-athletes a platform. NIL augmented the already-growing student-athlete brands. The NCAA had to adapt, pick up new tools, develop modern approaches, and figure out how to keep making an impact — for the student-athletes who compete and the fans who live and die with their schools. It’s an ongoing evolution that Arndt continues to shepherd today.

But even amidst all the billions in media rights deals and the millions in NIL deals and revenue sharing, there remains a special purity in college athletics. And yet, with all the humanizing stories and lifestyle content pieces in pro sports, it’s still hard to see ourselves in those larger-than-life athletes. But with student-athletes, it’s never been only about sports. For four years, they earn the admiration and attention of fans, but it’s just a short time in their lives and one part of their story. Arndt and her team will continue to showcase all of it. They’ll be the proud auntie cheering on the student-athletes, making the most of those years on campus. While for each of them, their time as a collegiate athlete is but a short chapter in their lives, their stories can inspire and have an impact forever.

WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JAELYN ARNDT

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Brand, General Sports Business

Why The Strongest Modern Brands in Sports and Beyond Are Shared Not Dictated

Ostensibly, sports business is selling a product. A social experience, affordable family entertainment, a compelling show.

But products have customers. In sports, we want fans.

Fans make the team or league part of their personality. Their favorite sport or athlete becomes an inseparable part of their identity. They become evangelists for the brand, recruiting others and spreading the good word. That kind of devotion transcends the product; that’s where brand comes into play.

Paul Stafford has worked with the biggest consumer brands in the world, in sports, but also well beyond sports. He appreciates that brands are not just a name, a logo, or a tagline — that’s not how he’s helped organizations like Airbnb, EA, and the Premier League, among others, develop authentic, resonant brands. He gave me a thoughtful description of how to think about brand and the difference between building a brand and executing a business strategy.

“I think many businesses are good at distilling a business strategy and understanding what they’re trying to do on a tangible level of, of ‘We’re going to invest in this space, we’re going to develop this product, so we’re going to appeal to these target audiences,'” said Stafford, CEO of global branding and creative agency Further. “But actually, you can’t then just communicate that to the world, you need to understand, well, what does that mean, and how does that translate into a role that this business is going to play in their customers’ lives?

“What is it that Jeff Bezos famously said: A brand is what people say about you when they’re not in the room. And that’s exactly it. What are they going to say about you?”

These are the elements that broaden the impact of the product or service. And that’s why it’s integral for all parts of an organization to understand the brand and know how to put it into practice. Brand isn’t a marketing motion, it’s not a sales tactic, it’s not a guide for the roadmap, nor a tone or personality trait — it’s all those things and more. Stafford explained that the strongest brands hit fans with consistency and conviction at every level and interaction — that’s what makes it undeniable and recognizable.

“Every single interaction that any customer, any employee, anybody, any business has with your business should really kind of play through that lens of like, well, how does it build on that proposition, how is it uniquely a relationship and an experience that only our business could have?” said Stafford, who led the company DesignStudio before it coalesced into Further. “And I think that’s it. You should be able to cover the logo, cover the marketing copy, but the whole experience and interaction should feel very much like that brand. So it doesn’t really matter what the touchpoints are. They can grow and will continue to grow, especially in this world of AI, but actually, that proposition should stay sacred from the very beginning, right the way through to the very end.”

Something special starts to happen as the brand seeps in, when customers have something to latch onto and can transform from customers to fans. In sports, marketers can think of fandom on a spectrum — from curious casuals to diehard evangelists. More broadly for brands across any vertical, Stafford referenced the ‘commitment curve.’

The commitment curve can be tantamount to avidity, but it can also mean more than that nowadays. Because the best marketing is word of mouth, real people spreading the word organically, those at the top of the commitment curve aren’t just patrons, but promoters.

“If you think about this as a sort of chart, and you think about it as who’s the most committed on this side, and also then how much you can ask those people who are committed that much…,” said Stafford, who invoked the ‘commitment curve’ concept as originated by former Airbnb Global Head of Community, Douglas Atkin. “So if you think about it as a founder or a chairman or the team, it’s those people who are the most committed to the business, and you can make the biggest ask of them. You don’t need to sell them anything. They are the business.

“Then you can think about each of these parts of the community as like a step down. So the next step down will be your employees, the actual team’s players in there, you can almost ask them the same. Next down, you probably have your most avid fans and supporters. Next down, you’ve got ‘I go three, four times a year’ kind of fans. All the way through to people who have never heard of you.”

An underlying truth in all this is that brands can’t be dictated. If, as Stafford mentioned earlier (referencing Jeff Bezos), that brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, then surely brand cannot, by that definition, be centrally controlled. It’s in the hands of others, and the best that organizations can do is to influence the thoughts and ideas of the most vocal and influential.

It can be a sobering, even intimidating, realization that even with all the resources and distribution channels in the world, brands can only control so much. But flip that on its head, says Stafford, and empower others to tell your story. Make everyone who cares, who’s high on the commitment curve, stewards of the brand.

“I think when you’re generating a brand, what you need to think of is how do we give the assets to each of these people to make them take one step up that ladder?” said Stafford. “So what do we give our employees or our team? What tools do we give them so they start acting like founders, they start acting like CEOs, they know the decisions to make, they know how to communicate what this business means as a founder? Those superfans, how do we give them the tools they need to start talking about us like they play for the club?”

Stafford has seen the challenges and opportunities inherent in this framework when working with global, generational brands. They have to be resilient and preserved, but also adaptable and evolved. The key insight, Stafford explained, isn’t to concede to the staunch preservationists or follow the lead of those looking to the future — it’s about taking those fan evangelists on the journey with you. It’s a balancing act, said Stafford.

“If your club wants to move into all of these new spaces and forget its loyal fans, forget its roots, you lose that connection,” he told me. “And, like I’m saying, a brand is never successful by just its own internal teams communicating. You need those advocates. You need those fans to go and tell that story for you. So you need to take them on the journey. And that’s why, really, you have to understand what it is that’s important to them, how that becomes a foundation, and how it communicates where you’re going in the future.”

These principles came to bear when Stafford and his team were tasked with the Premier League rebrand in 2016-17, when the top global football league dropped the longtime ‘Barclays Premier League’ moniker and refreshed its logo, among other efforts. Stafford walked me through a bit of the process, describing the balance of respecting the past while looking ahead to the future. There were several elements for which to account.

“They went and interviewed the fans and listened to everything they said, and then created something that is exactly what the fans said,” explaining fans’ resistance to proposed changes. “But then, when they had it played back to them, it was wrong. I think that’s right.

“You gotta understand where you listen, where you challenge, and where you have to take fans on a journey to the future, even if they don’t like it at the beginning. So how are you going to take them on the journey?”

Bringing fans along for the ride necessarily requires loosening the reins of control. The platforms are too dynamic, and almost everybody wants to be something of a creator. It’s not just naive to think every fan who plays off your brand or remixes your content will adhere to some arcane, static standards, it’s short-sighted.

Stafford recognizes it’s not easy for brands to adapt to this new normal. But it’s an opportunity to achieve outsized results, to empower abassadors who will build on your brand and make it stronger, engendering greater loyalty, expansion, and engagement.

“We’re working a lot with brands now to say, well, we need to stop this being so locked down, we need to give it the flexibility to embrace and utilize the community, that they’re going to go and use these assets,” he said. “We just need to build some way that those things, whether that’s a visual way, whether it’s a tonal way, that kind of resonates and builds it back to us…

“So we are working with brands now [on] how do you create assets that can always be adapted, given out, iterated on, but also be recognized as you and yours and build that brand loyalty back to you. It’s going to be a bigger and bigger challenge as we go forward, but it is how brands need to start thinking.”

The most powerful brands, the ones that inspire zealous devotion, aren’t owned, but shared. That’s when customers act more like fans and fans behave more like evangelists. When fans don’t refer to the team as ‘them’ but ‘us’ — it’s our team, our organization, our brand. The commitment curve crests at the point where brand blends with identity, and fans feel part of it themselves.

WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH PAUL STAFFORD

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Brand, Fan Development

Why the Arizona Diamondbacks Got Swaggy in their run to the World Series Last Year and How a Brand Gets Activated Across Platforms

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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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH KYLE PAYNE

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Brand, Content Strategy, Social Media

The Anatomy of Brand Building in Sports — Why It Matters, What It Means, and How It Looks in Action

Too much of social media looks and sounds the same. Brands and individuals exhibiting the same personality, trolling with the same memes, and trying to shout the loudest in hopes of standing out in increasingly cacophonous, homogenous platforms and feeds.

But what is a brand if its primary distinguishing factor is simply the volume? When every team repeatedly tries to out-savage the other or invokes the same well-worn tactics, all of a sudden it’s the black and white cow that stands out amidst the herd of purple cows.

This is not a call for blandness, merely one for purpose, for values, and for giving fans a reason to believe in you, not only to be entertained by you. Jess Smith has been enmeshed with distinctive sports brands throughout her career, appreciating the balance of amusement and aura that the most powerful, lasting brands exhibit. Everybody will say that maximizing engagement is the goal, but that’s oversimplifying things. A couple of slices of pizza may get you the same calories, and more quickly, than a plate of lentils and vegetables, but overdoing either of those meals, regardless of your macros, is a recipe for bloating or blandness. Jess says it better than my nutritional meandering:

“I think not all engagement is created equal,” said Smith, who is Vice President of Brand and Digital Strategy for the Stewart-Haas Racing NASCAR team. “…I always tell the team there are certain things that we’re going to have to tell the story about or initiatives that we’re going to have to talk about. It’s probably not going to be the most engaging, but our job is to figure out how we take it and improve engagement, and build upon it…

“There are some things that are core to the organization, core to our partners, core to values and we have to do them…So I think just understanding that from a team standpoint and I always tell the team, as long as we take care of the foundation, then those fun things that we know are going to pop and are kind of silly and maybe are more of a fan engagement [play], then we can do that.

“But I think it’s just making sure that the team understands what the purpose of it is, and even though it doesn’t hit those engagements, there’s still a ton of value to it.”

Teams would do well to do their meal prep and allow for cheat meals — okay, we’ll skip more food talk, but Smith did discuss the structure and organization it takes to manage a brand and content strategy these days. There are too many demands, too many channels, and miles of monotony interrupted by unexpected detours of urgency and opportunity. One of the more unique characteristics of planning and strategy in sports is that so much of it can end up being all for naught. In a split second, a triumphant victory can turn into an agonizing defeat — but you better be ready to capitalize on the potential win because those are the fleeting moments when outsized returns and results happen. Such preparation is why just about everyone who has worked in sports will know what it means to have a folder of tears (what I called it), a virtual graveyard where the best-laid plans and content remain, having never seen the light of day.

But you still have to be ready. And there are ways teams can be ready for the big moments and also ready for the times when strategy has to be pivoted or executed more quickly than a NASCAR pit stop.

“I feel like in sports you actually have to plan for the unexpected,” said Smith, who spent time with the New York Yankees and New York Rangers prior to heading to Stewart-Haas. “So you know when trade [season] starts to happen, you have to build all the templates and think of all the different scenarios that could happen. I feel like you have to be anticipatory and plan for the things that might not happen. That’s hard because sometimes you might put in work on something and it might not ever see the light of day, but if you don’t plan for it, the team’s going to be in not a good spot. So it’s all about planning for what you can plan for and being prepared for the unexpected.”

It’s easier to be ready in real time when the team knows its brand and knows its identity. Decisions aren’t made in silos, but instead backed by collectively recognized frameworks that keep everyone driving in the same direction (left turns only — NASCAR joke for you). But brands and frameworks can’t be constrained or overly rigid, lest they remain tethered to patterns that shut them out of conversations or even entire platforms where their presence could be relevant and where their existing or potential fans want to engage. There’s a level of flexibility inherent in the most successful brands now, appreciating that their fans want them to color outside a set of lines, at times, as long as they remain true to distinctive guiding principles. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary, to keep relationships burning hot and growing.

“My perspective on what fits within a brand box has evolved over the years,” said Smith, who also writes wonderfully on her blog Social ‘n Sport. “I feel like early on I was overly strict, it was brand above all else…I do believe there’s a brand foundation and you have to do the work that matters.

“So you have to understand who you are. You have to understand your tone. You have to understand what you won’t do. I think that’s really important. Always outline what you won’t do. But the media landscape has changed so much. People, I feel like, consume to take a break, it’s entertainment [and] every brand needs to loosen up a little bit. You have to figure out what that line is for you.”

Stewart-Haas Racing knows who they are and what they stand for. Smith helped tease it out and bring it to life more than ever before, and it was remarkable to hear her articulate the SHR brand, how organic it feels, and how it guides what they do and don’t do, who they seek to engage and not, and, well, everything. This is where conceptual meets practical, where the dreamers must also be doers. It can be easy to put up a few PowerPoint slides outlining a brand, but it takes the next level to translate that brand into everyday execution. But once you can identify the north star, it illuminates and enlightens, making where, when, and how to be active across platforms feel relatively simple.

For Smith and SHR, one of their most important content pillars is the fact that their team is, as she put simply, ‘a bunch of racers.’ Racing is in their blood, across the organization, and it’s that passion for the racing that they want to instill in their content, their passion, and their fans.

“While that seems like just basic marketing speak,” Smith explained,” everyone across the organization — like our fabricators are spending their weekends at Millbridge local dirt track, racing a dirt [race]. It’s true to our DNA. So ‘bunch of racers’ is one of our pillars. We want to show how all of our drivers, most of them race outside of NASCAR. They’ll do dirt racing, they’ll do modified. Kevin [Harvick] tonight is doing SRX, like they love racing. So that’s going to show up.

“That pillar is never going to change; if it changes and it’s not core to our DNA, but how we tell that story needs to change year to year.”

The guiding principle for SHR also helps them stay in the right lanes in their marketing and digital strategies. Brands that try to be everything to everyone often end up so convoluted or confused, with nothing for fans to latch onto or hold dear; they’re inconsistent. Smith articulated how SHR knowing who they are ensures its brand is strong and distinct, recognizable from the rest.

“When you think about that pie [of all potential sports fans], you think about NASCAR, I think we have to be really intentional about who we are or we’ll dilute ourselves and then we’re competing against a bunch of noise and almost don’t stand for anything,” she said. “Of course we want to bring in casual fans, but I think that where we do our brand a service is focusing on those casual racing fans and trying to bring them into the fold.”

As more brands succumb to the temptation to be whatever helps them achieve the biggest engagement numbers and viral growth, it’ll be those that remain distinct that stand the test of time. Everybody loves the jokester, people pay attention to the troll dropping savage lines and memes, they can’t help but look at the absurd and unhinged — but real relationships, backed by emotional investment require something more than surface-level gambits meant for a quick laugh. Well-rounded exposure and engagement matters. You can aim to attract attention for a day or strive to gain unconditional love for a lifetime.

One more thing…

Jess offered tremendous advice for people in leadership roles and I wanted to include an excerpt of that because it’s too dang good to leave out of this post. Listen (or read) the full interview below!

“One piece of advice — I think that you owe it to your team to give feedback and [to give] feedback often. When I first stepped into a management role, it felt like feedback sometimes was not, I don’t want to say a negative thing, but I was uncomfortable giving it. And as I learned, if you don’t give feedback, no one can read your mind. So it’s important for you to make sure that you give feedback, you give it often, you’re direct, and you also have candid conversations about your style. Like I’m going to give feedback, it’s not a negative, it’s a positive because I’m trying to help you. So I think the first time you step into management, just learning to give feedback, learning your style is super important because it helps your team and I feel like if you’re not giving it, you’re just doing a disservice to everyone.”

*******

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH JESS SMITH

READ THE SNIPPETS

Brand, Content Strategy, Social Media

How the Seattle Kraken Found Their Voice and Formed a Social Media Strategy Their Fans Can Feel Good About

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.

LISTEN TO MY FULL INTERVIEW WITH SAVANNAH HOLLIS

Brand, General Sports Business

Stories of Integrated Communications in Sports and How It Helps the World’s Biggest Sports League Ascend

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.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH JON SCHWARTZ

Brand, Digital, Fan Development, General Sports Business, Sports Venues

The CMO View: How Fan Engagement Strategy Gets Shaped in Sports

It’s fun to imagine the genesis of modern professional sports. That gradual buildup that started from a handful of individuals taking in an otherwise friendly game played at a high level. From there you get tickets and crowds, ‘fans’, radio broadcasts, TV, social media, and, before you know it, sports teams and leagues that boast billions of fans worldwide.

But for most of that history, the end game was attendance. Heck, it wasn’t all that long ago when some teams battled against broadcasts or pushed for blackouts unless games were already sold out, lest they cannibalize paying fans. And even today, for many, the season ticket holder is still seen as the highest echelon of fandom.

The picture is a lot more complex these days, though. Your team’s most valuable fan may never buy a ticket.

Elisa Padilla saw the evolution, having been in and around sports marketing for decades, including stints overseeing marketing for the Brooklyn Nets, New York Islanders, and Miami Marlins. So as media deals continued to explode and social media took off, she witnessed first-hand that ‘fan engagement’ rapidly evolved and expanded beyond the arena or the ballpark, with new goals to chase beyond attendance.

“[If] you can’t get to a game for whatever reason, it’s the team’s responsibility to be able to ensure that you have access to the team — whether it’s television, radio, digital, so when you think about the KPIs, when you think about social media, it’s about growth,” said Padilla, who now runs Kick It By EP, drawing out leadership, career, and industry insights throughout sports and entertainment and beyond. “How many people are following you? How is your account growing? How are your fans engaging? What is the reshare [rate] like?

“At the end of the day, you have people that are buying your merchandise, that are contributing to your TV ratings, your radio ratings and they’re your ambassador, they’re equally as important as the ones that are spending money to come into the arena.”

Fans are everywhere, they’re engaging everywhere. And no matter how sophisticated our analytics and tracking get, fans are also engaging where we’re blind to it. So when it comes to digesting the fan experience, it’s all more complicated than it was when Padilla was starting out in her career, when one of the primary concerns was how the in-game entertainment and experience resonated with fans in attendance. The never-ending feeds of social media offer a real-time glimpse of fan reactions, though — instantaneous insights.

But I asked Padilla about how leaders look at this vocal minority on social. Even a tweet that gets ratioed is still most often a mere thousand or so replies, a drop in the ocean for a team with tens or hundreds of millions of fans. It’s about understanding the direction of the tide, though, she said, and recognizing when a preponderance of evidence exists across touchpoints that’s resonating.

“I think it’s just having a temperature on what the chatter is,” she said. “And it’s just like if you have 24 comments, I’m taking this as an example, and 12 of them are negative and eight of them are not, it’s like, okay, that’s one view. And if those comments are on Instagram, well, what are they saying on Twitter? What are they saying on TikTok? What are they saying on Facebook? What are they saying on Reddit?

“I think it’s more important to really have your finger on the pulse, and if it’s something where the sentiment is red flags all across, then I think that that’s where you address it.”

It’s only getting harder to even understand how to find the pulse now, with new platforms, behaviors, trends, and tactics popping up seemingly every day. Everybody reaches an age when we can’t quite understand everything ‘the kids’ are doing. Heck, the way that Snapchat’s UX intimidates older users is often described as a feature, not a bug. But the more one moves on up from being in the trenches, creating the content, and pushing the buttons, the more important it is that leaders lead, but know enough to understand the big picture.

Padilla never shies away from new platforms and appreciates the role and responsibility of guiding the doers, managing the forest while experts tend to the trees.

“I approach it where I know enough about the platform, but I lean on others that have the expertise from a user perspective,” said Padilla, reflecting most recently on the emergence of TikTok the last few years. “Like, I know that there’s a generation out there that uses TikTok as research, so it’s like, okay, when we show up on TikTok we need to make sure that, whatever brands you’re working on, you have to show up from a place of knowing that the majority of the people that are going to see your content are potentially using it as research. So what do you want them to know? How are you putting your brand out there?”

TikTok, and social platforms in general, represent enormous opportunities for teams to grow and engage global audiences, well beyond what one could even conceive to fit in an arena. Padilla even spoke about the Brooklyn Nets being among a handful of US teams with a presence on Weibo, the Chinese platform often described as being similar to Twitter.

Remember earlier on, when the season ticket holder was atop the pedestal, the pinnacle for fandom? Well, when you have thousands of fans in Brazil watching your Instagram Reel or millions of fans in China following on Weibo, the picture gets a lot more complicated, but also a lot more potentially lucrative. The goal isn’t to sell tickets, to drive tune-in, or to necessarily make a sale. Those fiscal investments by fans are all great, sure, but it all starts with the prerequisite of earning emotional investment. Only then can you lead them to conversions and find ways to earn their revenue-producing support, in whatever form that may come.

“The way that I look at it is it’s about evoking emotion, driving action to share of wallet,” Padilla explained. “So if you produce a piece of content and you’re evoking emotion, what is the action that you want that customer or your fan to take? Is it that you want to lead them to your website? Do you want to lead them to a landing page? The brand has to figure that out.

“Then how once you get them to do that action, then what is the next step to get your wallet? And it may not show up the day that you post the content. It may show up six months later. But as long as you’re evoking that emotion and breaking through the clutter, I think that you can justify it.”

Once that emotional connection is formed, a fan becomes a fan. And then begins the desire for fans to show they’re a fan — can a fan be a fan if they don’t demonstrate it in some way? Consider the myriad ways to showcase it — going to the games, wearing the merch, watching the broadcasts, following and engaging on social media, messaging friends about the team, customizing one’s avatar — and the avenues to activate fandom only increase.

But even as it all gets more complex, the basics still reign supreme. When the team wins, hundreds or thousands or millions of individuals around the world feel a warmth in their hearts, a compulsion to stand and cheer, a desire to high-five the person next to them. Everything else follows that feeling.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH ELISA PADILLA

Brand, Content Strategy, Social Media, Social Media ROI

How Sports Teams Can Craft a Strong Brand Narrative One Social Media Post at a Time

Think about one of your favorite sports teams to follow on social media. How would you describe them? Which traits do they embody as an overall brand, which adjectives come to mind, what are their values, and what differentiates them from other sports teams?

In a time when consumers care what the brands they patronize and support stand for and how those brands come off, sports fans are also cognizant of whether their favorite teams and athletes mesh with their personal identities. And social media, in all its forms, is the most powerful mechanism teams have to develop and activate an identity. Every one of the hundreds of touchpoints teams have on these platforms with fans each week, every graphic and word — it all coalesces into how fans perceive the personalities and values of the team.

By the time Kurt Gies arrived at the Philadelphia 76ers, the team knew who it was and how to express it on social media. Luckily for Kurt, the brand of the 76ers was ‘Philadelphian’ and Kurt just happened to be a born and bred Philadelphian. So when he took over the keys (the social media posting) for the Sixers, he appreciated what his predecessors had built and sought to grow it further, along with the emerging personality of the team as embodied by its charismatic players.

“That [Sixers] account is not talking in just this plain voice, it’s talking as if it’s a Philadelphian, and Philadelphians appreciate that so much,” said Gies, who today is the Director of Social Media and Influencers for the LA Rams. “You look at the makeup of the team too…Joel Embiid especially in his early days was such a personality and it was like how do you take that huge personality and try and replicate that? Because at the end of the day, if you’re a sports brand account, you probably want to take on the voice of the people on your team…

“So having somebody like Joel Embiid is a huge piece of that and [the Sixers social media managers before me] did a great job emulating that and it just really opened up the doors for me as he started to play and become even more popular of like, ‘Hey, Joel is trolling people, we’re going to troll people too’ or we’re going to take on that similar voice.”

The Sixers were (and still are) one of the more distinct voices in social media and sports, and their originality and success continued, whether it was people named Max, Sandro, Kurt, Alli, Andy, or others behind the keys. It felt so organic for the Sixers when Kurt was there, and having guys like Embiid fueling the fire only made the direction all the more logical, sensible, and almost facile. So it was a new challenge when Gies left the comfy confines of the city of brotherly love to head to the LA Clippers, which had its own distinct brand identity and goals.

The Clippers were in the midst of a reinvigoration. The brand had been ascending, but with the arrival of newly acquired NBA stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George coinciding with Gies’s arrival, there was a salient opportunity to mold the brand and perception of the Clippers and its newly bedazzled roster. But to seize that opportunity meant paying attention to every detail, to ensure those hundreds and thousands of fan touchpoints all furthered an intentional narrative, Gies explained to me.

“When [his Clippers colleagues Sandro Gasparro and Charlie Widdoes] started they didn’t have Kawhi and PG [Paul George], but they did an incredible job of crafting that narrative and sticking to that narrative to help build that brand up from what it used to be,” said Gies, who had connected with both Gasparro and Widdoes from their time at the Sixers. “And then, you know, you get somebody like Kawhi and PG and you’re title contenders and everything was very calculated.

“That was probably one of the biggest I learned of many things from working with those guys. But that’s something that I always go back to, just there’s always a why behind what it is that we’re posting and what it is that we’re creating, and making sure that it’s achieving what that narrative is.”

Gies went on to describe what, exactly, that narrative was the Clippers sought to build. The ‘why’ to which every piece of content and post should connect.

“For the Clippers, it was, ‘Hey, we’re a blue-collar team. We’re a gritty team. We’re not this superstar team,’” he said. “So we want to show that we’re always putting in work. We want to show that we’re not afraid to roll up our sleeves and here are the specific players that we want to highlight and the keywords — so just really calculated and determined what it was that we were highlighting in the content that we were creating.

“We weren’t just creating things to create them. We were creating things and crafting copy — there are so many things that go into it. But we were doing all of this with meaning behind it.”

Thoughtfully crafting a brand doesn’t always equal virality. Sure, it’s great for every post to hit big numbers and social media teams will always try to convey the desired meaning or value in the best way possible. But when it comes to activating different aspects of the brand, it may mean not every post will ‘blow up’ on social. If every post were to go viral, it’s probably a sign that the narrative is not well-rounded, the full brand picture is not being presented. Gies talked about the importance of balancing trying to win the internet with content that connects back to organizational goals, and did so more eloquently than this author ever could.

“Focusing on engagement, that doesn’t necessarily mean that can’t hit both [goals],” he explained. “Saying something that’s like, ‘Hey, this is a meme, but that still ladders back to a goal,’ which could be engaging in internet culture because that’s going to help hit fans that aren’t fans of the Clippers; or the complete opposite of that of like, ‘Hey, community is really important and showing what we’re doing in the community is really important for our narrative,’ but that stuff might not necessarily perform that well. There are ways to make it more creative, but that’s still really important to our narrative.

“So understanding that sometimes things that you’re doing might not necessarily be for the engagement or for the impressions but are still really important in telling that story.”

Our reputations and personalities are the sum of every micro-interaction and impression we have with others. A perception is neither formed nor changed with a single engagement, let alone a single social media post. Over time, everything adds up and it’s integral that every word, each creative piece, and every post has purpose and precision. Brands aren’t built in a day, but they can last a lifetime.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH KURT GIES

Brand, Fan Development, Social Media

How an NHL Team Built and Executed its Brand: ‘You need to have a vision and a north star’

I remember my first social media job in major pro sports. I was an entry-level, one-man content band for social, among other platforms. And nobody told me what content to create.

Early on that often meant piggybacking off the beat writer stories until I got more comfortable talking to players and coaches. And, looking back, I had some strategy in my head — stories to tell, events to amplify, and my interpretation of the ‘brand’ of the team on the marketing side and how that should manifest on social media.

Social media has grown up since then. One-man bands in major professional sports are no more; social channels are powerful and they command more resources and efforts now. Strategy is now table stakes. The best teams have social media leaders collaborating with the rest of the organization, carrying out a thoughtful, cohesive brand through content and social media activity.

The content and social strategy starts with the brand, not the other way around. That’s an important distinction that can be the difference between engagement and connection, short-term results that can set up long-term wins. A strategy built out from a strong brand foundation stands the test of time. I recently spoke to the New Jersey Devils’s Senior Manager of Content Strategy Chris Wescott about the team’s success in building a distinct, relatable, objectively successful cross-platform content practice that effectively activates the team’s brand.

“You need to have a vision and a north star for your brand,” said Wescott, who has been with the Devils since 2019, the third National Hockey League (NHL) team with which he’s worked. “And then you kind of build your content plan around that, build your marketing around that, and you kind of build your voice around that.”

One reason that’s so key for social media, too, Wescott explained, is because the voice should not be the voice of the person on the keys. It’s the voice of the team and it should remain so even as key pushers change.

“The whole point of having a brand identity and voice is so that you can survive turnover at the creative level, too…,” he said. “You have to invest in [social and creative] positions. So that’s where you’re going to get a little helter-skelter in terms of brand voice and then you’re gonna see things that don’t necessarily make sense coming from that team.”

It’s just as integral to realize that a brand is more than the copy and memes on the team’s social media channels. It represents and manifests from the organization as a whole. And because brand is always the first brick laid, upon which the strategies and tactics are built, it’s vital that everybody works together and works out from the same foundation. That everyone has the same north star. Wescott talked about how this process played out for the Devils as they sought to reinvigorate and define the team’s brand in recent years.

“Our social media team does not operate in a bubble; we operate alongside marketing brand strategy…,” said Wescott, who previously worked with the Chicago Blackhawks and Edmonton Oilers before joining the Devils. “We all kind of sat in a room and started [asking] what are the Devils? Who are the Devils? Who are we gonna be five years from now? Who are we gonna be 10 years from now?

“There were a lot of meetings and discussions that went on with this evolution of our brand and how the voice should not only complement who the brand is, but really work in tandem with it to grow brand affinity.”

Think about one of your own favorite teams or athletes. How would you define their brand? Then consider how the content they post, what they talk about, how they talk about it, how they interact, and whether it all lines up with this overarching ‘brand.’ The word brand gets a lot of play nowadays (I hope you’re not playing a drinking game for use of the word ‘brand’ in this article), but less discussed is how you go from the strategy to tactics, how you put into practice what is put down on paper. As Wescott and his colleagues defined the brand of the New Jersey Devils, it was up to him and his team to activate the brand through their social media.

“We are Jersey’s team and there’s a certain pride and toughness that comes with New Jersey…,” said Wescott, describing a bit of the team’s brand. “We wanted to reflect that pride, that toughness, that roll off your shoulders kind of mentality in our voice. There’s kind of an attitude and a bit of a swagger with it…if you come at us, we’ll swing back. We’re not gonna take it from anybody, we’re gonna dish it back.

“And I think that plus a little bit of irreverent humor really kind of blends together with that attitude and toughness to create who the Devils are on social media.”

One of the best parts about social media, too, is that it offers both quantitative and qualitative feedback on whether the brand, strategy, and tactics are working. Wescott noted that the team has seen largely positive results since they adopted the more ‘Jersey’ brand. And what’s cool is that it’s not just social media. That brand north star really permeates throughout the rest of the organization in a lot of ways.

“There are certain times where you kind of hold off on integrating it,” Wescott cautioned but also noted, “But I think for the most part, like game presentation (for example) — everything should have that tone to it because you’re the Devils and everything that you do should have that tone to it.”

Tone, voice, and personality are important parts of a brand. But they’re not the only parts. Particularly in recent years, what a brand values — and how they actively demonstrate they hold those values — is of utmost importance. Remember, the Devils are ‘Jersey’ and that means not just representing the personality and tone of New Jersey, but showing that they really do love and support the Garden State. Wescott discussed how that well-rounded brand plays out through the team’s content — the team and the brand are more than their tone and voice.

“I think that there are some people [that] just think ‘Oh, the Devils are rude or they’re always roasting [people]’ or something like that,” he said. “But if you see what we do in the community and the amount of social justice initiatives, the amount of helping different underserved parts of our community and what we do for [the] ‘Hockey is for Everyone’ [program] and all those initiatives; it’s also welcoming people into our family, and once you’re in our family, you’re family…”

A significant part of forming an emotional connection is getting to know someone. It’s hard to form a relationship with someone inconsistent, to understand a disparate collection of interactions. The same challenge persists when sports teams don’t know who they are and who they want to be — if they don’t know, their fans certainly don’t know. The end result is often weaker connections, perpetually chasing short-term engagement day-to-day. A brand north star changes that. It creates a gravitational pull around which everything else orbits. Things just make sense and fans can get to know you, to appreciate you, and to fall in love with you. That’s how relationships form that will stand the test of time.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS WESCOTT

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