Category: Social Media

General Sports Business, Social Media

Skating the Line Between Core and Casual: The Fan Engagement Challenge in Hockey

Which sport’s fans are the most avid?

Not which has the most fans, but the major sport whose average fan is highest on the avidity scale?

It’s an interesting thought experiment because while everybody knows the NFL Rules the roost in the US, do they have the highest concentration of fervent fans? To have a high density of diehards is not necessarily desirable. Businesses, brands, creators — they all love their biggest, most passionate fans, but the common trend is to chase the casuals.

Sean McIndoe has a lot of avid fans. The longtime hockey writer who’s also known as Down Goes Brown learned early on in his career that it was better to be the best in a niche than to try and compete for the generic masses. McIndoe took a new take to hockey content, infusing comedy and (eventually) esoteric minutiae and wit that a subset of fans fell in love with. He’s been number one at what he does ever since.

“If there was a strategy that I mapped out I think at some point I kind of realized — and maybe this would be the advice to people starting out — is first of all, early on when there’s nobody reading you, try a whole bunch of stuff,” said McIndoe, who was working a full-time 9-to-5 when he started blogging about hockey on the side. “Go nuts. Because if it stinks who cares? Five people are going to see it. You’ll know kind of what works for you and what doesn’t or at least you’ll form an idea, and then from there find that niche, find that voice. Try to be number one at something.”

He continued: “It’s better to be number one at something very small than to be number 100 in the ‘I’m (national hockey writer) Greg Wyshynksi’s 100th backup; like if a hundred things happened to all the people ahead of me I’m the new Wysh’ — and you know Greg’s a friend of mine — he’s awesome, but he’s awesome because he can do everything and he can do it fantastic and he’s built this decades-long career doing it.

“There’s no market out there for the 100th-best Wysh, but there might be a market out there for the first or second or third best in some sort of niche.”

McIndoe’s work appeared in several major publications and he spent time at Grantland (RIP) before making his way to The Athletic, where he works today. He recognizes the advantageous equation at play for him at The Athletic. While wholly ad-supported sites are beholden to driving site traffic to every last fan, a subscription site like The Athletic thrives on fans who love journalism and/or individual writers so much that they’ll pay for the right to read.

DGB (an abbreviation for Down Goes Brown) wants his work to be enjoyable for everybody who ends up on his stories, but he also recognizes there’s something special about including some more obscure stuff within his stories, with a wink and a nod that only the geekiest and most ardent will understand.

“As a subscription-based business, [The Athletic] is not just about page views. Every time we write something someone doesn’t like [readers] come in like ‘Oh, it’s clickbait.’. It’s like ‘Dude, we’re a subscription model. What — do you think it helps me to get 100,000 people to click on something that they hate. Like walk me through how you think that benefits me or the site,” said McIndoe. “So it’s been nice to do that in a way that you that I’m not constantly churning out [content], I’m not sitting there going I gotta do ten posts a day and I gotta rank first in Google and I gotta jam keywords into the headline and all of that stuff…

“You’re right, you can’t go completely niche all the time,” McIndoe continued while noting he tries to keep a balance. “If it’s too niche, at some point, there just isn’t enough even if that’s not what you’re being directly measured by. But at the same time that niche audience are going to be the ones who love you the best…”

McIndoe’s niche audience loves him. (I read and listen to just about everything DGB produces) His fans likely have a high average avidity rate. The same could be said about fans of the National Hockey League. You won’t find too many fly-by NHL fans. It’s perhaps a blessing and a curse. The ceiling when it comes to ratings and self-identifying fans for the NHL will never have as many fans as the NFL, that’s a given.

As McIndoe sees it, in some ways the league leans into that too much, focusing on growing revenue per capita instead of seeking more capitas (fans).

I think the NHL — I’ve been banging this drum for a long time — they haven’t done enough to grow the audience they haven’t done enough to make the product appeal to as many people as they can.

“I think what [NHL Commissioner] Gary Bettman has done well is he is figuring out how to squeeze more and more money out of the audience they do have, and to maximize how much they can get from that,” he said. “That can be a business model. A lot of sports or entertainment places out there are realizing that Hey, I can’t grow the audience but what I can do is figure out who my real core audience is and then just grabbing by the ankles and hold them upside down and shake them, and that’s sort of what the Bettman model has been.”

The NHL revenues, like every major pro sports league, continue to go increase — those avid fans are paying off. But the ceiling for the NHL is lower without the finding avenues to bring in new or casual fans. A lot of emerging sports are also on a constant quest for new and casual fans to notice them and sample their product with an open mind, in hopes they’ll seek to learn and follow more (For example, sports like lacrosse, cricket, rugby, and volleyball, among many others).

The optimal set of conditions is existing fans welcoming newbies with open arms, serving as their sherpa and helping them learn the ropes. As McIndoe has seen all too often in his career, however, hockey fans are quick to call out novices and, well, shunning or shaming them. Is the ‘I liked this band when they were playing small clubs’ audience alienating new fans?

“The gatekeepers can go get bent,” said an exasperated McIndoe. “I hate that stuff. I hate that stuff where it’s ‘Can you name five players?’ Shut up, man. Hockey fans are ridiculous for that because the two things the hockey fans love doing most are complaining that there aren’t enough hockey fans. ‘How come everybody doesn’t see this sport the way I do?’ And then the second anybody new shows up just absolutely kicking them in the ass and turning them around and sending them home because they don’t know or how dare you ask a question. How dare you get a player’s name wrong?”

McIndoe recounted a time when his former boss at Grantland Bill Simmons, a powerhouse in the sports industry for years and still today, wrote about hockey but messed up a player’s name. The fans were relentless, possibly chilling Simmons from delving more into NHL content.

McIndoe did note that such overly protective ownership is not necessarily just a hockey thing; social media and the internet foments such tribalism.

“That’s not a hockey fan thing or even a sports fan thing, that’s an internet thing,” he said. “I know there are other industries that have much bigger problems with the gatekeeping stuff, but my message to hockey fans is Man, pick a lane. If you want hockey to be a little niche small thing that only you’re cool enough to know about, okay. You want to be the cool indie band, that’s fine.

“But then don’t complain and at the same time you’re going to complain not enough people are hockey fans like we are. We’re all like ‘We’ve got the cool indie band; we’re like Hey, this isn’t this the biggest band in the world and then they put out an album that goes to number one and we go ‘Oh, man, they’ve changed.’ No, they haven’t it’s exactly the same.”

The NHL may be the answer to which league’s fans have the highest avidity rate. That concentrated cohort has helped McIndoe and others like him succeed, he concedes, but it’s all those diehard fans that may be stopping the NHL from moving more mainstream.

We want to move fans up the passion spectrum; more superfans of your team, league, or sport is a great outcome. But there’s a balance (just like with McIndoe in his articles) — serve the superfans, for sure, but also develop the easy avenues and entrypoints for fly-by and casual fans. You want a big cohort of diehards who consume every nook and cranny of the sport, but you also want a sizable segment that knows next to nothing.

This was such a good interview with Sean McIndoe and I wanted to also include his insightful take on the increased presence of tribalism among media outlets. Such polarizing cliquishness is obvious in the world of politics, but that same us vs. them mentality is starting to penetrate sports, too, as this statement from McIndoe implies.

“You have this relatively new thing where people used to almost identify themselves by what team they cheered for, that’s as old as sports. But now it’s like a lot of people identify themselves based on what media they consume, which is deeply weird to me. Like I’m a [Spittin’ Chiclets] guy. I’m like Alright. Cool. You know, I get all my stuff from Outkick. Awesome, never talk to me, please, I don’t know, I guess. But you know some of that is the more personal style of writing and certainly podcasts it feels like a much more social thing and you start to identify with people. And it’s all good; like it’s more opportunities…I really mean that when I said Hey, if you like Outkick, please never talk to me. I feel that way. But also I’m not saying shut the site down. I’m not saying you don’t ever get to like the stuff that you like. Go like the stuff that you like, don’t ever talk to me about it because it’s stupid, but go ahead and like your stupid stuff. You’re allowed to. I like some stupid stuff too. Let’s get the audience out there.

“I don’t love the thing where it kind of turns into If you like my site that means you have to hate these guys or if you listen to my podcast we’re enemies with these guys — like, what are we doing? But at the same time some marketing guy would be like, No, That’s how you build loyalty. That’s how you do this and that. I guess that makes sense. It’s not really my angle on things.”

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH SEAN MCINDOE AKA DOWN GOES BROWN

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READ SEAN’S WORK AT THE ATHLETIC

Social Media, Sports Media

Value Over Replacement: What It Takes to Survive and Thrive in Today’s Sports Media Industry

Journalists are as replaceable as ever. But good journalists are as valuable as ever.

There’s no need to recite the countless headlines of publications shutting down or writers getting laid off to convey the challenges facing the media industry in sports and beyond. But that just augments the value of individuals who bring something unique to the table and command an audience.

Dan Wetzel knows what it’s like to face an uphill battle, to earn attention. The renowned sports reporter and columnist was part of the early days of Yahoo Sports (where he continues to work today), back when a lot of fans were still reading their sports stories in print or on whichever website could win the SEO or home page game. (Yahoo.com was one of those ubiquitous home pages, of course). Today it’s a different sea of competition, but more fierce, with innumerable options, personalities, and platforms where fans can find and consume sports stories. Throughout the eras, a consistent lesson continues to stick with Wetzel — you can’t blend in. There has to be a reason for fans to find you, follow you, and come back to you.

“My favorite one of the [advanced baseball stats] is VORP: value over replacement player,” he explained in a recent interview with me. “If you’re not delivering value over a replacement player, doing what the other people aren’t, then you’re failing. Because you can get the same stuff everywhere. So what are you contributing that’s above that?”

Fans have felt connections to their favorite writers for years, but, for prior generations, much of that was constrained. Way back, what fans read and watched about sports was limited to their local newspapers and newscasts, with a special treat perhaps arriving in the mail in the form of a Sports Illustrated magazine, for example. Now, it’s a battle. As Wetzel noted that’s where ‘VORP’ comes in for individuals, but professional journalists, and their publications, aren’t just trying to win the internet. Sure, a single story or tweet going viral is great and all, but if you’re looking to have fans come back for days, weeks, and years to come, that requires something more authentic, repeatable, and rooted in a relationship.

“Throughout time there’s constantly these mini trends where everyone will get all excited about this or that, and you get a lot of people in media going, ‘This is the next big thing.’ It doesn’t last, and then that whole thing falls apart,” said Wetzel. “So you always have to be true to yourself.

“Whether it’s people reading the column or hearing you on talk radio shows or listening to your podcast or getting to know you some through social media, the more of a relationship you have with them, I think your trust level is better. I think people people have an understanding and that’s not just with each individual, but an entire site. What’s the ethos of the site?”

Wetzel was referencing the way Yahoo Sports built itself up and sustained the brand over time. The ‘ethos’ of the site plays a big part in why sports fans (myself included) choose to click, listen, and watch what Wetzel and his colleagues put out. ‘You can get the same stuff,’ everywhere, remember, as Wetzel said a few paragraphs ago. So whether you’re a publication, a creator, a reporter, or even a sports team or league — do you and your content have a ‘brand’ that’s unique? If you asked ChatGPT to describe what differentiates you from other places sports fans can go, would it have a legitimate response?

I’m restating this key theme of this story because Wetzel and Yahoo Sports do have a unique brand, VORP and all. They’re informed but often irreverent, they’re credible and respectful of the serious stories, they deliver information, insight, and opinion in a relatable and digestible manner. Read or watch Wetzel and this ethos comes out. He has covered difficult stories throughout his career (Larry Nassar, Jerry Sandusky, Aaron Hernandez, for example), and also spends much of his time in the melodramatic but big-money world of college sports. Wetzel discussed this complex web of content, one in which he understands what matters and why.

“I don’t take the small stuff seriously, I take the big stuff seriously,” he said. “At the end of the day, the games are about the entertainment. I just treat it like a business. I always felt more like a business reporter than a sports reporter. The games are the easiest thing to cover and the least important. You know, they have a huge scoreboard that tells you what the final score is. It’s all the other stories where you don’t have a final score.

“And certainly in college athletics, the controversies, the scandals, the personalities are a bigger part of it than just the games. Because if you want to watch really good football, you want to watch the best football, you don’t watch college football. The best actual football being played is in the NFL. You want to watch the best basketball, you watch the NBA. The players are better, the coaching is better, the rules are better. It just is.

“You’re watching because of a passion and all the other mayhem and the environments and all the other stuff, as well as good basketball or good football.”

The passion in college sports is palpable and drives countless narratives. How many fans are ready to fire the coach after a week 1 stinker? How many coaches have been caught lying through their teeth to steer a story or evade an angle of questioning? As coaches have become more like CEOs and politicians, knowing how important it is to appease fans (especially the wealthiest ones) and recruits (including potential transfers), Wetzel recognizes he has to help fans understand the actual information. And to use his efforts to give fans what they’re not getting elsewhere along with his informed view of where the truth really lies amidst all the noise. That’s part of his value over replacement.

“On a complicated issue, like NIL [for example], it’s just trying to be reasonable, understanding it, and carving out like, ‘Okay, this is what I think,'” he explained, about covering the endless storylines around name-image-likeness in college sports. “Not just repeating. The easiest thing to do with NIL, and probably the most profitable would be to to cry that the sky is falling. That’s what everyone wanted…But coaches are the worst sources because they know almost nothing other than what they’re coaching…I mean these coaches are telling you that all the laws of economics no longer exist in this one entity because their feelings are hurt. So you try to explain it as best you can on something like that.

“If it’s a trial, you’re trying to convey information and to describe the situation and severity. If it’s a game you’re trying to show people things they can’t see on television.”

Fans don’t know what they don’t know. But any sports fan who spends a minute on social media (or message boards) knows there is no shortage of often anonymous users who claim to have information other fans don’t. While some of the ‘scoops’ individuals with often humorous usernames and pseudonyms sometimes turn out to be true, their hit rate tends to be somewhere near the odds of a jackpot lottery win. Is it the job of a journalist in 2024 to sift through all the slop and assess and inform their audience on what’s credible and what’s not? That’s a Sisyphean task and why it’s so important for someone like Wetzel to have a relationship with fans who know they can trust what he puts out.

“It’s not my job to police the information out there,” said Wetzel, whose exasperation with all the misinformation on social media can’t help but come out a bit. “There are credible news organizations that put false stuff out there. There’s the teams or the coaches, they put out false stuff [out] themselves on purpose. So all you can do is try to sort through it. But you can’t really spend much time.

“I mean, people will say, Oh, you’re wrong because I saw this. But I think, again, it goes to the long-term relationship. If people trust that you’re reasonable, and you don’t overreact to stuff, then maybe they have more of an understanding. That’s all you can go with.”

Wetzel continued: “Clearly social media allows anybody a voice and it can go big really quick. That guy could have been the guy at the end of the bar, guy calling in to talk radio. Now it’s out there and they can make things so you can disinformation things really easily. It’s all how it’s presented and it can be quite effective and people are good at it. What am I supposed to do about it? I mean, I don’t care.

“If an organization is listening to what’s getting said on social media, they’re failing, because what seems like a lot on social media is not. It can be one guy with 200 accounts. 20 people yelling at you can seem like it’s 20,000, whereas most fans are reasonable and still support the team and all that or don’t even know. But that’s not my job.”

There are a lot of voices, there’s a lot of noise. But if fans have a reason to seek you amidst the noise, to listen for your voice — you might just have a chance to survive in this new era (the new normal). As our conversation came to a close, Wetzel reflected on what it takes to make it for a journalist today, where the VORP lies.

“There have been so many people that come and go because they don’t really provide value. They’re replaceable. But if you can uncover information, get people to talk to you, if you know how to be a reporter, there’s probably a future for you. It’s a tough business, though…

“At some point it comes down to, why are you listening? And unless you’re incredibly gifted and charismatic it’s really hard to do without being a reporter or already previously famous because it’s just such a competitive industry.”

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH DAN WETZEL

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Content Strategy, Social Media

Top Rank Boxing’s Knockout Strategy for Finding Followers and Developing Fans

The fans are out there. Your fans are out there. More fans than you even realize. There are communities, conversations, and creators engaging with the sport, the athletes, the media and the organizations that comprise the sport’s universe.

You just have to meet them where they are and do so in a way that’s genuine and valued.

It was easier in the halcyon days when ‘social media’ mostly meant Facebook and Twitter (and eventually Instagram). But now fans are more fragmented, different segments engaging on different platforms and divvying up their engagement pie and timeshare.

Most sports organizations fall into one of two camps — either you’re the type to sit back and watch others try out the new platforms first, perhaps just securing a page or handle while you wait OR you’re the early mover, jumping in and figuring stuff out as you go. You either play offense, trying new playbooks and platforms or you focus on perfecting your existing scheme, improving and enhancing the plays you know you can execute well. Convoluted sports analogies aside, it was insightful to learn about the success Joe Setley has seen at the organizations where he’s worked, where the rewards potential greatly outweighed the risks.

“I’ve been blessed to work with organizations that have really been willing to be on the forefront of apps where it’s like, ‘Oh, TikTok’s come out, like, let’s try it,’ said Setley, the Senior Director of Social Media and Content Strategy for Top Rank Boxing. “Top Rank has built a giant audience on WhatsApp now, that launched last year. We’ve been willing to kind of just jump on these trends.

“I think there is probably a graveyard of accounts that I’ve launched over my time at different places that are in that little part of the Excel sheet that just say account no longer in use. But I think that’s really where I’ve had a lot of buy-in from executives and my bosses in the past, and now where it’s really given us the opportunity to say What’s the worst thing that happens? The app’s not going to succeed.

“Going back to that WhatsApp example for Top Rank, we have over 4 million followers on WhatsApp. That’s 20% of our audience that we now have.. That account has been active since June last year, so there’s no reason not to take that risk. Same with the UFC (where Setley previously worked). We launched the TikTok account and I think it was in the first 50 days we had a million followers on it. Like, there’s no real reason not to embrace the kind of new apps because again, worst case, you discard it. But take that chance and hopefully you’re going to get lucky a couple times.”

Everyone who’s worked in social media can likely cite one or more platforms that came and went (Google+ was gonna be huge! Until it wasn’t. What about Peach or Ello or Yo!?). Setley noted that taking the shots isn’t as daunting when you can mostly repurpose existing content (TikTok was an exception, he noted). Meeting fans where they are is job number one. The next arena where that matters, especially for a sport and organization with a global fanbase (or realistic ambitions to have one) is language and culture.

A massive unlock for Setley and his team at Top Rank was to look at diversity of language and culture across their social media accounts. There are fans celebrating the sport and individual boxers hailing from different countries around the world waiting for an opportunity to come together and engage with platforms, pages, and posts that are made for them. It’s a chance to properly serve those fan segments, deepening engagement and connections, and enhancing fan avidity among them.

“All of our content was in English except for a Twitter account, so we really decided to dedicate a lot more effort into meeting these fans,” said Setley, who has been at Top Rank since late 2021. “Potentially another language will come down the pipeline in 2024 or 25, but we’ve seen a massive success in reaching these fans, using language as the main component.

“That was actually a really large reason why we launched the Spanish Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram pages;, especially for that market, we wanted to have an account that could be more dedicated and focused to them. So we have a large Puerto Rican audience, we do a boxing event at MSG every Puerto Rican Day weekend, so we wanted to create an account that was more dedicated to promoting our Hispanic champions, our Mexican champions, our Puerto Rican champions, and really making sure that like where the main account can’t do 30 posts about them a day, this account could. So hopefully the Spanish account is a start of a larger, more global and regionalized. “

Every team and league (and boxing promoter) would do well to look within the existing fans of their sport and figure out how to turn those casual account ‘followers’ into engaged avids. While we spend time living post to post, aiming to reach higher levels of engagement and engagement metrics, there’s another framework worthy of consideration — moving fans up the funnel, ascending them up the spectrum, no matter where they reside today.

Everyone’s chasing new fans, especially the sports leagues whose three-letter abbreviations aren’t universally known, but what is the experience like for these new fans upon their arrival? What does the track look like to welcome these relative noobs, coming across the team or sport or league from different entry points, to continue growing in their fandom, moving up the spectrum? While boxing is one of the world’s oldest sports, Setley and Top Rank strategize with intent to bring new fans into the fold.

“We did audience surveys over the last year and really tried to identify what a fan of Top Rank is, and we learned that tons of people love boxing, but they don’t all know the rules of boxing,” he said. “Inside the ring and outside there are things like purse bids or co-promotions or what makes a ten-eight round and things like that; it’s not the easiest to find resources of how to learn these things. So we’re spending an effort this year to launch a series called Boxing 101 that provides these educational points for everyone.

“From a casual fan to a hardcore fan, we want to be able to provide a resource even just for the hardcore fans. They are arguing with their friend, they want to be like, ‘See on Top Rank’s website, they define this as that.’ So we’re trying to really help educate the fans.”

Top Rank can be a valuable resource for fans — showcasing the fighters, informing fans, and providing entertainment and access beyond the televised fights (which air most often on ESPN in the US). But it’s not as simple a relationship as fan-to-team or even fan-to-league. Top Rank supports fighters, promotes fights, and has been a beacon of the sport for decades. But the brand of a boxing promotion like Top Rank is not as simple as that of the laundry we cheer for in stick and ball sports. But Top Rank, like its peers, wants to stand out in the quality and stardom of the fighters they work with and a brand that is as sterling as the 50+ years the promotion has been around (founded in 1966).

Any sports brand, particularly in sports with rich, celebrated histories and historic rewatchable events, would do well to learn from Setley and Top Rank. This writer is personally bullish on the opportunity for organizations activate their archive, and Top Rank knows one of their key differentiating factors against other boxing promotions or even boxing media outlets, is their history. Setley talked about the value of their vault.

“Something that [Top Rank] really does well is we have boxing footage since 1966, so something that we made a very strong push and effort on is showcasing that vault,” said Setley, who also mentioned that 92-year-old Top Rank founder Bob Arum remains an active part of the promotion today. “We now have a Facebook page that’s called ‘Top Rank The Vault’ that has over 600,000 followers. It’s not dedicated to promoting upcoming fights, it’s just you want to watch an old Muhammad Ali fight, you come here. You want to watch an old Marvin Hagler fight, you can come here…

“It’s bringing back that kind of content that separates us, because none of these other promoters have that deep of a library. We have Floyd [Mayweather], we have Manny [Pacquiao], we have Hagler, Hearns, Ali — like anyone that has ever been a legend in boxing at some point has come through the Top Rank doors.”

Backdropping Top Rank’s ability to seek out swings worth taking and value yet to be realized is the buy-in from the top on down. Setley knows that social media strategy doesn’t happen in a silo, it can’t; positive feedback loops buttressed by numbers help keep the train moving, but even before that it takes investment in the vision and the evidence-backed and educated belief that these punches will land.

Said Setley: “At the end of the day we have an amazing president of our organization, Todd duBoef who, revenue or not, has really been a massive supporter of our content overall…He’s been able to give us that belief, that expertise and the resources to make it happen. So over the last two and a half years, our numbers have gone through the roof, and it’s really all thanks to him being able to just be an advocate for us when he’s speaking with other members of the executives, when he’s talking to us, working with him to really build out what our social strategy is.”

Your next mass of fans is already out there, you just have to attract them. Embrace the unknown, take risks, and meet your fans with authenticity. In this ever-evolving digital landscape, understanding your diverse fanbase and innovating will turn casual followers into lifelong fanatics. As Joe Setley and Top Rank have shown, success lies in the connections we build, the stories we tell, and the communities we nurture. By strategically engaging with new platforms and thoughtfully curating content, you can drive deeper engagement and build a thriving, loyal fanbase, and stay on top for years to come.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JOE SETLEY

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Digital, Fan Development, Social Media

From Metrics to Meaning: How the Portland Timbers Engage and Recruit Devoted Fans

What is the total addressable market for a sports team?

Depending on who you’re talking to, the answer may be everybody who lives within a certain radius of the team’s home city or venue all the way up to, well, everybody in the world with a pulse.

With seemingly limitless goals, it’s a delicate dance for sports marketers and strategists to try and be everything to everyone while understanding the most effective use of not-limitless time and resources to develop the healthiest, lasting fan base.

The key is to put the fans first. Sure, that sounds like a ‘Duh’ comment, but in the endless chase for numbers and vanity metrics, are fans really at the center of the strategy? That’s not to say virality is bad, far from it — we want to recruit new fans — but that doesn’t mean the bulk of time and resources should be spent thinking about these potential new fans at the expense of those already in the fold. Ruben Dominguez manages these masters in his position at the helm of the Portland Timbers social media and content strategy. The Timbers have a passionate fanbase and Dominguez knows serving and speaking with them is paramount.

“I really use these times to talk to fans and gauge them in that sense because if you read the comments, you can get some stuff out of that of what people want, but when you come up to people and they’re telling you what they like about the channels or what more they want to see I think it’s always the best thing that you can get,” said Dominguez, referencing the real-life conversations he’ll have with fans at Timbers events.

Dominguez continued: “The best example I can give getting to that is press conferences. So when I first got here, I really thought, as a soccer purist, that press conferences and hearing from the manager and players is the best insight that you can give. Win, draws, losses — it just really gave the opportunity for a manager to speak, so I was pretty hell-bent on getting those out. Even if they didn’t do the best numbers, there’s a good chance to just provide people with info about the team and dictate narratives.

“With that being said, a lot of people saw that as low [engagement] numbers, not really any juice for the squeeze. But now that we’ve had a little bit of a higher-profile manager [Phil Neville] come in and people are wanting to hear [from him], I thought it worked out well, and now that’s something that gets a lot of buzz when we put those out.”

Dominguez championed content like the press conferences, which he used as an example of content that would serve fans more than serve metrics, but he also put the strategic lens on the initiative. The team can produce content that’s valuable and desirable for fans and make the most of it for the organization and its business objectives. A coach press conference on its own may not do mega numbers, but the recurring nature and the countless clips they beget produce meaningful opportunities.

“It might not be the greatest piece of content, but I think there’s a lot that you can get out of it for the organization,” said Dominguez, who spent time with the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and the United Soccer League (USL) before making his way to Portland.

“So when you’re looking at these specific things you’re doing, whether it’s training photos or arrival photos or all these things that are recurring and come about, I think you just got to put it in that context. How does it work for the fans? How does it work internally for you all? Is it something that you can get a lot of juice out of the squeeze for, and then how does it work for the business side? And that’s kind of how we make decisions with everything.”

Meeting fan expectations and identifying value within recurring content are key cornerstones, but the Timbers, like any team, want to continue to grow that fanbase and find new ways to develop and engage fans. It can be easy for content teams in sports to get caught up in the routines of the season’s grind, one practice and pregame warm-up and postgame coverage blending into the next. Many fans may count on the routine coverage, resting assured that the team will deliver it day in and day out. But teams need to disrupt themselves, too, take chances, try new things, and find ways to break through the expected to attract new attention in the feed and find new ways to bring in new and existing fans. There’s a calculated strategy to the experimentation and innovation, and it’s a mix of art (creativity) and science (what the numbers say).

“I think when we do take those risks, we ask the same questions,” Dominguez explained. How is this going to affect the brand? What is this going to do for us? Could this be something that lives on? If we do it, what metrics do we need to measure for — and not just numbers-wise, it’s like the pulse of the community. If we do something and we see that a lot of fans like it and they’re like, ‘We want more of this’, but maybe it doesn’t fit our brand, then we’ll look at it and say, ‘Okay, where can we fit this?’ Or we say, hey, maybe this is our brand because this is something our fans like, our players like, and those are the people that we’re speaking for when they go out into their communities and when they get to talk to their people, what do they want to show about their teams?”

The sum of fan touchpoints and engagements makes up the brand of the team. Now, not every encounter and impression is expected to carry the impossible burden of burnishing every brand pillar. There are different fans, different expectations, and different opportunities with each platform, digital and otherwise. For someone in Dominguez’s role, it’s integral to activate each platform with intent and appreciate the expectations, behaviors, and opportunities each presents. Dominguez broke down how he and the Timbers think about the various social media platforms.

“When we look at a social strategy, we’re looking platform to platform of what we want to do,” he said. “I think one thing that we can say about TikTok, for us, is we kind of just want to show the cool aspects of what we do of our life, our players, and just show those kind of aspects of the game; [whereas] you look at something like Twitter or Instagram, it’s going to be totally different.

“I think when we look at Twitter, we want to show that we know ball, because I think that’s the best place where you can kind of display that, where things kind of go and you see things from different platforms, and when you do reach these other audiences, whether they support a team in Europe, South America, we want to show that know what we’re talking about, and we’re not one of those typical American teams or have that stigma.”

Teams are continually trying to serve their fans and create a brand that’s attractive to prospective fans. Oftentimes the simplest path to a spike in fans, or at least supporters, is through the players. Just ask Inter Miami, who saw their fanbase grow exponentially upon the arrival of Lionel Messi, or look at Tottenham Hotspur over in the Premier League, who gained perhaps an entire nation of fans when South Korean football star Son Heung-min joined the club. Such star power can get fans in the door, but it’s on the organizations to foment deeper, lasting connections that transform individuals’ identities to adopt everlasting fandom. Dominguez had a front-row seat to player-driven fans, particularly when he worked with the Portland Thorns, which boast US Women’s National Team star Sophia Smith on their squad. There’s a difference between cultivating fans of the team that ‘x’ player plays on and fans of the team who love both sides of the jersey.

“I think, speaking on the Thorns side, just the dynamic of that and working at the NWSL, the national team players are highly regarded,” he said. “People are going to switch team allegiances with their players going to different sides. So I think that’s one thing in that in a sense sells itself, where I think the difference on the Timbers side is I feel like the brand of the Timbers is almost like the star player and just playing for the Timbers. So we’ve always tried to keep that mantra…

“On [the Timbers] side we have the obligation to tell a lot of stories. And I think, since I’ve gotten here, I’ve really made it a point for us to, no matter the player, their play on the pitch, their status within the team, I think there were stories everywhere to be told. So we really tried to make that a point to get them out into the world and tell their stories.”

Teams want fans to feel connected through the players, but in a way that family members support each other because they’re part of a common group with a shared crest. This type of familiarity and communal support is achieved by telling stories of players all the way up and why Dominguez talked about the team’s content strategy around their Timbers Academy, where fans can get to know the players they’re bound to love, because they play for the Timbers (even if it’s not on their first team yet).

“We have probably the best academy we’ve had in the Timbers’ short history,” said Dominguez, “so really showing those players and getting them accustomed to what we do and ultimately banking on if they make it to the first team that we have archived footage and can tell their story from when they were young up to when they get into the first team.

“I think probably one of the coolest things I’ve been a part of since I’ve been here is we signed a homegrown this year. His name’s Sawyer Jura. He’s Oregon through and through. He’s from Bend. When we were able to do his announcement, he had pictures from when he was like 7 or 8 with [Timbers mascot] Timber Joey coming to games, we were able to recreate some pictures with him and his family from when they were on the field at games when he was younger to now. He’s been on the first-team squad a couple of times this year. So it’s been awesome.

“That’s kind of what we’re striving for from a content side, is just having all of that stuff built up to tell the best possible stories we can, and have players on this team that people feel like they know and can connect with, and then, in turn, you feel like it’s a family and a community that you’re building and you don’t have to depend on X star coming in for you to be a Timbers fan, you’re just a fan of the club.”

Perhaps the best example of generational fandom is in college sports. Dominguez has first-hand experience and perspective having attended and worked at Texas A&M, with a massive fanbase that loves their Aggies across sports and as student-athletes cycle in and out. That type of unconditional devotion transcends one’s understanding of the X’s and O’s, goes beyond any individual player, is bigger than wins and losses, and lasts a lifetime.

“Coming from a [college like Texas A&M] that is very big on tradition, I feel like we’re kind of the same here in Portland,” said Dominguez, who’s in the midst of his third season with the team. “We have a long history, coming up on our 50th year of the club, so those sorts of [traditions] are just things that you can highlight and just show people love and feel a part of something at the end of the day.

“I think any footy fan that you speak to just wants to feel that community and feel something to be a part of while supporting their team.”

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH RUBEN DOMINGUEZ

READ THE SNIPPETS

College, Content Strategy, Social Media

The Evolution of the Creative Operation in Sports and Why It Needs Leadership and Structure

What’s your LinkedIn bio snippet?

You know, most people have their job title and the place they work. Others have something more operative, like what they ‘do.’ Although I don’t love the vague nature of the latter, it’s an instructive way to think about one’s job. The answer to the infamous question from the Bobs in the Office Space: ‘What would you say you do here?’ (look it up, kids, and watch the movie if you haven’t seen it!).

It’s not so aggrandized to characterize the actual day-to-day work as something more grandiose, but to understand how producing that video, writing that email, or building that report is connected to the rest of the organization; how the modular work on the assembly line affects the bottom line success for the company and how it ultimately ties back to your to-do list.

Such is the potential disconnect between the endless demands of the creative team, especially for a sports organization, and the rest of the business. The quantity of content output for the creative team — graphics, videos, and everything in between — continues to increase. This is overall a good thing, as organizations appreciate that engaged attention, and content earning that attention, is the ultimate currency. But as teams grow and the content practice evolves from an arthouse to a well-oiled factory floor, a layer of management is necessary. That transition is taking place now, ensuring the quantity doesn’t drown out the quality and the art finds a way to meet the science.

“When you’re looking at ticket sales and fan engagement, it’s really hard when you only have 1 or 2 graphic designers to support all those (objectives),” said Akshay Ram, a Product Manager at Adobe who has years of experience in sports creative, including during his undergrad at Syracuse. “So then it comes down to who’s making the call for priorities. And in the college space, I don’t think that specific person is established as much, so it makes it a little more challenging, and I think that’s part of what that transition looks like.”

Prioritization. That’s the mechanism through which the art must be balanced. I can remember back in college speeding through video edits while others would spend days tweaking and perfecting a single photo or graphic composition. Software solutions are certainly facilitating the production process now, as Ram can attest sitting at one of the biggest and most ingrained and integral companies at Adobe. The new world in which everyone can at least pose as a creative (think back to the early days of Instagram filters, even) means the role of a full-time skilled and studied creative is evolving. I spoke with Ram about the balance of the creative team with empowering others to complete the last mile of content with only the creative team owning the final export.

“Something I preach all the time [is] are you are you working efficiently by doing what you’re doing? Can you provide some of that trust to someone else by setting yourself up for success and them up for success?” said Ram, who also worked with Bleacher Report during his time studying and working at Syracuse (he likes being busy!) “There are many tools that are going in that direction right now where, as a creative, you can’t just think about being the most creative person and putting in all these flashy effects. What do [colleagues] need in order to communicate the message that they’re trying to send out? And maybe that just requires a simple template and you as a creative setting that up for someone else to go in and just change the parameters that you establish.”

Whether it’s templates that help maintain quality while scaling output and autonomy or more premium content, the creative part of an organization is delivering solutions more than ‘stuff.’ It’s stuff with a purpose that conveys a brand and seeks to accomplish objectives and, ultimately, to move that proverbial needle in the desired way. We’re in an era now (not so much an era, just a before/after new way of the world) in which everything is measured, for better or for worse. Even artistic masterpieces or hit songs are broken down into bits and analyzed. And the creatives in sports have had to become part of the new paradigm — it’s a necessity when there are thousands of pieces going out every season and an insatiable desire for more and better. This is where the creative leader needs to lead, preaches Ram.

“They just give anyone this title of creative director [referring specifically to college athletics in this context] and then they expect them to also create content. So what they’re not doing is actually analyzing what’s going into producing the content and how that translates,” he said. “We talked at the beginning of this about how most schools just want to sell tickets to games or turn viewership up and don’t understand what market size looks like and if the market size is translating to the expected viewership, all these kinds of things. So creatives don’t actually have a KPI that’s embedded with what they do, and they also don’t get the information from the higher-ups. How we solve it is a great question…

Ram continued: “Many times you need to have that chain of influence where someone can tell you, ‘Hey, it’s not just about reaching 6 million impressions or engagement, but it’s: in order for us to get there, we need to deliver in this capacity.’ And that middle ground between the two, I think, should be facilitated at the creative director role, where they know how to filter the numbers from the creative, allow the creative to do the work, and then they kind of dictate what’s our direction to get there.

“That’s where a lot of these titles aren’t actually aligning to fruition with what they say. I think they should be that filter between the people who are actually doing the core functions and the people who are asking for it.”

Everyone has a scoreboard — but even the most sophisticated systems of measurement can’t capture everything. There is dark social through which the reach of content increases exponentially (and content with a higher propensity to get shared via those channels), content that elicits activity or feelings or depth and strength of activity and feelings. It can feel simplistic to juice engagement and reach numbers through more content output, but that’s not always the right answer.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, I need quote tweets, I need retweets and reposts’ and all that kind of stuff,” said Ram. “They don’t think about ‘How do you make good content that people just want to absorb and send to other people?’ And I think that’s where reach comes into play and also plays a role in how you’re thinking about creating at scale. Because all it takes is one platform to really enhance the success of your campaign that you’re working on, the content that you’re creating.”

When they know the outcomes and objectives at play creative leaders can manage all those variables — time, resources, premium output, templates — to achieve maximum results with optimal efficiency. We’ve arrived there, when the creative department of the organization needs to operationalize and the leader isn’t necessarily the most talented designer or producer, but an individual responsible for managing all the moving parts and processes.

“That’s where I’d love to see the community move in that direction, where they are understanding the KPIs, they’re establishing KPIs and there is someone that is heading that creative department who’s translating that to something that makes sense from a creative standpoint,” said Ram, “which is, you know, ‘Let’s spend this much time to execute on this. If we were given one week to get this done, what’s the best piece of content we can create? How do we take that and package it in a way where it’s not just one deliverable, it’s maybe one video, ten stories that can go across these platforms?’ That’s where the social media team plays a role.

“I think the creative director has to be that filter that can communicate with the social media manager and marketing to make that happen.”

The last decade or so has seen the ascent of the creative department within an organization to invaluable and indispensable — an essential part of the team. Such a place requires a more strategic approach to it all and the present and future creative leaders must play a vital role in the maturation and professionalization of creative. The importance of content will only increase from here on out, inspiring a new era of innovation and storytelling that will propel organizations forward and redefine the boundaries of creative potential.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH AKSHAY RAM

READ THE SNIPPETS

General Sports Business, Social Media, Sports Media

Insights: How Ben Koo and Awful Announcing Navigate the Changing World of Sports Media (and Media in General)

It’s a tough time for the media business. You may have heard. Headlines of layoffs and closures or consolidations in the greater media industry appear way too often. Amidst the ebbs and flows of news and media brands over the years, Awful Announcing has continued on, serving a sports media and business niche, even as competition for attention and the whims of social platforms change the game.

I recently interviewed Ben Koo, CEO, Editor-in-Chief, and primary owner of Awful Announcing and its sister site The Comeback. I often hone in on a theme or two in podcast interviews in these posts, but Koo covered so many interesting topics, let’s touch on a handful of big subjects:

  • Surviving as Social Media Platforms Discouraged Outbound Traffic
  • The Polarization and Hot Takes that Social Media Encourages
  • Understanding Public Sentiment When a Minority Drives Internet/Social Content
  • Measuring Success in the Multi-Platform Media World
  • Content Aggregators and Mooches
  • The Present and Future of the Media Industry

Surviving as Social Media Platforms Discouraged Outbound Traffic

Social media was a boon in the early days, a significant source of referral traffic (I’m old enough to remember going to ESPN.com and browsing for the best stories to read). Then the platforms realized the best way to drive revenue was to keep users on their sites or apps as much as possible. The trend has only gotten worse for publishers and now some algorithms even penalize posts with outbound links.

For sites like Awful Announcing, each algorithm tweak and drop in referral traffic can have a meaningful effect on their business. Koo and his team have to figure out how to balance feeding the platforms with content that’ll drive engagement while still giving fans a reason to click through to the site.

“We’re trying to do more in video,” he said. “We’re trying to be smarter about headlines where we get people interested, but we don’t give away the full story; we’re putting out the most interesting thing about what it is [while] hoping that people want to see more…

“Since Awful Announcing is creating content for a specific audience who’s thirsty for more details it’s not as big of a problem. But it’s still kind of discouraging because we think more people want to [discover] our content, and when it’s being throttled down, just because of new initiatives algorithmically, I don’t think it’s serving the users of those social platforms who have opted in to see our content but are randomly seeing, like, the For You page for Twitter [full] of crypto bots and what have you and Facebook meme pages. I hope it’s a trend that reverses.”

Awful Announcing knows they produce unique content and there’s an audience out there that wants to consume it. It may be more difficult for that audience to discover them and their content, but AA knows if you reach them, they will come (a bastardization of the old Field of Dreams quote, eh?). Koo said their originality, cultivating relationships between the writers and readers, and dedication to expanding their platforms are all key to continued survival in this new era.

Here’s Koo: “I think original content and original voices and being accessible on more platforms, which is something that we’re slowly kind of prioritizing more and more, really good quality voices, and being on more platforms, whether that’s a TikTok, Instagram, we’ve been promoting our content a lot more on Reddit, because I think some people have kind of moved from Twitter to Reddit in terms of content discovery…

“We’re putting in a lot more energy into trying to be at the places where people are because the existing traffic mix has decided that it’s not good for them for other people to drift away from those social media platforms. So we need to be on more platforms. We need to have more original voices. We need to have direct relationships, not only from the site to people, but also writer to readers — so more people following their personal accounts. It’s a major effort and it’s going to affect everyone in media, so we’re trying to figure out the best we can.”

The Polarization and Hot Takes that Social Media Encourages

Social platforms and their prioritization of engagement to reach users have also profoundly affected media across all mediums. Content that elicits a reaction tends to get amplified, and we’ve seen that theme translate to countless debate shows and the rise of hot take artists, with some viewers/readers questioning the authenticity of such dedicated devil’s advocates. It would be easy for Awful Announcing to lean into it, but taking polarizing stances just for the sake of ‘engagement’ is not something Koo and his team want to be about.

“I think it would probably be long-term negative if we were just trying to be dishonest with our opinions for the sake of chasing it…,” he said. “People like to kind of chirp a little bit that we have favorites or this and that, but I just don’t see that. I think our reputation is generally neutral to positive with some nitpicks here and there.

“But we write so much content it’s impossible [to avoid]. I mean, we pissed off Stephen A Smith at South by Southwest. He said last night we should kiss his ass. And then he says Awful Announcing, first off they do good work most of the time, and then he went into [it]. But it’s the first time I’ve ever heard him complain, and it just comes with the territory. I think we do a pretty good job having opinions, covering the space, but not succumbing to the temptation of just hot takes for clicks.”

Understanding Public Sentiment When a Minority Drives Internet/Social Content

Awful Announcing still does lots of work related to its eponymous theme — identifying the bad and good (and otherwise notable) in announcing and sports broadcasting. But talk to any social/digital media professional and they’ll remind you that the vocal minority on Twitter and other social platforms and forums are just that — a loud minority. So while we may get seduced to think a couple dozen comments, let alone a single anonymous commenter, represent the opinion of the masses, the vast majority of the public is not expressing their opinion on these platforms. And even those who do speak up are predisposed to a polarizing take (you generally don’t go on Yelp to give a slightly above-average review, it’s either because you loved it or hated it). Awful Announcing can uncover some of the truth by watching trends and having diverse individuals and perspectives within their ranks.

“[Thinking about] where does the real sentiment lie — one thing is it’s good to have a good group and a diverse group in your own newsroom and on Slack. Kind of like, ‘Do we all hate this person? Oh, there are 3 or 4 people who don’t, and seven people who do, that’s interesting.’ So that is always helpful. I think if we were to put a Twitter thread or a Facebook poll or whatever on just about anyone — Tony Romo, Gus Johnson, Joe Buck, you’re going to get a big cluster of people who are fans, a big cluster of people who are some type of neutral and a big group of haters.

“Announcing is super subjective…Having a good newsroom with diverse opinions, being fair when we do write an opinion piece or critical piece, or putting other people’s comments — like people hated how this person called the end of the game. Another thing is just trends. So sometimes we do polls and we get 4000, 5000 replies and we’ll say ‘Rank the four NFL A booths that are not Amazon.’ So ESPN, ABC, CBS, FOX — which one’s your favorite? And if you saw Romo and Nantz a few years ago when that thing was at 40%, where there are four options, and then a few years later they’re in second or third and they’re at like 20% there’s a trend that we can kind of talk about that more people are getting annoyed with Tony Romo.

Measuring Success in the Multi-Platform Media World

Everything gets more data-driven with each passing year. Writers once were (and at some publications still are) beholden to page views and subscriptions from their individual stories. That’s what pays the bills, and paying the bills, at the end of the day, is pretty much all that matters. There is some nuance for Koo and Awful Announcing, and metrics have evolved a bit for them to define successful content. As someone who loves a good long-form Wright Thompson article (and who lives with data in my day job), it’s good to see the value and insights in different types of metrics for Awful Announcing where, yes, page views matter, but it’s not always that simple in the chase for continued success and revenue.

“We are making investments in video and hiring and whatever, but we are probably more locked in to page views because that’s just what keeps us paid,” said Koo. “We do like front page home page traffic as a big indicator where someone either typed into their [browser] AwfulAnnouncing.com, or they read a story and then clicked on the logo or the home to see what else they could find. Pages per visit is always encouraging to see if we’re doing better there. Time on site helps us with advertiser retention and higher programmatic ad bidding. When people see that people are on here, they’re seeing your ad units for 45 seconds or 2 minutes or three minutes as opposed to 17 seconds.

“[On social media], retweets, impressions on Twitter — how much did this tweet about an article or a piece of video get seen? Generally, as long as we’re profitable and growing, we’re happy. And I try to not have our team too focused on a million different statistics, but I think for us, we’re a little bit different because we’re not part of a larger entity.”

Content Aggregators and Mooches

We’re in the age of aggregation. There are lucrative newsletters based on aggregating headlines and summarizing articles. There are countless social media accounts making hay from lifting a notable quote or anecdote from a robust story by a publication (not to mention the Dov Kleimans of the world, mostly just reposting others’ content). News breakers like Adrian Wojnarowski and Adam Schefter are as well-known as ever, but their ‘bombs’ are merely the first spark for a conflagration of derivative articles, columns, podcasts, and posts. Some question the ethics of professional aggregation, but the bigger issue may be how it affects the ROI of putting resources into original reporting. This excerpt represents a small portion of the discussion with Koo about the themes within aggregation (including a great story involving the Bishop Sycamore story and subsequent documentary), as he touched on how the existing paradigm affects his business decisions around original reporting.

From Koo: “I think as long as you’re referencing where the quotes are from, that’s kind of fair. You’d like to see some links if they use it in an article…

“[Original reporting] doesn’t monetize that well. Every once in a while — we did this story about Kevin Brown, the announcer, getting suspended by the Baltimore Orioles. That story was great. We got a lot of traffic, [and] we do have 2 to 5 original reporting stories, where we’re trying to scoop something, per month, I’d say. Some of them get not that much traffic at all…Whenever we think we have something, we go for it, and as long as someone’s interested and wants to do the work, we go for it. But is there a monetary return on that work? You know, that’s where it’s good to have institutional backing, subscriptions, stuff like that. Because from an advertising standpoint, it’s hard to justify. But we do it because it’s important.”

The Present and Future of the Media Industry

Awful Announcing is nearly 20 years old. In this media environment, that might as well make them a gray-haired lady. So Koo and his team have surely been doing something right over the years. Sitting at the helm of the business for most of the site’s lifetime, Koo has seen much of the media crumbling around him while Awful Announcing keeps going. So it was interesting to get his take on where the greater media and publication industry is headed and what will separate the survivors from the rest in the years to come.

“Niche things that have subscriptions and events seem to be doing well. I think what hasn’t done well is scale for the sake of scale, and that’s like BuzzFeed merging with a bunch of things. I think Vox Media got really big. Complex just sold to a new place…you have basically seen all of these jobs that have been taken away and infrastructure at companies chasing scale for people who were not creating content. I look at us and every dollar that comes in, almost every dollar, a huge percentage goes to people creating content.

“I’m not seeing media as a great investment…even the successes in our space, which are few and far between, if you look at the price tag and what they thought they were going to be, they don’t really [turn] out as big successes, to a certain degree. So yeah, content’s going to be in an interesting place because it definitely helps to have money given to you to become something big and notable and influential, but do the economics work for investors to get their money back? A lot of places have come and gone…”

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Thanks to Ben for his thoughtful and articulate conversation on several compelling topics! The media paradigms may be evolving, but there will always be stories to tell, conversations to start, and content to consume, no matter your interest.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BEN KOO

READ THE SNIPPETS

Content Strategy, Social Media

The Science and Art of Social Media and Engagement in Sports

Marketing and ‘engagement’ used to be an exercise in faith. Maybe you judged the success of content by word-of-mouth from one’s immediate network, from positive feedback and write-ups by the press and marketing Illuminati, or by an uptick in bottom-line metrics that you surmised came as a result of great content.

Then digital media came along, followed a decade later by the more engaging (there’s that word again) social media and all of a sudden there was a tangible measure of success, a scoreboard that told you whether that fire content was also deemed great by the consuming audience.

The leaders in social media were, and largely remain, the stat stuffers. They mastered the system, making game plans that would light up the scoreboard, creating the foundation for what defines successful social media strategy and results today. Aaron Eisman was young in his career when he got to witness, and became part of, one of those early leading organizations — Bleacher Report. There, Eisman picked up lessons that still serve him today. In a recent conversation, he reflected on how, with every sports account activating around the same major sports storylines, B/R stood out.

“The Social Moments team [at Bleacher Report] was the viral meme team, I guess you could say,” said Eisman, who also worked with Turner Sports and the NFL Network before starting his agency, Eisman Digital Consulting. “It was a team of 10-12 people literally sitting in a room a couple of times a week and they would just think of viral moments or they would create an idea before it happened. Like, if the Cubs are going to win the World Series, what are we going to do social media-wise to make it look really exciting and dope?

“We were playing chess and we were always steps ahead of the competition. We were always getting ready to do checkmate while they were just starting their chessboard.”

So much of social media strategy is being ready for anything and everything. Planning to be extemporaneous. There’s a place for timeless content, to be sure, alongside the real-time, reactive, opportunistic content. As the industry matured over the years, everybody began to think more like chess, trying their best to anticipate two or three moves ahead, the circumstances that would play out — all while keeping in mind the ultimate goals and mini objectives to achieve along the way.

“Ultimately when you think proactive, reactive, evergreen, breaking news — any of these other creative metrics and things that you think of in your head about how the content should be or what it should be, then you’re going to really advance as a social media team, and just think ahead of the curve,” said Eisman.

The final destination — the definition of success — is not the same for everyone. But the scoreboards on the platforms all read the same, we’re all reviewing the same box score, context notwithstanding. The metrics do serve as a feedback mechanism; is great content really great if not enough people see it? As long as the dominant social media channels continue to dominate, you’re largely playing by their rules. And, what hits on those channels tends to influence user behavior, consumption patterns, and preferences in general.

All that’s to say that social media strategy, while not slave to the metrics, is certainly influenced by them. It’s a feedback loop that leads a strategy to success.

“If the strategy is building out the right content, then the content should hit, and if the content should hit, then the numbers should prove it,” said Eisman, who has run Eisman Digital Consulting for nearly five years now. “The numbers don’t lie, so the analytics should tell you… the analytics should reaffirm or adjust the overall strategy. So it kind of works in a cycle almost between those three aspects.”

It’s tempting to get swayed in the silo of individual posts, to be seduced by the serotonin of a post’s objective performance. But it’s important to appreciate the forest for the trees, too (a cliche, but it’s apt here!). The success or failure of individual posts, of a day in the life of a social media strategy is fleeting. The half-life for the majority of these things is so short. That’s why it’s integral to understand what we’re doing all this for — what are the goals, what should the short-term strive to add up to in the long-term?

In an evolving world where overnight success is possible, where a single TikTok video can catapult an account from 1000 to 100,000 followers, it’s important to articulate the actual goals. Sometimes it is more followers, sometimes it isn’t. Eisman and his team encounter a diversity of stated goals working across clients for Eisman Digital and strategize accordingly.

“People want different things: to help grow their social media account or grow other goals they have. So how we get there is you want to figure out the goals of the person or the client you’re working with then you figure out the strategy of how to get to those goals,” Eisman explains. “And some of it’s not overnight. I mean, one of my biggest clients right now is a golf training app and they more care about the process of what the content looks like.

“If it takes time for us to create the great content, it’ll take time, but we don’t need to push out a great post every day because sometimes it leads to more followers, sometimes it doesn’t and we’re accepting of that.”

As social media has matured over the years and long ago transcended the remit of the archetypal ‘intern,’ social media strategy is now part of the bigger picture, expected to deliver against the organization’s true, bottom-line goals. So social media cannot and does not exist in a silo. It often works in tandem with all of the organization’s other marketing and engagement channels — there’s, umm, synergy (sorry, had to use that word). So whether you’re leading an in-house social and digital media team or running a social/digital media agency like Eisman, it’s critical to step out of those siloes.

Eisman expounded on the subject: “There are different forms of marketing, social media is one of them, but do you want to do a newsletter or do you want to do ad placements on Google? Do you want to do paid social or does your organic post that does well numbers-wise deserve to be boosted and put money behind it? And influencer marketing, there are just so many forms of marketing these days when five, ten years ago, probably more ten years ago, it was your general marketing people, your public relations people, and maybe you had 1 or 2 social media people ten years ago, and now it’s completely changed into social media needs to be a beast for organizations.”

While we marvel at the exponential growth in importance and power of social media in the last 10-15 years, it’s just as necessary to understand that social media is not the answer to everything. It’s not a magic pill. So as Eisman, or any social media leader, works to set and execute against goals for a given company, part of that is understanding where social media has less influence on the ultimate outcomes. There are plenty of precision holes to pick, but, generally, the promises that we want social media to proselytize need to be kept on the other side.

“There are some KPIs and metrics that social media can hit very easily and we can go after those growth metrics and stuff and those engagement metrics and those impression metrics and all that stuff, reach metrics, whatever you want to call it,” Eisman explained,” but sometimes we can only accomplish so much on social media. It’s got to be the product that has to sell…it has to be good.”

It’s true that we now have a better understanding than ever of what works and what doesn’t work. But with that greater insight comes more complexity as the new challenge is connecting all those disparate dots that comprise the bigger picture.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH AARON EISMAN

READ THE SNIPPETS

Content Strategy, Digital, Fan Development, General Marketing, Social Media, Social Media ROI

Key Themes and Opportunities for Sports Organizations in the Year Ahead

2023 was a great year to be a sports fan. Most of the traditional measures of fan interest increased, more emerging sports rose up, the platforms of sports did some good in culture and society, and it was another year of growing understanding that the future of sports business and fan engagement will be molded, if not led, by those managing the digital and social channels that comprise the majority of time spent and touch points between sport and fan. 

There may not have been paradigm shifts in the greater smsports world, but the roots for such massive evolution formed and there’s more recognition than ever that originality wins, meaningful connections matter, and that sports and athletes are the gateway to so much more than the game on the field or court.

With that in mind, something of an annual tradition building off close observation of the space and countless valuable conversations, here are ten areas of interest and themes at the top of my mind in 2024 for the greater sportsbiz industry.

Fan Identity (online and offline)

So much of fandom has been, and continues to be, about identity. One declares themselves a fan of a given athlete or team and therefore does the things that fans do — follow their social, consume content involving them, wear merch showcasing their fandom, and maybe insert it into their avatar or username or profiles. And the notion of identity, in digital and IRL environments, remains paramount. But there’s more competition than ever to own pieces of one’s identity, so the challenge for sports organizations is to foster and reinforce elements of identity, empower fans to showcase it and find emerging and original ways to do it. One more way to tap into fan identity is to align with their other interests and passions, such as our next item…

Creators, Influencers, and UGC

Fandom is contagious and we’re seeing more collaboration and strategy in direct work with online influencers (and ‘traditional’ celebrities) and creators who are already fans themselves. These mutually beneficial relationships benefit all parties when they’re authentic and it’s why you’ve seen teams and leagues in the last couple of years create full-time positions to oversee and execute influencer marketing and relations; others are rolling the remit into social media roles. It’s not uncommon now to see titles like Director of Social Media and Influencers on the staff directories of teams and leagues.

This is not just about direct partnerships, it’s also a larger theme playing out in sports business as the industry begins to appreciate more and more the value of earned media. Earned media — from fans posting about a game, a team, a player — is not new in sports; traditional B2C brands would kill for such organic earned media. But as teams add a strategic layer, that’s where the fun starts. Facilitating creators with content and access, fostering UGC and showcasing to create a positive feedback loop, monetizing it directly and indirectly. The organization of this ecosystem is only just beginning, which leads us to the next theme…

The next phase of Collab

If we had the data, we could probably see a chart showing the growth in the % of Instagram feed posts that are Collabs looking something like 📈 in the last year or so. Mutual relationships are getting mobilized more frequently, whether it’s league and broadcaster, team and player, league and brand. Alongside the Collab posts, the platforms are also productizing the behavior in other ways, testing true collaborative content, with multiple parties each contributing to a single post.

My job often entails ideating around maximizing such organized orders of parties for a given sports or entertainment property. As the fences get more easily traversable and the collaboration being offered by platforms more widespread, it will lead to more frequent, more creative, and even opportunistic collab content taking off. Too often the power of relationships that transcend the field gets taken for granted, which indirectly leads to our next item…

Relationship platform

There are a lot of answers to the ‘Why do we love sports?’ question and a lot of them are correct. But at its core, past the inherent storytelling [and, yes, the wagering] the group dynamics that sports fandom cultivates is the beating heart. Sports fandom offers an opportunity to plan a social night out with friends or family, it can jumpstart a dormant group chat, fuel endless conversation at the bar or the dinner table, and it can lubricate meetings with even total strangers, providing an instant ember of relationship.

So how can sports teams lean into this superpower even more in 2024? We’ve seen the move to smaller group engagement across social platforms, whether it’s on Discord or IG or WhatsApp or elsewhere — sports provides the connective tissue for much of it. Teams and leagues can create more synapses, more opportunities to foster friendships or even initiate new engagements. If sports can master their position as a purveyor of relationships and pastime, there is a helluva opportunity to further enhance the next item…

Direct to Consumer

The trend of leagues and teams developing and prioritizing their owned and operated channels, often with an app and a CRM at the center, is not a new one. But the climate has only hastened these pursuits — the dilution of precise targeting with digital ads is one and more recently the gradual decline of the regional sports network (RSN) business. If all of a sudden teams had to rely on monetizing their live broadcasts one fan at a time, many realized it sure would help to have a direct line to more of them, especially those not already in the database because they’ve attended a game [but still watched a lot of your games/content].

The apps are getting more competitive — they have to. Teams and leagues are asking themselves (and being pitched by vendors) ‘What can we do to entice more fans to spend time on our owned platforms’ (and what value prop will convince them to register/sign in with their information)?’ There’s the low-hanging fruit of mobile ticket/account integration, but beyond that relatively ‘free space’, there’s a plethora of ideas out there, from interactivity to exclusive content to novel features, and lots more. But one area picking up steam for sports and beyond is our next topic…

More gaming

There was an article recently in Vanity Fair about the New York Times’ big bet on games, facetiously stating the Times is becoming a ‘gaming company that also happens to offer the news.’ Meanwhile, the NBA recently introduced ‘NBA Play’, a collection of games in their league’s app. As the competition for time, attention, and true (registered) membership for fans keeps heating up while simultaneously becoming more important, games represent a sticky, engaging, shareable opportunity to capture all that.

Depending on which stat you stumble upon, something like 90% of Americans regularly play games, whether they’re into Call of Duty, Words with Friends, Immaculate Grid, or even an old-school crossword or Sudoku. So it’s no wonder that investment in games is one with a big TAM for teams and leagues. They can be pretty simple, too (see: Wordle and all its variations). With built-in fandom, the games can simply align to general mechanics — challenging but not too challenging, sticky/consistent, talk-worthy, and, well, fun. Keep an eye on gaming, it may even become a growing direct revenue stream as sports organizations start to realize how much their IP can truly be monetized, which brings us to our next subject area…

Premium content, Passive Monetization, and Content Libraries

There are investors that focus specifically on acquiring YouTube libraries. With just a few tweaks and optimizations, archives of YouTube videos can generate a decent amount of revenue from years-old videos. Meanwhile, that documentary you just watched on Netflix was made in 2018 — and most of the content was pieced together from decades-old archives. That long opening aside, the point is that each piece of content a team publishes, cuts, or produces (or even if they don’t and it’s sitting in the cloud storage) is an asset. And those assets can deliver dividends in direct and indirect ways.

Many conversations you have about sponsored content now bring up that their organization saw the light in the last 1-3 years. The pandemic was a big part of it, but so were tailwinds from marketers across brands diverting more of their marketing spend from linear to digital channels. Sports content, from highlights to documentaries and the reality series that The Last Dance and Drive to Survive accelerated in demand, and while many teams already have the capability in-house to produce great all-access pieces, they’re starting to act more like a media company now, bringing in additional help or hiring more to up their volume. Because it brings in money. It brings in sponsors and can provide lasting value through time spent on an app or lucrative YouTube rabbit holes, or through pre-programmed social media ‘archive’ accounts, and maybe behind a paywall for your in-house RSN subscriber (if that comes to be). The number of permutations and options to piece together reams of old highlights, interviews, and B-roll is virtually endless. Especially if you consider our next item…

Generative AI

Generative AI had already made its way into sports well before ChatGPT launched and introduced the masses to the awe-inducing results; companies like WSC Sports already permitted you to ask for ‘All of Nikola Jokic’s dunks from his rookie season in 2015-2016’ and get a highlight package (assuming the big man dunked at all his rookie year). But the acceleration in 2023 was remarkable and does not seem to be slowing down as 2024 begins. It won’t be long before a video producer can use detailed prompts to significantly reduce the time it takes to produce premium content, optimized for algorithms and viewership. Maybe fans will even be able to create rough cuts of such content themselves (perhaps not in 2024).

The highlights-driven generative AI has been novel, but is mostly packages of a player’s top plays or all the ‘x’ from ‘y.’ As emotion and storytelling gets woven into these creations, the content banks are going to build up more and more so that fans may be consistently flipping between Hulu and their league or team’s app when deciding what to watch before going to bed. The relationships fans can build with their favorite shows or podcasts or creators are hard to truly measure, the metrics models are still catching up to digital interaction that’s so prolonged, invested, and sticky. So let’s talk about the next topic…

The evolving nature of engagement

We’re in the middle of the engagement era. Valuation models are often based on engagements (some include impressions, too), but as metrics and real-life results get more scrutinized, for the first time in a while the industry is reconsidering what really matters and, conversely, what just makes all sides look good to their bosses. As platforms evolve, owned channels get prioritized, and more mediums emerge, the old-school paradigms of engagement and engagement rate will evolve, too. If an impression means they walked by your store (excuse the shopping analogy; it works well here, but team platforms are not ‘storefronts’), engagement could mean they stopped and stared for a moment, they took a peek inside, they came in and browsed for a while, they came in and tried something on, they left with a purchase, they never came in at all but looked it up later, they never came in but after seeing a couple Instagram ads they added something to an online cart, they didn’t buy anything but brought a friend to the store — this list can go on and on with so many more variables and behaviors considered.

The point is that the way we think and talk about engagement is getting smarter and more thoughtful. In an industry like sports, where the longtail is so powerful (but more challenging than ever), sports organizations have to get better at understanding what is not just capturing the casual fan’s attention but what is capturing their heart and mind. The lifetime value of a fan is immeasurable, especially when their fan evangelism is accounted for, and as tempting as it is to chase the trees amidst the forest, we have to balance the casual engagements with the deeper fan touches. Expect to see innovation in measurements — not all will stick, nor should they — as we reconsider KPIs like time spent, frequency of engagement, retention, a fan’s connection tree (to other fans) and their potential k-factor, their propensity for high LTV curves, the number of platforms they engage on, and so much more. While we all love the idea of a Joe DiMaggio-like hitting streak when it comes to repeated social media success, moneyball is making its way into the industry as we consider slugging percentage and game-winning plays. That brings us to our final topic…

Eventizing across digital/social

Routine and its less-appealing stepsibling monotony are an inherent part of sports. Especially for sports with longer seasons and vast quantities of games and star players taking maintenance days, it’s hard to make every game matter. (see: The NBA In-Season Tournament as an effort to alleviate that) And that’s okay; in fact, it invites innovation. Teams and leagues are finding more ways, through brand and creator collabs, through theme nights that echo across content and social, through gamification, and more avenues to give fans a reason to consume and care — whether that means attending, watching, or just paying attention on social and digital channels.

These manufactured ‘events’ that try to break up what could otherwise feel routine are also opportunities to capture casual audiences. If you not only accept but embrace that not every piece of content and every campaign and event and game needs to try to reach your total addressable audience, organizations can hone in on specific audience cohorts. (See the appreciating engagement section). Your Hispanic Heritage activations and creative on social don’t need to go viral, but if that content can be really cool for a certain audience, that’s a win.

At the more macro level, it doesn’t take a genius to see the increase in tentpoles produced and propagated by leagues, with the NFL and their schedule release content jumpstarting the practice. What are all the opportunities for a team, whether through organic parts of the league calendar or manufactured events by teams/leagues themselves, to make it feel like a big deal to fans? Get the right partners involved to justify the investment and make the campaigns feel big and exciting, and that slugging % can go up. Other trends in this piece will make activating and executing such ‘events’ on digital/social and beyond more feasible and valuable, too.

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A common refrain for years posits that all brands are media companies, and vice-versa. Sports organizations embody this duality more than ever, with generational brands and an endless fount of valuable IP. Developing new avenues to monetize and actualize it all is top of mind for the year ahead. The pluripotency of sports is unmatched and we’re just starting to realize what that means.

Content Strategy, Digital, Social Media

Why Social Media Needs a Voice at the Table in Sports: ‘Magic can happen when you listen to your social folks’

Social media was once the province of the intern. Heck, that an intern was running the team’s or brand’s social accounts became a running trope, even as years passed and organizations recognized the increasing power of the platforms.

Even today, while social media channels are integral platforms for the team — for marketing, for brand building, for fan development, for revenue — the primary leaders behind these channels are rarely given a seat at the proverbial table.

The disruption to the paradigms that prevailed in sports for so many decades elevated social channels more quickly than organizations could (or cared to) evolve, but the way Millennials and certainly Gen Z and younger want to interact with their favorite teams and consume content has necessitated a new mindset, and forward-thinking leaders are starting to adapt. Bill Voth didn’t and doesn’t run away from change, quite the contrary, he embraces the new and novel (and ‘scary’ things he may not be expert in). So as he straddled the line between the old and new worlds of sports media and content, he recognized the key role he could play as he was brought on to the Carolina Panthers to usher in that evolution of fan engagement. For Voth, it meant providing leadership, but mostly getting out of the way.

“One of our jobs as creative leaders is to let the creatives below us, the real creators, the ones who are doers — I’m not a doer anymore, I used to be…to empower them,” said Voth, who was the young disruptor himself as he adopted social media before many of his older sports broadcasting colleagues and counterparts logged on. “There’s all this red tape above them in these organizations, there’s all these meetings and all this other stuff, and it’s your job to deal with all that stuff, to figure it out and to not micromanage them, and to let them go create and be. I think that that’s going to continue to be that way in this business for quite a while.”

To embrace emerging channels was just logical and, by the time Voth got to the Panthers, social media and team-produced original content was already a growing part of sports team operations. But there was much more evolution to come, even if meant challenging decades-old conventions about what content teams should spend their scarce time and resources to produce. Everything became more measurable in the digital and social era and that made it impossible to hide from the stark truth the numbers often told — that the ‘traditional’ content inherent to sports team coverage wasn’t what a lot of fans, especially younger fans, wanted.

It could feel like blasphemy to uproot the typical content mix, with discussions of X’s and O’s and game previews and recaps. Producing such content requires time and resources (remember those are scarce) and it may not be what a growing portion of your fan base wants. Voth noted these realities, recognizing that not all sports teams and markets are the same. The content strategy for every NFL team doesn’t have to be the same, and that shouldn’t be a divisive stance.

“In Charlotte, I did not believe there was a big enough market or a place for 30-minute coaches shows or 30-minute highlight shows,” said Voth, who was the Carolina Panthers Director of Content and Broadcasting until departing in early 2023 to start Bill Voth Digital. “If I was doing content in a Cleveland or a Pittsburgh or a Green Bay or in Dallas there is absolutely a market for that type of content. It’s specifically to the Panthers fan base…

“I didn’t think that X’s and O’s content, by and large, really hit all that great with this fan base; I think being different and funny and fun — we leaned more on that stuff than, ‘Okay, the Panthers won this weekend, let’s break down what happened.’ You get a few people reading, a few people clicking, a few people watching, but the fan base isn’t big enough to draw on those numbers that you really want if you’re going to spend the time to make content like that.”

The numbers mattered. They may be imperfect at times, but they’re a signal for what fans actually want and, in turn, content that does good numbers represents an opportunity to drive considerable revenue. As social media evolved and quickly became THE most prolific channels on which teams could reach, develop, and engage fans, organizations sought to create a content flywheel. And quality content is the fulcrum of that flywheel. Voth saw this play out first-hand, and indeed had a role in it, as the Panthers grew their content operation and saw their partnerships operation extend into digital, driving more revenue, which begat more content.

“The more you can monetize, the more staff you can bring in, the more staff you can bring in, the better content you can do, the better content you can do, the better sponsored content you can do. And it goes around and around and around and it feeds itself,” said Voth, who also talked about the value of having a digital-focused partnerships person, to serve as a bridge between departments. “So I am a big believer in if you can do really great content and you can make a lot of that branded or sponsored content, and you can really build up your numbers, you can do even more branded and sponsored content, [and] you can make money. The content people are happy because they’re doing good content; you can actually do good sponsored content, not just check the box sponsored content.”

The culture of not defaulting to convention permeated the Panthers. It had to. They couldn’t just do what other NFL teams or what standard operating procedure had been for years; they had to iterate and figure out what worked for their fans and their market. This is easier said than done and requires a bit of risk taking and, as Voth emphasized, a willingness — heck, even a desire — to fail sometimes. This extended to the team’s voice on its social channels and its general approach to content strategy. If they wanted to be an exceptional NFL club, to stand out from their counterparts across the league and even in other sports, they had to, well, stand out.

“I think it’s having an ecosystem of try stupid things, try fun things,” said Voth. “And when you have people like (former Panthers Social Media Manager) Amie Kiehn and (Panthers Social Media Coordinator) Angela (Denogean) who are like, ‘Okay, let’s go play in the sandbox and let’s try this, let’s try that’, a lot of times that content is going to hit and you can set trends. And that is definitely one of the things we tried to do for years with the Panthers.

“It was, okay, if a team is doing something, like, I automatically didn’t want to do it,. So I didn’t have a hard and fast rule — don’t use The Office, don’t use SpongeBob, don’t use talking heads like Max Kellerman and all this stuff, don’t use L’s, but was very much like, ‘Hey, can you try and not do content with that stuff because everyone else is doing it?'”

There’s a little bit of ‘get comfortable being uncomfortable’ ethos to such a strategy, doing things no one else is doing, testing the untested. It’s not easy for leaders to adopt this mindset, let alone to hand over the reins to employees who may not have several decades of experience, but instead have years of experience in newer platforms and culture that their more senior supervisors do not. It takes humility to recognize that, yes, there is still a lot of sagacity to pass down and guidance to provide, but no one ever did anything extraordinary while held back on a tight leash. There IS disparity in knowledge and experience and skills — but the point is that the disparity and asymmetry goes both ways. And it’s when leaders have the foresight and courage to humble themselves that the extraordinary can be achieved.

“I think social folks, social media managers in particular, still need to be in the room more. I think it’s come a long way where, as you and I started getting into this digital and social, we were never included in conversations,” said Voth who then alluded to a viral, secondary schedule release video produced by the Tennessee Titans in 2023. “…[The Titans] posted two videos during schedule release. The main video they dropped at 8:00 was a wonderfully produced video. I’m sure whether they did it internally, whether they used an agency to do it, I’m not sure, I think they probably did it internally, but it was wonderful.

“But then of course they posted the ‘Man on the Street’ video that was just a couple of social people saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we try this?’ And that’s the magic that can happen when you listen to your social folks.”

No one will question the power and importance of social media these days, let alone leave the reins of the platforms solely in the hands of an untested intern. Some of the first full-time dedicated social media pros at sports teams now bear titles like VP or SVP, so the evolution is happening. But it’s about more than job titles and a decade of experience earning a seat at the table and a voice. It’s recognizing that those in the trenches every day, consuming, engaging, and creating with and alongside fans have valuable, esoteric insights that decades of experience and advanced degrees can’t match. All you have to do is invite their input and listen.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BILL VOTH (a lot more!)

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College, Social Media

Inside /r/CFB — the Subreddit where College Football Fan Engagement Thrives and a Community is Sown

There’s unbelievable breaking news or a crazy game just ended — if you’re a sports fan, what do you do?

There are a number of options and many larger platforms have come and gone over the years (remember Facebook Stadium?). Some will go to their intimate group chat on iMessage or maybe Insta, some fans will tweet into the noisy timeline, maybe you’ll go and comment on the Instagram post from a news outlet or comment in the Bleacher Report feed — but some of the most engaged sports fans reside on Reddit.

This article is not a recommendation to drop everything and prioritize Reddit for a social media strategy; it’s a look at one of the most engaged sports communities everywhere, a subreddit that is just outside the top 250 subreddits in terms of subscribers but is often right near the top in average comments per day — /r/CFB, the college football community on Reddit.

In such a tribal sport, why do over 2 million fans subscribe to ‘The Internet’s Tailgate’ (as the subreddit calls itself) and what’s it like to manage and moderate such a vibrant, vehement community? Bobak Ha’Eri is part of the team behind r/CFB and has been there since the early days of the subreddit, helping to oversee the community as its growth has made things more fun, but more complicated. The result today is a thriving subreddit (and a brand that has extended to a Twitter account with hundreds of thousands of followers) that has had to professionalize, in some ways, but remains as irreverent and funny and entertaining as ever.

So what does happen when news breaks? When it does, Ha’Eri and his r/CFB co-moderators have to be ready for the tsunami coming.

“If you don’t moderate a website at all, you have total chaos,” said Ha’Eri, who had experience in message board moderation before /r/CFB, but on a much smaller scale in comparison. “With a college football section, one of the weird things that we get, which isn’t involving offensive material, is everybody’s going to try and post the same story as soon as it happens…”

The criteria for the /r/CFB when it comes to managing the deluge of content that 2.1M+ subscribers can bring, Ha’Eri explained, is: “Does it add to the conversation? Then maybe we’ll allow another one in. But it’s to also manage what I know most users would like. What we learn, because we sometimes will churn out surveys [asking] users what they want to have, and what they like about r/CFB is a variety of stories, including kind of the squirrely ones that people hadn’t thought of or heard of, is either a wacky thing at a minor school or just some kind of aspect…”

With a subreddit that big, it becomes necessary to have a more formalized approach to moderation, a framework that can guide the decision-making of the team of moderators that ultimately direct the traffic on /r/CFB. Ha’Eri has a legal background, so his mind sometimes thinks in such terms when considering moderation choices. The team behind /r/CFB has also organically developed an approach to leading the community and the brand. Because when you’re that big, there is power to wield. And, as someone once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

“[You] kind of trust [Reddit’s upvote/downvote] system, but at the same time, we have to play a more parental role,” said Ha’Eri, who fell in love with college football as an undergrad at USC. “And again, I’m really belaboring this, making it academic, but from a legal analogy, you know, that’s what the judge’s role is. The judge has to say, is this case enough to move forward to a jury? Is this enough where we’ve stated something that is a question that the law provides a remedy, so it isn’t quite that mind-intensive to be a moderator.

“We’ve always had that level of trying to keep some sort of level of equality between all of us with some respect for seniority and understanding. So then we created an executive committee of more senior moderators who always end up making the bigger decisions like should we move forward and make an LLC? Should we move forward and make that? So we’re not forcing [things] because I mean, you know, you might have up to 20 or 30 moderators [and] that can be onerous to try and get everyone on the same page. And also sometimes you need to move quickly.”

Even with a soft layer of oversight, it’s primarily the users and their upvotes and engagement that drive r/CFB. It is quite the cosmopolitan community; spend a few minutes browsing the threads and you’ll quickly have counted dozens of different college programs represented. Fans that make their way to sports bars IRL to watch the Saturday games will often go to the ‘Michigan’ bar or an ‘Ohio State’ bar, where they can be surrounded by fellow fans all sporting the same colors. And online, there are plenty of team-specific message boards and communities for college football fans, so why do so many eschew those more insular places in favor of the mixed town square on /r/CFB? It’s an interesting question posed to Ha’Eri, because college football is so tribal; it’s that passionate patriotism that makes the sport so special. But r/CFB has thrived because of, not in spite of, the melting pot.

Ha’Eri once found himself on USC message boards, but he’s come to recognize why so many fans flock to /r/CFB, often leaving their segregated communities behind. And it’s that intermingling that has made r/CFB so special.

“They have their own peculiarities oftentimes,” said Ha’Eri of the more team-specific platforms and message boards. “it’s a very concentrated community and they sometimes see feedback loops…Sometimes you get irrational views and it becomes an echo chamber, and that echo chamber feedback loop can be an issue. And frankly, sometimes you’re like, these people, I’m a fan, but you all sound crazy….

“r/CFB did something that’s hard to do,” he continued, “which is have a college football website that caters to all fans and can keep the peace…I think people like hearing from other fan bases. They like hearing news…”

As Ha’Eri noted in discussing the vastness of the /r/CFB community, there are over 130 FBS teams in college football, each with their own dedicated fan bases. Some fan bases are bigger than others, rivalries can get fierce, and power users can dominate the conversation if left unchecked. Ha’Eri and his colleagues know what makes r/CFB so special, though, and to hear him tell it is to understand that there’s, well, at least something of a method to the madness — underlying objectives that guide how they want to govern the community.

“Our official mission statement is ‘We’re a welcoming community that celebrates fun, camaraderie and creativity in all of college football,’” he said. “Because that is what we’re really about…r/CFB offers that kind of like, here’s all the news items that are kind of hot right now. Oh, but the fun thing is, here’s a community of people that love to make, usually jokes or interesting commentary and sometimes worthless commentary. But that’s what the the voting arrows are for…”

Beyond the mission statement, the alternative moniker of r/CFB feels so spot on for anyone familiar with the community. Because if Twitter once proclaimed itself as ‘the biggest virtual sports bar in the world,‘ /r/CFB really does feel like ‘The Internet’s Tailgate.’ A place where this plenty of passion and shouting, to be sure, but also the jokes and witty commentary to which Ha’Eri alluded.

To keep the analogy going, and to try and understand why so many fans go to Reddit, of all places, to expound and vent, there’s something special about the communal nature of r/CFB that stands in stark contrast to the noisy nature of shouting into the void on Twitter. Comment trees sprout branches upon branches on /r/CFB, conversation builds with others more so than the hordes of individuals ratio’ing the tweet of a team or reporter. Fans aren’t just seeking an outlet to scream, they’re seeking other fans. I’ve noticed, at eventful times, fans going to Instagram and commenting en masse on the team’s most recent post, even if it’s from several hours ago like a photo of the team in warm-ups. That’s the pull that Reddit offers. Because whether it’s the game thread or the postgame thread, the r/CFB ‘tailgaters’ go to their college football town square to say their piece, knowing others are waiting to do the same — and react and engage with others.

“Some people, I swear, have been sitting back as the game is going on and [thinking] like, I know what I’m going to write in the post game,” said Ha’Eri, who has helped grow the @RedditCFB Twitter account to over 330,000 follows, partly by sharing some of the best /r/CFB posts and comments. “They’ll write something and happily hit F5 [to refresh] over and over again the moment it appears…Sometimes it’s serious, sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes it’s a lot of frustration. But it provokes conversation because the way the comment section works is they’re all comment trees based off a top level comment.”

As fans come back week after week, game after game, day after day, something starts to happen — community forms. Ha’Eri and his moderator team mostly sit back and let fans start conversations and go back and forth with each other. It’s seeing that play out which is so heartening to Ha’Eri and why all the (unpaid) work that goes into keeping it going is worthwhile. Because while there may be biting jokes, maybe even some name-calling — it’s all fun at the end of the day and it’s a community that transcends any differences in team colors, accents, and borders. There’s something life-reinforcing about that, at the risk of hyperbole, reminds us about the inherent power of community that sports embodies. That’s the magic one can see in r/CFB.

“It’s a part of the [college football] culture. We’re used to ranting at each other or making funny comments,” said Ha’Eri. “We found our strength is a community and the users that come to us and what makes them useful is that people bond over the sport.

“Sport is is beyond politics. It’s beyond [this or that]. It’s joyous, it’s fun, and if you hopefully have a healthy relationship with it, you know, ultimately it’s silly and frivolous.”

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BOBAK HA’ERI

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