Sports Geek Look Book – @NBA edition

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Podcast transcription

Harf: And find out what’s happening on the sports digital and media ‘guruness’ and of course Sean Callanan is our man for all that from SportsGeekHQ.com. I’ve been caught on the hop here Sean, good afternoon.

Sean: Good day Harf can you hear me?

Harf: Yes I can.

Sean: Well that’s good. You get a few technical glitches, that’s why you just get a sports geek in!

Harf: That’s what we do on Harf time! What’s happening in the world of sports geekiness?

Sean: What we were doing, this week we launched the Sports Geek Look Book to look at all the NBA websites. So there’s thirty NBA websites and we’re constantly going around checking what they’re all doing, how they’re activating and commercialising their websites. So what we’ve done is taken the heavy clicking away from people and you can just go to SportsGeekHQ.com and download the Look Book. So it has all the thirty teams and so you can see how they’re commercialising their website. Some of the teams have a presenting partner, some of them are really pushing their own team brand. Also how teams, depending on how they’re going travelling on the court, not everyone can have Lebron James to be selling out the stadium and everyone behind the Miami Heat. You’ve got to do different things. So you get to get a good feel for what all the different teams are doing, how they’re structuring their site in what type of content and they’re pushing, some of the teams are really pushing heavily into videos. The Trailblazers are doing a lot of work effectively on their own TV channel and pushing a lot of video content. So their site is very video heavy whereas other sites are really pushing, really locally.
Even though we all know we all follow the NBA from here in Australia, a lot of the NBA’s marketing efforts or at least the teams is very much localised to their local market. So there are a lot of offers there for local fans and part of that is to do with the way that the marketing and the rules around the NBA and what they can do, is available to them. Because NBA teams can only have sponsors and can only market to sponsors, I think it’s a seventy five mile radius. So even though they have global appeal they can’t go and push out a really big sponsorship activation, because then that becomes the territory of the NBA for the whole country and also the NBA globally. So even though you have these really big brands like The Celtics and The Lakers who have millions and millions of Facebook fans potentially driving to their site, when you go to the actual sites themselves they still seem rather localised in offering deals around the region whether it be Minneapolis for Minnesota or in Portland or around San Francisco for the Golden State Warriors.

Harf: I was peeking through your Look Book today when you sent through the link to this and I found that the Boston Celtics website is the biggest in terms of sponsorship and opportunities from that point of view. The other ones are pretty clean, most of it is focused on play content or analysis of the games and what’s coming up. But the Boston one seemed to stand out really drastically as the one that had a hell of a lot more advertising and sponsorship on it.

Sean: Yeah and it also depends on what is their overall digital strategy? Like if you saw the Knicks, the Knicks site, it’s pretty lean, it doesn’t have too much commercialisation on it. But they’ve actually got a secondary site which is called Knicks Now. So they’ve got a different site that’s a little bit more consumer friendly. It’s a little bit better for sharing and it sort of busts out of the template, I guess what we’d call a CMS or a content management system from a tech speak. Busts out of that template a little bit and be a bit more flexible on what they can offer. So there’s a few teams that have secondary sites, KnicksNow.com, nicks now dot com, ImATrailBlazerFan.com, WolvesNations.com, there are all these secondary sites, they’re also trying to push their fans to. So not all the action necessarily happening on the one page, on a standard homepage, some of the teams are looking to reach their fans and really push that fan engagement because they’re competing with the ESPNs of the world and the Fox Sports of the world for their content and they can provide content that some of those media outlets can’t provide because they don’t have the access to the players and that’s one of the things that fans really do want.

Harf: I was interested to find out Sean your take on teams that aren’t going well, how do they stay positive and market teams when they aren’t winning?

Sean: Part of it is that you’re always going to have fans that stick through thick and thin. So you have to embrace those fans that stick fat. Part of it is pushing the entertainment angle of the game so you know the Detroit Pistons who were my team from the 80s, I still follow the Pistons but at the moment, they just suck at the minute. They’ve actually been playing a little bit better.

Harf: Is the microwave Johnston playing?

Sean: No, Vinnie ‘microwave’ Johnston isn’t still playing.

Harf: He’s my favourite.

Sean: Yeah I was a big fan of Vinnie but yeah they were offering a thing with the new technology in Detroit called quickly where you register to get a ticket alert and the quicker you get in and get those tickets, the cheaper you get them. And the ticket price will keep going up to a point. So they’re just doing some fun engaging things to one keep the fans that are going to stick by, give them some rewards, get them coming to the game but really making the game a whole entertaining experience because they can’t do anything. They can’t guarantee a win but they do, do a lot of their marketing around the visiting team. Actually the Pistons did beat the Heat this year but they’ll do a lot of marketing around the marquee teams of the NBA.

Harf: Okay well that’s a summary of that. Other things involved in social media of course are passwords and Burger King found out the hard one and they had a good one.

Sean: Just yesterday the Burger King Twitter account was hacked. And quite humorously they changed the avatar to the McDonalds logo and said they’d been bought by McDonalds. So it did get a bit of press. Everyone was obviously re-tweeting it and seen that it had been hacked. Took them a little while to get control and shut it down and get the account back and then even today Jeep in the States had their Twitter account hacked. So again, it make sense to make sure you’ve got some strong passwords, makes sense you understand who’s got access to your Twitter account or your Facebook account. There was a few people joking around Burger King, perhaps they shouldn’t have had the password as ‘whopper123’.

Harf: [Laughs]

Sean: I just tweeted out, maybe some of the listeners can suggest bad sports password like King James having his password as ‘Lebron23’ or Kobe Bryant having his password as ‘TradeDwight’, that’s hard to say! So potentially yeah but making sure you secure all your passwords is the main thing and make it hard for people to crack because obviously it’s going to be a little bit of a thing, there will be definitely people trying to hack accounts and see what kind of gags they can get!

Harf: Good advice from SportsGeekH.com, don’t you worry about that. Thank you mate see you next week!

Sean: No worries mate.