The NFL's Social Media Campaign

If you have been following this blog over the past 11 weeks then you have seen me write about the NFL's relationship with media. Regular season games get monster ratings for the networks. Post season games do even better. The league has learned how to utilize its relationship with the broadcast networks with the newest advances in television technologies (can you say 3D Super Bowl??)

That is why it's no surprise the sport also dominates on the social media playing field. The area of social media the league gets its most attention is twitter. Most NFL websites have blog writers and beat writers. Twitter is a platform for beat writers to share breaking news quickly to fans. If a story is of high priority, there is a good chance it will be written in a blog post. Twitter is the "preamble" to blog post. I follow many NFL writers and insiders on twitter. Half their tweets are about blog posts they are preparing to write. I've stolen their approach this semester and I do the same thing. I use Tiny URL to link followers to my work.

Players are actively involved with twitter. Think about it for one second, what corporate job gives you direct access to high profile employees? The NFL does. You can follow your favorite players on twitter, tweet them, and re-tweat their posts. On many occasions fans have received responses from a player they have tweeted. This is a great way for fans to interact with players and is another way of connecting fans to the sport. The league does have a strict rule prohibiting players to use social media during the games. I think its a smart rule. At some point their needs to be a sense of privacy in a locker room or on a sideline. I comparre this to an employer prohibiting their employees from tweeting in the board room.

The NFL also uses Facebook to connect with fans. Each day, my Facebook feed will show something like this:

The league makes an attempt to share multi-media with its fans. This is a fan driven sport and the more access fans have to its favorite players and teams the better it is for the NFL. By littering these types of posts on Facebook there is a better chance this link will be shared by users (this happens with viral videos all the time). Expanding your audience is always a good thing if you are a growing business; the more eyeballs on your product the better chance it has to succeed and make money for you.

The NFL uses video to assist its social media campaign. Video blogs have become the standard for most reporters. During training camp, fans want to see the newest practice videos and post practice soundbites associated with blog posts. Here is an example of a Jets Blog written by Rich Cimini of ESPN New York. Rich is perfect at writing two to three blog posts a day, tweeting about his posts, and supporting his writing with a video package. 

My original proposal was to move an existing NFL franchise back to Los Angeles, the second largest media market in the country. This is something the league is already talking about and there is an online presence about the subject. If I were to lead up the social media campaign for this project I would create a webpage in conjunction with the league informing fans about the topic. The page would highlight my points for placing a team in LA. I would use twitter to tweet articles from this blog specifically relating to the topic. If the project grew attention I would utilize video platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo to distribute league provided video materials and commercials centered around the topic. If the topic were to be talked about on television, radio, or in print I would direct viewers to those distribution platforms through Facebook and Twitter. 

When proposing a topic the most important component is the credibility of the writer and the source. I would make sure the information being disseminated to the public was thorough and accurate. Then I would take to the social media masses and spread my word. This has become the way of the world on the web and it has been successful so far.