Online marketers of all stripes could relate when Chris Hall of the U.S. Soccer Federation quoted basketball great John Wooden at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in
2. Soccer as a spectator sport is barely on the
3. American soccer fans’ allegiance is largely local, yet the U.S. Soccer Federation has no local presence.
4. Many soccer fans in the
5. Organizationally, the U.S. Soccer Federation is still in the process of shifting from a command-and-control culture to a culture of empowering nonstaff to have brand control.
6. The danger zones for social media tend to be politics, religion and sports.
7. The organization expects they will have uninterrupted wireless access in
* Done its homework. As the joke goes, English football fans are likelier to change their spouse than change their team allegiance. So the U.S. Soccer Federation talked with European football club peers to tap into their online strategy: Treat supporters as part of the family, give them what they want and keep them engaged.
* Created foundations for real-world community. Pluck Media, recently acquired by Demand Media, has assisted with the Federation’s social-media strategy and elevated the level of user-generated content via blog and forum commenting. The Federation has also implemented a bar program that allows local bars to self-identify as places where the games are screened so local fans can watch matches together. Since bars are not always appropriate venues, the organization is also exploring other ways to bring families of fans together offline, such as house parties and community screenings. This kind of grass-roots organizing will be a focus of the Federation’s strategy moving forward.
The room was packed during the panel, replete with soccer fans and geeks who devoured the presentation but were not satisfied with the pace of the U.S. Soccer Federation’s progress. In the Q-and-A that followed, audience members said they want more passion in the coverage, more power for the fans to contribute to the site, better mobile accessibility and more sophisticated geo-based services such as Gowalla and Foursquare. They also homed in on how behind-the-curve the Federation is on Spanish-language adoption. The reasonable but unsatisfying answer — that Hispanic audiences are an important of the equation long term, but short term, they’re a small portion of their traffic — did not seem to satisfy these, the harshest critics.
Still, the changes are a step in the right direction and can serve as guideposts for the rest of us who are reinventing and fine-tuning our own online strategies.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Let Atlanta know what you think