Social Media and Sports: A Godsend or an Accident Waiting to Happen?
Posted by Adrian Sertl on Fri, Feb 03, 2012
For sports fans, the proliferation of athletes and their respective clubs (to say nothing of the sports media personalities) who are actively engaged in Social Media has been a revelation. Most, if not all, of the clubs in the top leagues around the world have official Facebook pages and Twitter accounts where fans can go and find out the latest news, engage in a discussion with other supporters, or, more so the case with Twitter, connect directly with the team’s stars themselves. Some clubs also have their own official YouTube channels which allow fans to watch match highlights or interviews or even get a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the club that was previously restricted to journalists and team officials. The phrase ‘being one with your favourite team’ has never been so truthful.
Of course there are always Social Media pitfalls that these organizations really need to be keen to avoid if they want their supporters to have an overall positive experience. Unfortunately for my favourite soccer club FC Bayern Munich, last week they managed to (inadvertently) get themselves entangled in one of these pitfalls when they released a new app on Facebook, ‘The New FCB Star’, which was met with overwhelmingly negative feedback from the club’s supporters. Here, then, is a cautionary tale.
Last Thursday FC Bayern announced on their official Facebook Fan page that the club was going to be signing a new player and that fans could click on a link that would direct them to a live press conference containing all the details of who this new player was. To set a bit of context here, for weeks supporters of the club, much like most clubs’ supporters do in the designated transfer ‘windows’, had been discussing transfer rumours and debating the merits of player A or player B so this announcement of an imminent player signing was met with a ton of anticipation; all of this was in spite of the assertion by the club that there were going to be no players coming to or leaving the club this January.
Clicking on the link did indeed bring up a stream of an official looking press conference (featuring the Club’s Marketing and Sport directors as well as the team Captain) but much to viewers’ chagrin the signing wasn’t what they were expecting.
Essentially the club used the guise of a false press conference to let the supporters know that they were in fact the club’s new signing, the twelfth man as it is known in soccer circles, and that the new Facebook app was going to allow the supporters to become even more deeply immersed in the on goings of FC Bayern. While the club appeared to be acting with good intentions they completely misread the prevailing mentality that a good chunk of the fan base held; the thousands of negative comments on the Facebook page most definitely proved that point. Plain and simple the supporters felt swindled.
How is it that a club that appears to be fairly Social Media savvy could have misfired in such a big way with this publicity stunt? All it would have taken was for someone to take some time to read fan comments on either the Facebook page, Twitter, or any of the many fan forums to find out what the supporters were discussing (like transfer rumours) and perhaps they would have re-thought the whole thing altogether or at the very least communicated it differently. Realizing their error the club was very quick to post an apology on both the official website and the Facebook Fan page.
We here at BrandProtect have a long list of clients that use our Social Media Analysis and Research Tool (SMART) to help avoid the kind of incidents that FC Bayern had to deal with last week by making sure potential sparks do not become raging infernos. Our fully customizable search tool allows for clients to monitor a host of issues pertaining to their brand; we search a wide variety of social media outlets and report mentions back based not only on the general sentiment but on the authority that the particular site holds on the internet. This allows you to prioritize incidents based on how likely web users are likely to see it. Of course if a situation does happen to get out of control, we’ve got the knowledge and experience to assist you not only in containing the issue but coming up with an appropriate response that allows you to engage in rational dialogue with people as opposed to a more heavy handed approach.
We don’t want to see your online reputation tarnished.
What other risks can a brand face if they choose to ignore what their customers say? How important is monitoring to your brand?