It is that time of year where we are finishing the semester and getting ready for the holidays. Yet, it is also the time for an important athletic event that happens every year around this time for college football: The Heisman Trophy Awards. First of all, I would like to congratulate all of the athletes who were finalists for the Heisman Trophy. This is a great honor and you all should be very proud of yourself. I felt this year’s class had some tremendous athletes and I am sure we will continue to hear more about each of these individuals in the future.
I realized when the finalists were announced that I had a connection to each university in some way or fashion. My very first college indoor track and field meet was held at the University of Oklahoma back in Fall 2001. Michigan was one of the five schools I took my recruiting visit to back in 2000 (beautiful campus!) and I am good friends with many professors and awesome social media and sports professionals at Clemson. Last but not least, I teach and work as an assistant professor at the University of Louisville.
Second, it was very exciting to see the first football player from the University of Louisville to get this prestigious award, Lamar Jackson. Congrats, Lamar!
While the players and the award focused on the analysis of the statistics on the field, it is also important to look at what was happening off the field and on social media from each of these schools. Joe Londergan (a contributor for Front Office Sports) wrote a pretty thorough review of each of the Heisman campaigns from each team and what they did overall on social media to promote their players. Joe made some good points related to some of the trends and special features that were highlighted in each of the campaigns that were initiated by each of the teams.
As a professor who teaches social media, I tend to look at various sources to determine best practices and ideas/lessons learned for the future for various campaigns. So, I thought I’d share a new take on the analysis of the campaigns here that may have not have yet been looked at. I wanted to see what the data said online.
For my social media class in the spring (#Freberg17), my students will have access to Sysomos for their strategic social media campaigns to listen and collect data to brainstorm ideas and be able to conduct a thorough data driven strategic situational analysis for their clients. The students will also have access to use this tool to determine whether or not their ideas for their client went well in their evaluation section.
So, with that being said, I went ahead and looked at some of the areas that may want to be reported in the evaluation part of the process for each of these campaigns. This is an important part of the campaign to determine whether or not you were successful in reaching your goals across the different mediums and channels. For social media, measurement and evaluation are becoming more and more key to determine next steps as well as determining lessons learned.
I wanted to focus on some of the key areas I think are important to include in any evaluation report for social media campaigns. We see a lot of times the vanity metrics being reported (ex. number of impressions, follower increase for certain accounts, number of mentions, etc). These are fine to start off with, but you want to also look at the various engagement metrics and look at ways to better understand who you are reaching (ex. communities and influencers), what they are saying (ex. sentiment), share of voice (how much of the conversation are you a part of related to this topic), and action steps (behavioral metrics based on what you have asked your community to do with call-to-action steps).
These are just a few to start off with to give you an idea of what some of these social listening tools can do for evaluating a campaign such as the ones we have seen for each of the Heisman finalists this year.
Influencers and Communities are key parties for players to be aware of.
I think this is one of the coolest things we can see here from what Sysomos can offer. These communities are based on what we are able to collect on Twitter, and as you can see here, each Heisman finalist had a different relationship based on the communities they engage with related to their campaign hashtag. Within each of these networks, you are able to determine 1) the overall influence of each of these accounts and their authority and 2) the strength in their connection with the community.
There were some crossovers with some of the main communities we were able to see here from the data, but within each of these communities, there are distinct influencers and accounts that are definitely there to start a conversation with and establish a mutually beneficial relationship.
Lamar Jackson
Jabrill Peppers
Deshaun Watson
Baker Mayfield and Dede Westbrook
Branding of the hashtag is the new tagline for a campaign.
Determining what your hashtag is going to be for a campaign is really, really important. You don’t want it to be too confusing or not strongly connected with your overall message strategy for a campaign. In addition, you want to make sure your player is in the center of the conversation as well.
As you can see here with these word clouds, that each of these images show here are the keywords that are most frequently mentioned (ex. the bigger the name, the more mentions they are able to get here). As you can see here, there are some images where you see the player’s name or even their Twitter handle. What is important here (and what you can do here as well in Sysomos) is see the associated keywords attached to each of these mentions and analyze these. This is important from a social media strategic standpoint to evaluate what are the other associations that are being made about the campaign, and if there is anything that needs to be potentially integrated within the campaign here. Ideally, for the campaign analysis like one for these Heisman finalists, you’d want to have the campaign hashtag being used along with the player’s name and ideally, their Twitter handle.
Lamar Jackson
Jabrill Peppers
Baker Mayfield & Dede Westbrook
Deshaun Watson
There are some lessons we can all take away here as sports and social media professionals:
- Sometimes the best spokesperson is yourself. I was very impressed with the authenticity and personality Lamar showed during his speech and at the various award shows. You could see his personal brand shine and I wish this was highlighted more to go along with the great stats and plays he was making on the field. I think all of the players who were finalists could look at social media more as a way to engage with fans and others to help establish their own personal brand. Education and training in social media is definitely key, but also feeling empowered to confidently engage with others online to enhance their personal brand is the next step to take their brands to the next level.
- Building relationships with online communities can help now and in the future. These communities are forming because they are part of your fan base. Evaluating the strength of the connections and relationships with each of these communities is important. There are going to be some that will be part of your community at the local level (which is important), but there could be some opportunities here. These teams and players could use this analysis as a guide to look at where they need to go online to make these stronger connections and what could be some ways in starting the conversation with these individuals. Taking action and starting the conversation is definitely the first step.
- Social media campaigns provide a perfect opportunity for storytelling. I think that’s one of the best things about social media is the fact you are able to tell your story and go directly to your fans without going through gatekeepers to get your message out. I was impressed with the way Clemson (S/O to Jonathan, Jeff, and Nik + your team for this!) did this not only throughout the season, but really shined the light on Deshaun during this campaign before and after the awards ceremony.
- Use data that is available on social media to help guide strategies. There are many, many tools and resources out there to use for conducting a competitive situational analysis or brainstorm potential strategies. Jason Falls actually spoke about this at the LDA conference a few months ago and how it is key to make sure to integrate data from social and digital media into your SWOT analysis. Sysomos is just one tool to do this – but I think this needs to be part of a social media strategy for any campaign. If you are at all interested in what else Sysomos or other tools can do, please let me know and I’d be more than happy to chat with you about some of these options.
Let me know what you think about these. Hope all is well and have a great day!
Best Wishes,
