Mediaboss Marketing

The lifeblood of college football fandom is changing.

The painted faces crammed into the student section of stadiums nationwide have turned away from newspapers and talk radio toward social media to get stats, scores and even messages from coaches and players in real time. As social media infiltrates stadiums and clubhouses, teams are scrambling on and off the field to reach students and young alumni an audience that constitutes 12 percent of game attendance, a figure that will only grow over time.

To understand the growing role of social media in collegiate sports, consider a 2011 study by Galen Clavio (.pdf) at Indiana University. It found 18- to 29-year-old fans are significantly more likely to rely upon social platforms like Facebook and YouTube for sports info than those older than 30. Although Clavio acknowledges the survey may self-select for a group of tech-savvy, high-earning respondents, the findings jibe with those of Pew Internet, which found 86 percent of adults aged 18 to 29 the highest percentage among all age groups use social networking sites on a regular basis.

Athletic departments have felt this shift, and some are struggling to navigate the changing landscape.

Pleasing students is one thing, but running a business (and college sports is a business) is quite another. The boosters who fill athletic department coffers typically are older than students and, according to Clavios study, beyond social medias influential reach. That may lead some athletic departments to figure, Why bother? Attendance stats support this view, as the greatest number of fans at college football games are aged 45 to 54. Theyre followed by the 35 to 44 set. But the number of fans who rely upon social media for much of their news will only grow.

No less a problem are television networks, which are quick to say social media can infringe on exclusivity contracts. Thats led to some effort to rein in social media. In 2009, for example, the Southeastern Conference briefly considered banning social media at all sporting events, an idea that seems absurd, if not impossible to enforce.

If the Iranian government couldnt cut off Twitter in the middle of country-wide riots, the SEC certainly wasnt going to be able to cut off social media at an Alabama-Tennessee game, said Clavio. The SEC got that message and settled on a not-for-profit social media policy where fans could post updates, take pictures or shoot video as long as they made no money doing so.

The relationship between sports and social remains occasionally tenuous, but it is a commanding player on any athletic programs roster so much so that a teams website, once the dominant digital domain for team information, pales in the shadow of its Facebook page.

Among Top 25 NCAA football teams, social media pages are built around a few core principles: fun, short, engaging messages and pictures. Lots of big, beautiful pictures. Take the University of Michigans Facebook page, a destination engineered to prime a daylong fan-gasm in the virtual Big House. The site is built for fans, not boosters or networks, and with nearly 1 million faithful followers, director of digital marketing Jordan Maleh delivers what users want. The page features high-res images that easily stockpile 20,000 Likes or more. Updates featuring game scores or rally calls accumulate thousands of comments ranging from a simple Go Blue to armchair quarterback criticism of the teams performance. Every sport gets its own social site, with 29 in all.

I view Michigan athletics almost like a league. Major League Baseball or the NBA has 20-plus teams; we are now focused on 29 [Wolverine] teams as opposed to just one, Maleh said.

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College Football Fans Go Social for Sports News