So I recently became a fan of the Clemson Tigers...on social media! I will always be a Georgia Bulldog, but I came across an article recently about how Clemson New and Creative Media team is #winning and decided to check it out for myself. I help manage social media accounts for my job so I find myself paying attention to college athletics social media pages from time to time. With their recent chance at winning the CFB National Championship title, there has been a reason for non-Clemson fans to pay attention to their social media accounts. From videos of Coach Swinny Dabbing going viral to a Match.com dating profile with hopes of meeting up with ESPN's College Game Day, their social media team shows us how to do social media the right way. Aside from the content created around the CFB National Championship I think that their overall presence on social media is better than most college athletic accounts.
I checked out their Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Vine accounts. What stood out to me the most was their videos. They share the videos across all platforms and most, if not all of them are made from Vine. Their Vine account has over 11 million loops which is incredible for a college athletics page. Vine is not a platform that most schools use And use effectively, but Clemson has mastered it. They create these short videos for every sport from preseason workouts to game day which not only hypes up fans during the season, but keeps them interested in the off season. It's a creative, quick and easy way to engage fans other than using graphics and photos if executed the right way. Fans retweet, like, and share a lot of their content which is instant feedback telling them they're doing the right things. It's obvious they are current and know how to appeal to their audience with images like this:
Georgia's social media accounts and New Media department, Hunker Down Productions, have been exceptional as well. The videos that they create are amazing and if they ever decided to make a full length movie I would watch it in theaters. I think our video production is similar, but we await the football hype videos over everything else. I think Clemson takes followers behind the scenes of their college athletes and delivers it in a six second package that leaves you wanting more. It is even a great way for recruits and prospective students to spark interest in the university. The same could be said for Georgia too, but Clemson gave us a run for our money with this one:
Clemson's new media team and their creative work is something that I will be keeping an eye on as far as social media goes. Football is another story, so nice job in social media land, but there still ain't nothin' finer in the land...
We have all seen the Michael Jordan Crying Face memes on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I recently saw an article from ESPN.com about the possibility of getting sued over using MJ in one of his most emotional times. Getting straight to the point, you won't get sued for retweeting this meme,but Michael Jordan or the original photographer (Associated Press) could try to sue if they wanted to, but have real problems to deal with.
There was a recent case with Dancing with Stars' Val Chmerkovskiy. He shared a meme of a little girl in hopes to get a conversation started about childhood obesity. Well he got a conversation started alright. While the sister of the little girl was on Facebook she saw the image and was obviously upset that someone had posted this image of her little sister and made it into a meme. The photo was taken without the knowledge of the little girls' family in 2008 and the family decided to sue Val for $6 million dollars for defamation, emotional distress, and invasion of privacy for making the meme go viral. The original photographer on the other hand is only being sued for $600,000. This doesn't seem fair considering the meme has been around since 2014.
Though he did not create the meme, he shared it and is still receiving a lot of heat about it from social media followers. It turns out the little girl has Down Syndrome which makes it all worse, but there was no way for him or anyone else to know that. It does not make it right, but I don't think he should be sued for millions of dollars for posting an image that he did not create and did not have malice intentions on the little girl. From a PR perspective I would have told him not to do it from the beginning, but sometimes people do things that they should have thought twice about. He apologized and the case is ongoing. Memes are a big trend in social media and they don't seem to be going away for a while. They can be made from anything from an athlete to a popular event to a regular person. Most users have shared these images and don't think about how it can affect the person that the image is about. Most are harmless, but some can be harmful. Continue to share the funny ones about celebrities, but stay away from the ones with people like you and me. It's all in fun until someone gets sued!
Emojis are essential to any text, tweet, snap, and caption. These fun faces are more than just an embellishment on how happy your are to talk to your BFF. Emojis have come a long way from the generic smiley face. Over the past few years we have seen a few developments with skin color, relationships, and the long awaited middle finger emoji. Apple, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter have all improved or added emojis for their users. Twitter began to create a special emoji when you use specific hashtags. This started with the 2014 World cup when they introduced "hashflags":
Majors brands and events have been receiving this extra special something for recently like Coca Cola, Toyota, Star Wars, and the American Music Awards. These hashtags have been used for major sporting events as well including the College Football Playoff Championship and Super Bowl 50. The 2016 NBA All-Star Weekend is the newest sporting event to get in on the action. There are 32 new hashtag emojis for this event for players and basketball fans (including myself) are loving it. Check out all 32 below:
Whether or not you are a huge basketball fan if you know who these players are these emojis sum them up in an emoji perfectly! I have to admit when I saw these I laughed out loud because these are so spot on. The official 2016 NBA All-Star twitter account used them all throughout the weekend.
I'm sure that this will have a positive impact on the impressions and mentions the NBA and All-star weekend would normally receive. Even if the impact is not that large of a difference it is so much more fun to tweet about these games now. I don't know if this is temporary or forever, but I sure hope these are here to stay!
Did you see Beyonce featuring the Super Bowl? She was amazing and the game kept me occupied until it was showtime, but then I realized it was really just a cover up to announce her new tour... All jokes aside congrats to the Broncos and Peyton Manning, they played a great game and I can't wait for the Cam Newton memes to go viral on everything. Lets recap Super Bowl 50 from a Social media standpoint... Here is my review of the Sports Stadium feature. My first con is that the app is not an actual app as I was led to believe from reading an article. It is actually a feature on Facebook that you access by typing in "Sports Stadium" or by typing in the team names into the search bar. I only had 8 out of 561 Facebook friends interacting on this feature. I'm not sure how they got the word out about it, but that is pretty surprising and I didn't get much out of it at all. The news feed was strictly about the game, but it wasn't a lot of activity. The live stats and expert comments were a nice touch, but it wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be. As much as we are on our phones we sometimes miss plays, so it was nice to have that as a part of the news feed. This is also only available for American Football and no other sport. With the NBA Finals coming up in June, hopefully Facebook will have it ready for that. I know that this is a brand new feature for Facebook and they will work out the kinks so we will see how they develop this feature over the next few months.
As far as the other social media platforms go I think that they were nothing out of the ordinary. Snapchat was my favorite platform over Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook because of the story feature. Snapchat normally has the story feature, but they had two for the Super Bowl: Super Bowl and Super Bowl worldwide. I don't think most people consider that there are American Football fans around the world. I guess it is not any different than us celebrating a Futbol game in Europe, but it was very cool to see celebrate Super Bowl 50 with us. I thought it was a great example of how social media makes the world a smaller place and how it can also bring us together.
Next week is Super Bowl 50, but the Panthers and Broncos are not the only ones preparing for the championship game. Social media platforms have been preparing to out perform each other this year. Facebook is launching an app called Sports Stadium where fans can talk about all things sport and it includes features like play by play, game statistics, and commentary from sportcasters.
Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram are typically busy during major sporting events. From criticism about the officials to Game Day pictures, if something is happening in the Sports world it is being mentioned on social media. For Facebook to step up and make an app solely for sports is a major step and could possibly put it ahead of the pack for fans. Twitter is normally the platform of choice for live events because it's short and sweet and in real time. (Let's be honest no one wants to see you update your Facebook status ten times in a row during the game, but I will gladly favorite your tweet as i'm scrolling down my feed.)
Snapchat has also brought some fun to the game with having geofilters and stories specifically for sporting events. You can easily see what your other couple thousand Falcons fans are doing while watching the game live or at home. Instagram has recently introduced a feature that allows you to see posts related to the same live event all in one place similar to Snapchat's story feature. Twitter has been called "The World's Biggest Sports Bar". Who can forget Oreo making light of the lights going out at the Superbowl XLVII by tweeting that you can still dunk in the dark. That was a great way for advertisers to take advantage of an unexpected situation during a live event. For the Sports Stadium app it is set to be adfree, but will it eventually include advertising?
Twitter is a big competitor for Facebook with it's other apps, Vine, Q&A, Camera and Challenger and Periscope. Twitter has reported $132 million loss while Facebook has reported $1.56 billion in profit with advertisers so having an ad free app may not hurt them, but it may not last long either. There is just as much anticipation and excitement if not more for the Super Bowl commercials as the game every year, but could this eventually be a future Super Bowl commercial replacement as advertisers and marketers look to social media to further promote their brand? Or an additional part to the multi-million dollar 30 second tv spots? Probably not this app alone if it ever does begin showing ads, but as social media continues to become a major part of our world it could be the beginning of some major changes for advertisers and marketers. The app will be released in time for next Sunday's big game which will be a great test to see how well the app will do with sport fans.
