Yesterday’s 2010 NFL Draft was one of the most anticipated and hotly debated in recent history, both off- and online. Rightfully so, the NFL has made a concerted effort to facilitate and capture fan conversations that are taking place across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and blogging networks.
The key to the NFL’s online social media draft strategy was recognizing that “conversations are happening in a lot of different places,” NFL.com’s General Manager Laura Goldberg said. “We want to make sure we’re aggregating comments no matter where they are.”
In shifting to prime time by airing at 7:30 pm EST on Thursday night, the NFL took a TV ratings gamble by competing against Thursday-night favorites like Grey’s Anatomy and The Office this year. On the other hand, the new time slot set up for a perfect “Maverick-to-Goose” spike in online fan discussion and interaction levels.
Social conversation mediums like Facebook and Twitter typically reach peak activity levels during weekday prime time hours and the NFL clearly took advantage of this. These online platforms were abuzz with fan chatter last night, which came as no surprise to the economically savvy NFL executives.
The league is actively focused on social media in its marketing efforts. According to an internal NFL marketing presentation, the league wanted the draft to become a highly coveted “trending topic” on Twitter. Needless to say, the top 10 trending topics were consistently draft-related during the broadcast apart from a lonely “Earth Day”.
But the NFL won’t be taking a page out of vitaminwater’s playbook anytime soon and redirect NFL.com to its Facebook Page. The league still considers the official website to be its most valuable digital asset. So naturally they leveraged the NFL social media properties to direct fans to the controlled destination, where they could offer fan promotions through a series of branded interactive features and applications.
These sponsored apps included a Draft Tracker that provides stats on every player and Fan Ballot which allows fans to grade their team’s selection performance.
The Fan War Rooms allow fans to discuss their team’s selections and has amassed over 400,000 comments so far. “People are talking back and forth in the context of their teams, in terms of who they should pick or what offensive or defensive lineup they should go with. It’s been an amazing way to get more fans engaged and really make this a much more social event, if you will, both before, during and after Draft”, said Goldberg.
NFL.com launched the war rooms in a more limited fashion last year and received more comments than the league had expected. “We decided this year to make them a little deeper, if you will, in terms of features and functionality,” Goldberg said. “We really want to cover the draft in a way that is highly interactive with our fans.”
For the first time this year, the NFL unveiled a slick interactive tool that allowed fans to scroll through the real-time discussion on Twitter based on the official #NFLDRAFT hashtag. The NFL covered its major partners by attaching them to different apps on the site, but it wasn’t a surprise that this was the only one that went unbranded since the content was not edited or fast-checked. Although the NFL didn’t directly monetize the stream of tweets, it allowed fans to gauge the pulse of NFL fans by reading how people were commenting on the draft.
The NFL’s purpose is to engage fans and increase loyalty, generating more page views and more time spent on the site to benefit both the league and its corporate partners. “The more we engage fans, the longer they spend on our site, the more pages they look at, the more videos they look at,” Goldberg said. “It’s also great for our advertisers. The more someone is engaged, they’re much more likely to look at an ad, to notice an ad.”
The NFL can’t be discredited for their efforts to make the draft experience more social. They covered all the basics like promoting a Twitter hashtag to track the conversation, announcing the picks in real-time through the @NFL Twitter account, and serving up some exclusive video interview shorts with recent draftees on the 415k fan (or should I say “liker”) NFL Facebook Page, but most of these promotions were replicated in last year’s draft.
Although surely after a year of new social media capabliites and burgeoning services, you’d think the NFL would have come up with a few more innovative ways to leverage today’s hottest platforms and products to enhance the draft experience for fans and viewers.
What about mobile location-based networks? Foursquare was a little-known startup back in April 2009 when last year’s NFL Draft took place, but has since proven its ability to deliver powerful interactive promotions through premium partnerships, particularly surrounding events like Fashion Week and SXSW. With the company’s headquarters a few miles away from Radio City Music Hall where the 2010 Draft took place, I’d think a cool scavenger hunt or creative promotion could have been executed if the NFL was interested.
Furthermore, the draft player and team pages on NFL.com could have been perfect integration points for the recently announced Facebook “Like” button, which can be found in the top right of individual athlete profiles on ESPN.com like Tim Tebow. Encouraging fans to interact via this simple widget would have extended the conversation into friend News Feeds on the near 500 million user social behemoth, further increasing the digital fan discussion and helping realize the NFL’s self-declared goal.
I’m expecting nothing less from a more digitally savvy NBA at this year’s 2010 draft in June given their longstanding partnership with Facebook.
Outside the league, there were a few noteworthy promotional ploys including the ever-innovative Chad Ochocinco and his Motorola-funded athlete news network. OCNN drafted New York Jets All-Pro cover speciast, Darrelle Revis (@Revis24) to transfer his coverage skills to the draft where he interviewed players, coaches and fans as well as tweeted live updates. Additionally, Oklahoma’s Gerald McCoy was drafted to OCNN before the Bucs grabbed him at No. 3 in this year’s draft to provide an inside look at this weekend’s festivities from a draftee’s perspective. See below for their coverage of the NFL’s Play 60 event in Central Park.
But the award for “Creative Use of Social Media” goes to Coach Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks and his little Twitter musical scavenger hunt. Leading up to the draft, he tweeted 13 songs as clues to who the team was planning on selecting. Each tweet was accompanied by a #seahawkdraftclues hashtag and had a link to the music video hosted on Bing, which is coincidentally owned by Microsoft who happens to be a major sponsor of the Seahawks. Now that’s some creative sponsor activation and fan engagement.
What are your thoughts on the NFL’s use of social media in this year’s draft?
