The Social Media Premier League – January 2013

Since clubs are using the January transfer window to revise their squads I thought I’d take this opportunity to publish the latest edition of the Social Media Premier League table.

So what can you expect in the latest set of results? Well, there’s been an near wholesale shift in the scores.  This rise means that clubs who have seen their score remain stagnant, such as Arsenal and Sunderland, have tumbled down the table. This rise can be attributed to many club’s adopting a more innovative digital comms strategy as clubs begin to understand the power and potential of Twitter.

See where how your team is doing below…

				TOTAL
1	Chelsea	84	88	86
2	Liverpool	84	78	81
3	Manchester City	84	73	78.5
4	Tottenham Hotspur	82	72	77
5	Aston Villa	72	81	76.5
6	Everton	78	62	70
7	Swansea City	73	64	68.5
8	West Ham United	78	58	68
9	Newcastle United	73	62	67.5
10	Reading	80	55	67.5
11	Southampton	74	61	67.5
12	Stoke City	69	66	67.5
13	Norwich City	80	54	67
14	Sunderland	81	53	67
15	Wigan Athletic	79	55	67
16	Arsenal	84	49	66.5
17	Queens Park Rangers	74	57	65.5
18	Fulham	71	55	63
19	West Bromwich Albion	70	47	58.5

Liverpool’s Twitter presence goes global

We’re often told about the Premier League’s international appeal, usually when the staggering details of the next multi-billion pound TV deal are leaked to the press or the dreaded 39th game idea is floated for the umpteenth time, but social media has really brought home the allure of England’s top flight to those abroad. Check out the Facebook or Twitter accounts of any of the top clubs and you’ll see a large number of responses, many of which are from supporters based outside the UK.

They can’t boo from the stands, but they can sure leave nasty messages!

It may seem easy to ignore these supporters, after all they’re not able to boo from the stands if things aren’t going so well, but as more money flows into the game from abroad and teams decide to take their pre-season training camps to the USA, Asia and the Middle East communicating with this contingent of foreign fans takes on a new importance.

But is communicating with these supporters through your existing channels satisfactory when you take into considering the language barrier and other difficulties? Liverpool don’t seem to think so.

The past few weeks has seen several accounts created and verified simply to cater to Liverpool’s army of fans from across the globe. Supporters in Thailand, Indonesia, India, Spain, France and the Arab world will now get the latest club news in their language at a time suitable for them.

Liverpool are not the first to create foreign language social media profiles and I’m certain they will not be the last. For a fan-base that may occasionally feel unappreciated or disconnected from events that occur several thousand miles away this is a lifeline. For Liverpool it’s a fantastic way to solidify the allegiances of those Reds from far flung corners of the globe and gain access to an audience that will surely continue to grow.

Sport and recreation in England – 2012 edition [Infographic]

Okay, this isn’t strictly about football but I’d like to take a minute to show off a labour of love that has finally come to fruition.

What you’ll see below is an infographic detailing the state of the English sporting landscape as of October 2012. I hope you all enjoy it.

It is my first, so all feedback is appreciated.

The Premier League versus the NFL – Infographic

Which is better, football (the one with the round one) or football (the one with the oval one)? It’s a debate that gets the blood flowing both here and in the USA and while there’ll never be agreement on which sport is the best the chaps at Confused.com have produced an infographic to find out which one comes out on top when using social media.

As you could probably have surmised both sets of fans are fiercely loyal, but to two very different things – one the league and the other their team.

No prizes for guessing which is which!

The 2012/13 Social Media Premier League

The beginning of a new Premier League season doesn’t just mean the return of  hours of inane punditry from ex-professionals in dodgy designer shirts. No, it also marks the return of the Social Media Premier League (which, due to my love of acronyms that don’t quite make sense, will now be known as SMEPL).

Just like the professional game, relegation is a fact of life in the SMEPL so out go Blackburn, Bolton and Wolves – three clubs who had contrasting fortunes in previous versions of the SMEPL table – and in come Reading, Southampton and West Ham. How will the new boys fair? You can find out below.

		Klout	Peer Index	TOTAL
1	Chelsea	83	80	81.5
2	Liverpool	84	71	77.5
3	Manchester City	82	68	75
4	Tottenham Hotspur	82	68	75
5	Aston Villa	71	71	71
6	Norwich City	80	61	70.5
7	Sunderland	80	55	67.5
8	Arsenal	83	47	65
9	Newcastle United	71	59	65
10	Reading	80	50	65
11	Queens Park Rangers	72	57	64.5
12	Wigan Athletic	79	50	64.5
13	West Ham United	71	57	64
14	Southampton	69	58	63.5
15	Fulham	72	52	62
16	West Bromwich Albion	70	50	60
17	Stoke City	69	39	54
18	Everton	78	23	50.5
19	Swansea City	11	69	40

Previous versions of this table have seen Chelsea lead the way by some considerable distance and at the start of the 2012/13 season it’s apparent that very little has changed, however the gap has began to close ever so slightly.

Elsewhere it’s clear that Everton have tailed off dramatically while Wigan Athletic have began to climb the league, Swansea are still struggling at the bottom due to a low and possibly unfair Peer Index score, in the North East Sunderland have overtaken Newcastle as social media top dogs and Manchester United still don’t have a Twitter account.

Across the board it’s apparent that scores are rising. Is this down to a greater understanding of how to use social media amongst football clubs, or is it simply due to the recent formula rejigging undertaken by Klout? Have you seen an upturn in the level and quality of interaction from clubs over the summer months? Let me know.

Late Kick Off – Twitter and Football

The BBC’s Late Kick Off North East & Cumbria aired a fantastic piece on the use of Twitter in football last night. 

The Mirror’s Simon Bird speaks very well about the implications, especially from a journalist’s point of view, but there still seems to be a few people, journalists and fans alike, who don’t quite get it.

The Four Year Plan – a public relations exercise gone wrong

If you were watching BBC2 late on Sunday night (and let’s be honest, why wouldn’t you be?) you may have stumbled across The Four Year Plan, a rather entertaining piece of film highlighting the unmitigated disaster that was Flavio Briatore’s tenure as part-owner of Queens Park Rangers.

The documentary, which was commissioned by the Formula One tycoon, doesn’t really fulfil its presumed purpose as an ego trip come PR ploy but instead acts as a check-list of all the things you really shouldn’t do or say (at least not publicly) if you’re the owner of a football club.

Flav - A PR Nightmare?

Whereas much of the shock comes from what we see going on behind the scenes (Briatore’s constant interference in first team affairs, his predilection for sacking  people and the fact he’s seemingly unaware that his words can and will be translated by the film makers) the way in which fans are dealt with is also rather unnerving. At one point Briatore, after being heckled by QPR supporters, threatens to sell the club unless the names of those booing him are handed over. There’s only so much that the put-upon press office can do to play down altercations such as this, presumably because they’re too busy drafting club statements regarding the most recent hirings and firings.

I imagine The Four Year Plan will be forever thought of as the Spinal Tap of sporting documentaries, but beyond the obvious entertainment value it does pose some serious questions for PR professionals. I mean, how on Earth would you handle a man like Flavio Briatore? At what point do you tell him that allowing a film maker to record the owner talking about texting his manager instructions from the stands isn’t brilliant for the club’s image? And how long after you suggest he tone it down would it be before you got your P45 in the post? It’s a tough one.

The social media Premier League table

Last week I wrote a very short post about whether it mattered if Premier League football clubs were any good at using Twitter and I decided that it doesn’t. The basis for this conclusion was that the loyalty of your average football supporter trumps the need for new and interesting content. Hardly a ground breaking conclusion, however this realisation also made me think about how we could better discover who’s top of the social media league table.

Taking inspiration from Richard Bailey’s #socialstudent experiment I’ve used two analytical tools to study the social media footprint of the members of the English Premier League, adding the scores from both together and then halving that number to come up with the total. See where your club places below:

	Team	Followers	Klout	Peer Index	TOTAL
1	Chelsea	672,155	77	64	70.5
2	Manchester City	245,280	76	58	67
3	Liverpool	763,632	78	50	64
4	Arsenal	1,278,585	80	47	63.5
5	Tottenham Hotspur	147,264	69	58	63.5
6	Bolton Wanderers	17,096	59	62	60.5
7	Norwich City	28,722	66	53	59.5
8	Aston Villa	41,389	63	51	57
9	Fulham	35,203	64	48	56
10	Sunderland	37,246	66	46	56
11	Wolverhampton Wanderers	27,740	64	45	54.5
12	West Bromwich Albion	10,922	58	50	54
13	Everton	41,993	66	40	53
14	Newcastle United	50,158	61	43	52
15	Queens Park Rangers	23,887	60	40	50
16	Stoke City	21,738	55	33	44
17	Wigan Athletic	10,173	56	32	44
18	Blackburn Rovers	13,691	49	32	40.5

(N.B. You may have noticed that Manchester United and Swansea City don’t feature. There’s a good reason for this, mainly the lack of a Twitter account for the former and an incomplete set of metric data for the latter. Don’t worry though, should either situation change I’ll post an updated list as soon as possible!)

There are a couple of interesting points to come out of this exercise, the main one being that while followers are important they are not the be all and end all. Despite a gulf of over one million followers the combined Klout and PeerIndex scores of North London rivals Arsenal and Spurs are exactly the same. Further down the list there are examples of clubs with a smaller number of followers sneaking ahead of the more recognised names.

Unfortunately I don’t expect to see Chelsea fans dancing in the streets of south west London tonight on the back of this post, after all the reliability of metric data is still up for some debate. That said I still think there’s enough here to give those of us who use social media professionally some food for thought. It’s becoming apparent that there’s more to life than just followers.

Does it matter how Premier League football clubs use Twitter?

A lot has been written about footballers on Twitter, mainly due to the antics of one Joey Barton, but not much is said about how football clubs use the platform. In the Premier League 19 out of the 20 teams have an official Twitter presence (the name of club without an account may surprise you), all of which have very different styles of communicating.

Two of the better accounts are those of Sunderland and Wolves, where a mixture of news, insight into what goes on behind the scenes at the club and personable tweets make both an interesting read. At the other end of the spectrum there’s the spam approach, with Newcastle United being one of the biggest offenders. A riveting read if you’re a fan of offers on club-branded gear, not so much for those who want something a bit more substantial.

Sorry, if you want it in pink you'll have to look elsewhere...

But does the content matter? The stats suggest not. Newcastle have many more followers than either Sunderland or Wolves do despite the fact their stream is little more than a barrage of links. It seems fans will follow their club online regardless of whether their content is actually any good. But then that’s blind loyalty for you – what’s a poor Twitter presence to a supporter that travels around the country watching their team getting hammered?

So football teams don’t feel the need to innovate online like other brands because their audience will follow regardless, but that’s not to say that it’ll always be this way. The news that the Premier League are about to embark on a major social media drive indicates those within game are beginning to take digital comms more seriously. Will teams follow suit? It’s too early to tell, but I’d still like to know what you want to see from your club’s Twitter account? I’ll include best suggestions in a later post.

Liverpool and Luis Suarez – A PR faux pas

There’s being fashionably late and then there’s turning up several days after the party has ended, and by deciding to comment on the Luis Suarez case in the final week of January I definitely fall into the latter category. However I’d like you all to bear with me while I explain why I left it so late.

Before I found myself involved in the world of public relations I harboured ambitions to be a journalist. My first love, as you can probably guess from this blog, is sport and I took a great interest in racism within it. I’d written pieces for the Football Supporters’ Federation on the subject and my current work deals with equity at a grass roots level. Talking about racism in the game to me is like a red rag to a bull and I wanted to approach the case, and Liverpool’s baffling response, as aware of the grim details as to what went on in that Anfield goalmouth as possible. Writing a blog piece over Christmas, when I’m full of food, beer and hell would’ve just resulted in a rambling diatribe against Mr Suarez. And no one wants to read that, do they?

Loyalty is a much sought after commodity in football. Almost any gesture, whether it be a player turning down a bumper contract elsewhere to stay with their current club or as happened in this instance a club backing a player after a less than savoury incident, will be applauded from the roof tops by fans and pundits alike. Sometimes though this clamour for loyalty overtakes the need for common sense.

Photo by Vincent Teeuwen

When Liverpool released their statement in the wake of the news that Luis Suarez was guilty of racially abusing Patrice Evra it was clear to all that the Anfield press office needed their heads banging together. The charge was serious, yet here we had a football club not only backing their player but attempting to undermine the credibility of those on the other side and those who reached the verdict. If that wasn’t bad enough even the tired “some of my best mates/family members are black” caveat that seems to be applied exclusively by racists to give credence to their opinions was given a cursory paragraph.

A storm erupted and at this point Liverpool FC, the club which apparently prides itself on it’s reputation for equality, should have held its hands up and accepted the findings with good grace. Maybe someone within the press office suggested this was the best course of action. Who knows? If they did we can only assume they were shot down because the club had just knocked up a few dozen Pro-Suarez t-shirts and the club couldn’t justify wasting any more cash after the transfer of Andy Carroll (I’m sorry, but I couldn’t resist).

After the t-shirts another statement followed, as did a glut of online rants from myopic supporters unable to accept that the FA’s findings were reasonable based on the now publicly available evidence. However there has been a slow realisation from those on Merseyside that Liverpool’s brand has been damaged by their antics. I’m hardly an expert, but I could’ve warned them off going down this particular road if they didn’t want their name tarnished.

Were Liverpool’s press office negligent or were their concerns ignored by those above them who believed that they’d not get dragged off their high horse if they tried to play down the validity of the allegations against one of their players? I know which I believe. Liverpool’s response to the Suarez verdict was baffling to everyone, even those with a very basic knowledge of public relations. You don’t become one of the biggest brands in world football if you have dolts managing your reputation.

Amongst the media and rival fans Liverpool and Kenny Dalglish will be associated with racism for a long time. I’ll leave whether that’s fair or not for you to decide. On the other hand many existing supporters have been emboldened by the club’s stance, taking some form of pride in the siege mentality that the club created with their statements but then that’s blind loyalty for you. Unfortunately as valuable is loyalty is it doesn’t protect teams from negative PR, especially when said team is on a collision course with the English game’s cause célèbre.