How could Newcastle United take advantage of #ColosParty?

On Wednesday night, while most UK football fans were watching and tweeting about Chelsea’s last gasp victory over Benfica in the Europa League final, a small corner of the country was tweeting relentlessly about a house party in Ponteland.

When Sammy Ameobi posted pictures on his Instagram account showing Newcastle United’s squad enjoying a night in at the Coloccini residence it was always going to generate a stir. Fans started tweeting about the photos using the hashtag #ColosParty and it soon went viral in a huge way. By 11pm it was the top trending topic in the UK, surpassing any mention of Chelsea’s win in Amsterdam.

Sorry Rafa, but we’re top of the league

Some of the tweets were kind, some were cruel but almost all were relentlessly funny and perfectly encapsulated the power and imagination of social media savvy football fans.

These moments aren’t uncommon in themselves but they’re transient. It’s rare a club have such a perfect opportunity to take advantage a movement for PR purposes and build bridges with its support at the same time, so when I saw the popularity of #ColosParty I started to think about ways Newcastle United could do just that.

The most obvious (and laziest) way for NUFC to get in on the #ColosParty action would be to slap the hashtag onto its regular tweets. There’s one problem with this – hijacking hashtags is not popular and the number of adverts the club sends out on social media is the main bugbear of NUFC’s fans. The club wading in and throwing out 2 for 1 offers on NUFC branded shot glasses, affixing #ColosParty to the end of their tweets, would backfire.

It became clear that to exploit this opportunity to the fullest the club would have to look offline. One particular idea stood out to me:

Rename Shearer’s Bar.

Don’t worry, I don’t mean permanently, just for the final day of the season. Call it Colo’s Bar and after the Arsenal match invite supporters to attend an event called #ColosParty.

This stunt would work for a number of reasons – it’s cheap, it’d be easy to organise even at such short notice and the story would be guaranteed to generate column inches across the local and national press in addition to chatter on social media. It would also give the club a chance to pay tribute to those supporters which made #ColosParty the most talked about topic on Twitter for a short while and act as an opportunity to celebrate the NUFC career of a very popular player.

What would the benefit for the club be? Well, it would increase footfall in Shearer’s Bar on the day of the match while reinforcing the bar’s identity as the premier NUFC themed venue in the city. Furthermore it would show Newcastle’s commitment to listening to supporters on social media channels which is something that the club has so far struggled to do.

So, does Colo’s Bar sound like a good idea? Let me know below.

Six solutions to Newcastle United’s Twitter problems

Earlier this week I published a post looking at the attitude of Newcastle United fans towards the club’s use of Twitter. The results didn’t make good reading.

The main criticisms included that the near constant stream of spammy links to the club shop made the feed unusable and there was an irritating lack of engagement with supporters. Questions went unanswered, comments ignored.

While I’m very good at it I don’t particularly like being the person who sits around criticising others without offering up some solutions, so I took a closer look at Newcastle’s Twitter problems and came up with a six ways they can improve on the status quo. Some are my own take on broad rules for social media use, others are very specific ways in which they could make immediate improvements. Let me know if you agree.

1. Dialogue not monologue

Twitter is a conversational medium. Dialogue is the name of the game and as Ross Wigham recently wrote communicators need to come up with ways of “dealing with the new world of two way conversations”. This is something that seems to have been missed by the social media team at Newcastle United who use the platform to simply broadcast information. This would be a no-no for any organisation, let alone a football club that has an eager audience who are dying to interact. It’s simple – engagement with followers will increase satisfaction and further entrench the support of the thousands of brand advocates on Twitter who fly the flag for the club.

2. Question and answer

Questions about ticket availability and prices are often asked

There are some relatively easy ways to engage these fans. I know from experience that the club is often posed questions about issues such as ticketing via social media, but little is communicated until an announcement is made on the official website. No one likes being ignored. Answering these simple questions would go a long way to improving relations with stakeholders. Even holding regular Q&A sessions so queries are concentrated during a particular period of time, which in turn would make them easier to field, would drastically improve engagement.

3. Ask more of those outside the club…

But it’s not all give, give, give. The club should take advantage of the creativity of the audience and begin to ask questions of supporters. Football fans love to share photos and videos that they believe will cement their credentials as a ‘true’ supporter. Being recognised for this dedication, either by a kind word or a simple retweet, by the very club they follow is the best type of peer recommendation. Not only are they being recognised by the one account that matters, but they’re being recommended to hundreds of thousands of other supporters.

Using Twitter as a conduit for collecting contributions from supporters regarding relatively trivial matters, such as the songs that should be on the DJs half time playlist or the design of a new kit, is another fantastic way to engender a feeling of ownership and show that their opinion has value while being extremely simple to do.

4. …And those employed by the club

Look inwards. Football clubs employ hundreds of people who work in a myriad of roles however many supporters don’t know much about what goes on day to day within the club. Why not hand control of the club account over to a different member of staff once a day every week? One week it could be the tea lady, the next it could be Yohan Cabaye? It generates a feeling of exclusivity by giving Twitter followers something fans offline will not be able to access. If an entire country can manage to do it then a football club can.

5. The right messages on the right platforms

I’m aware that all of this leaves very little time for promotion of the club shop, however I haven’t completely forgot about it. The fact of the matter is that Twitter isn’t a medium that’s particularly conducive to producing great sales leads when the plan is to spam, spam and spam some more. That’s not to say it should be avoided at all costs, but it should certainly be cut down on, particularly as there are platforms out there which would allow the club to push products while contributing to the conversation.

Put the club shop on Pinterest rather than pestering Twitter followers

One such platform, and it’s one that Newcastle United have no obviously official presence on, is Pinterest. Why not, like AS Roma, put the entire contents of the club shop on there? Link images back to the club shop so supporters can quickly and easily buy any products they want. Encourage users to repin items they like with a simple competition and watch as they promote the club’s products organically.

Newcastle United will have access to a huge number of photographs locked away in the bowels of St James’ Park that supporters would love to see. Tumblr is the perfect platform to showcase and sell prints of these images as Liverpool FC found out when they launched The Reds Gallery. Newcastle are already adept users of Flickr and the sharing of these galleries on Twitter was something which was commended by respondents in my earlier survey. As many of the same principles apply with Tumblr it feels like an opportunity is being missed.

6. Cross promote

Social media should not operate within a silo. It should be part of a wider strategy and be promoted across different channels to form a cohesive digital communications plan. This same rule  can be applied to specific social media platforms, which should be put to use promoting one another and mirroring each other’s messages.

Promotion is important in more ways than one

Take, for example, the Pinterest and Tumblr accounts that’ve just been mentioned. Cross promote these profiles successfully and make the over half a million people that Newcastle United reach directly, whether that be on Twitter or Facebook, aware these channels exist and uptake will be swift. Chances are if they follow you on one platform they’re likely to do so on another. And the benefit of having multiple profiles across different accounts? Access to different audiences and the ability to deliver the same message (tailored for the platform, of course) multiple times without appearing to spam the audience.

The bottom line

Few brands can boast an audience like sport clubs can. In the words of We Play, “sports fans are the most influential advocates in the world”. It’s a privileged position. For club’s like Newcastle United success on social media is an open goal and a poor digicomms plan is not a valid excuse for failing to capitalise.

Newcastle United fans have their say on club’s Twitter use

Newcastle United supporters – a passionate bunch

Luddites may disagree, but it’s pretty apparent that digital communications is now the front line when it comes to fan engagement for football clubs. The Premier League is a world wide brand and online means messages can be disseminated around the globe in an instant. Just look at the number of followers your typical Premier League side commands – many are well in excess of their average league attendance, with more supporters lurking elsewhere in the deep, dark bowels of the internet. It’s no real surprise that social media and how clubs use it to connect with stakeholders generates strong opinions from supporters.

Newcastle United have been using Twitter for a few years now and currently have around 200,000 followers, one of the largest numbers in the league. I asked supporters about the club’s use of the platform to find out whether they thought NUFC’s use of Twitter put them top of the table or that the club were involved in a basement battle.

Supporters were asked five simple questions – whether they followed the club, what they liked, what they disliked, what they wanted to see more of and what they wanted to see less of.

First off, of those fans who responded 25% didn’t officially ‘follow’ the official Twitter account. The main reason for this, mentioned by 61% of respondents, was the glut of marketing messages sent out by NUFC. It turns out that spammy and invasive tweeting will put off even the most ardent supporter.

This complaint was not simply restricted to those who have opted against following @NUFCOfficial. 84% of all respondents made reference to the use of the Twitter account as a vehicle for little more than adverts as one of their main dislikes of NUFC’s use of Twitter and it was a commented on frequently by those surveyed:

• “Too many tweets about club shop offers”
• “They just use it to sell stuff from the shop in the main. They never reply to genuine questions”
• “The amount of tweets about selling items instead of news about the club”
• “Getting spammed by offers of merchandise from the club shop. The club shop should get a separate account”

Oh dear. It’s pretty apparent that the club’s policy of using Twitter to drive traffic and increase sales isn’t well liked and probably isn’t working either. 85% of fans said they wanted to see much less of it. But anyway, what about plus points?

To the surprise of no one, fans said they want to hear more about new signings.

When asked what they liked about the club’s Twitter almost 55% could muster an answer that wasn’t a variation on the word “nothing”. As you’d expect many of these responses focused on information that the club could publicise before anyone else, such as team line ups, signings and other breaking news:

• “Team news on match day”
• “Ticket announcements”
• “Goal updates from matches are usually the quickest on Twitter”
• “Picture galleries”

So it turns out there are a few redeeming features of the club’s Twitter use. However that cannot escape from the fact that the feeling among many supporters is that if engagement is the name of then game then the club’s presence is not fit for purpose. When pushed on what they’d like to see from the account an increase in interaction was at the top of the pile:

• “More interaction with supporters. Better use of social media tools in general to connect with fans”
• “Interaction with supporters. Greater innovation in terms of how it is used too. Twitter can be used for great things but Newcastle have not embraced it.”
• “More interaction with fans”
• “Fan engagement. A teeny tiny bit of opinion now and then and the odd exclusive signing pictures rather than having to pay for NUFC TV”

A nice, round 40% of respondents made some mention of increased engagement with supporters in some form or another. There was also a clear interest in more exclusive, behind the scenes content similar to Manchester City’s Inside City video series. Granted, that’s not strictly a comment on Twitter but it’s more proof that social media use must be coordinated cross platform.

I’ll leave the final word to one respondent who was pretty damning in his assessment of Newcastle’s use of the platform…

• “They’ve totally missed the point of Twitter”

Keep your eyes peeled for a follow up post in which I’ll explore the ways Newcastle United can improve their use of social media.

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.

Jen Chang’s threats are a PR own goal

On at least one occasion I’ve used this blog to prattle on about Liverpool FC’s brilliant use of social media. They, out of all of the Premier League clubs, seem to have understood what the medium is all about and more importantly what it was capable of.

‘perspiring journalist’ Duncan Jenkins

That’s why I was shocked to read the most recent post on the blog of fictional football journalist Duncan Jenkins. Jenkins, who is either a stunning take down of the growing crowd of wannabe football journalists that inhabit Twitter or a joke that got very boring very quickly depending on who you talk to (I’m in the latter camp), managed to call one or two of Liverpool’s incoming transfer deals on the back of existing press speculation. Given the litany of accounts which predict transfers, or at least try to, this was nothing unusual however the sheer popularity of the account meant Duncan’s predictions got much more coverage. This upset someone at Liverpool, namely their Director of Communications Jen Chang.

I’ll not go into detail about what happens next, however Mr Chang comes across like the lovechild of Magnum P.I. and Reggie Kray. Suffice to say the tale of what is essentially flat track bullying has spread across Twitter in double quick time, giving Liverpool yet another avoidable PR problem to deal with.

Can anyone give me odds on Jen Chang being told to “Walk on” by his bosses?

I would have thought that Liverpool would’ve been aware of the risks in making threats to any fan, let alone such a well followed individual. Chang’s decision to drop the threats probably resulted from the realisation that trying to destroy a man’s life because of a few hopeful punts on a parody Twitter account would eventually be more damaging to him than it would Jenkins. And he’d have been right.

The most disappointing element of this episode (and there are a few) from a public relations point of view is that the go to option to stop these supposed leaks was not conversation or mediation but to bully. It goes without saying that the role of PR should never be to threaten, no matter how red-faced an organisation is left. Is this reaction indicative of a club who have spent much of the last 12 months with their backs against the wall as they battle allegations of racism, poor on-pitch performance and not entirely unjustified jibes at their record in the transfer market? I’d say so, but that’s no excuse.

Furthermore proper public relations should save organisations time and money. The amount effort that went into compiling a dossier on Jenkins’ creator is dozens of times what it would’ve cost to develop an understanding through less nefarious, more conventional PR methods. The £300,000 extra that Roma bagged from the deal as a result of the tweets does not matter. Anyone could’ve posted a speculative tweet linking the club and player.

This doesn’t just mean bad PR for Liverpool either. It’s a story the communications industry could do without too. Granted it’s no Bell Pottinger and I expect coverage on conventional media will remain minimal but it doesn’t do us any favours.

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.

Dissertation – Professional footballers and Twitter

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will have been inundated with requests over the past 24 hours to complete a short survey regarding how a number of Newcastle United players use Twitter. First off I’d like to thank you and apologise. Cheers for not immediately deleting me the moment I began to spam your timelines with links, because I know had I been in your place I’d have been reaching for the big red unfollow button within minutes of the first few links hitting my profile, and sorry for having to resort to such measures. It won’t happen again!

Now the apologies are out of the way I’d like to explain a little bit more about why I’m asking you to explain in great detail how you feel about Sammy Ameobi’s tweets. The end of any university course is marked by some sort of practical project and that is the stage I find myself at now. The topic I am studying is the impact that the use of Twitter amongst footballers has had on the way that their adoring public perceive them. Has social media worked wonders as a public relations tool for professional players or is it a nightmare when it comes to reputation management?

As well as studying the accounts of a couple of players I also want to hear from my fellow fans as, after all, it’s your opinion that really matters here. I’ve conducted this via an online survey which I have distributed exclusively through Twitter (well, almost exclusively. If you’re yet to complete it you can click here). The results will the be used to help form the basis of my conclusion, so it’s important I get as much feedback as possible.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress and my findings on the blog, so keep your eyes peeled. Once again I’d just like to say thanks for putting up with the constant stream of updates asking for your help. It wont last much longer, I promise!

Footballers on Twitter – what do the fans think?

A lot is written about the impact that the uptake of Twitter amongst members of the footballing fraternity has had, but has it really changed the game for your regular fan?

I spoke to two supporters – Mark and Joe – to see how they felt about footballers on Twitter. I started by asking them to outline what they believe the pros and cons of having professional players on Twitter are:

M: “Fans get an insight into what the player is doing, whether its Rio Ferdinand taking his kids to school or Demba Ba saying what he did at training. On the other hand the players are at risk of abuse from people who claim to be fans. You also get players like Joey Barton and Nile Ranger who tweet a lot of rubbish and give the impression that footballers are what we always assumed them to be”

J: “Darren Bent is an example of the good and bad sides of Twitter. While he was at Sunderland he was talking with fans about matches, TV shows he was watching and so on. On the flip side when he made what he saw as a hard-headed career decision to move from Sunderland to Aston Villa he got a lot of abusive tweets.”

Twitter turned Joey from a villain, to hero, back to a villain

But do fans think they have more of a connection to those players on Twitter? Opinion is divided, but supporters certainly feel something:

M: “I feel closer to players. For example Ryan Taylor is just like a fan in the way he puts across his views about Newcastle. When Danny Simpson was on Twitter he would often update his followers on things and so I felt a bit closer to him than someone like Leon Best, who doesn’t have Twitter.”

J: “I wouldn’t say closer but there’s a few players I feel I understand a bit more. There’s Michael Owen, who is very dull but every now and then gets really wound up and irritable. And then there’s Joey Barton…”

Brand values - Dullness

Is there an ulterior motive for getting your face on Twitter if you’re a footballer, or is it just because you want to talk to your publics?

M: “I think it’s used by players to both contact fans and to promote themselves. For example Joey Barton is definitely using it to market himself. He engineered his move to QPR by going on Twitter. On the other side of the coin you’ve got players like Demba Ba who only really tweet football related things to keep fans up to date.”

J: “I get the impression that players use Twitter to keep in touch with each other as well as talk to fans. On a recent Late Kick Off Hartlepool United player-coach Ritchie Humphreys and a senior player talked about the benefits of Twitter in terms of keeping the banter going away from the training ground.”

So has Twitter really sparked a massive change in the way players communicate? I’ll leave the last word to Joe:

“You get a lot of managers saying they don’t like Twitter but I don’t see how it’s that different from seeing a bunch of players down the pub or in a restaurant. Sometimes they’ll be willing to talk, other times they don’t be disturbed. Twitter’s just like that, but on a much broader scale.”

Do you agree or is that an oversimplification? 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 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.