What Is The Relationship Between Athletic Programs And The Power Of Social Media

“Show me the money”! This common phrase yelled by several characters from the film, Jerry Maguire, not only applies to top sports agents making millions of dollars from their clients, but also to athletic programs and organization when it comes to promoting events through the media (Imdb, 2017). Perhaps, now more than ever, the management/leadership must have a thorough understanding and working knowledge of target audience, consumer demographics and the power of social media. The relationship between athletic programs and the media has changed, in large part to the innovations in technology. Such innovations have brought media to the forefront, causing sports management/leadership to possess even more skill in the realm of media and social

With that, it is imperative that sports communication professional understand how to communicate with consumers. The first step in any promotional event campaign is to identify the target audience. “Demographic of people who are most likely to show interest in your product or service makeup the target audience” (Lake, 2016). Reaching the target audience is a daunting task, and is the biggest priority of most sport marketing campaigns. Direct marketing (Masteralexis, Barr and Hums, 2015), a method of communication that uses material sent directly to a specific target audience either via mail or email, are widely used by most marketing campaigns. Consumer demographics are used to identify differences in personal attributes among consumers (Suttle, 2017).

Despite their cautious attitude towards using social media, the National Football League (NFL) made a momentous move in 2015 to engage their fans even more. “Before, advertisers could be confident in knowing that the commercials they ran on TV would be perceived by a large portion of their target audience. That confidence has begun to deflate in the past few years as mobile devices have forced themselves into the living room. Today’s typical TV viewer is a multi-tasker, switching between their smartphone, tablet, laptop and television as many as 27 times per hour” (Zafar, 2015). The NFL opted-in for a test-run of a new initiative by Twitter aimed at tackling the second-screen fallacy, dubbed Twitter Amplify, which allows the NFL to send promoted tweets to over 284 million users, consisting of up-to-the-second highlights from select games, equipped with a short video advertisement from partners like McDonalds and Verizon (Zafar, 2015). In preparation of opening day last season, Major League Baseball (MLB), as part of a new multi-year partnership between the MLB and Snapchat, players were permitted to use smartphones to send pictures and videos inside ballparks for the first time ever. The event was known as ‘Snapchat Day’ and allowed MLB players to contribute to an ‘Official MLB Live Story’, in addition to unique camera angles, including a feature called the “SnapBat” or a