Social Media: Getting Hockey Fans All A-Twitter Since...2008

I met freelance writer Stephanie Bagley at the first #NHLTweetup in New York City. She had come to check out the scene, notebook and voice recorder in-tow. Stephanie seemed very interested in the social effect on the NHL, and how the NHL could enhance the fan experience by diving headlong into social. I asked her to contribute a piece to this blog that examines these issues. Check it out and let me know what you think - why (or why not) is social a big deal in pro sports, particularly hockey?
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By Stephanie Bagley
Special to From The Blue Seats

At 6:18 on May 27, just prior to Game 5 between the Red Wings and Blackhawks, Wings beat reporter Bruce MacLeod, @redwingsbruce, broke the news that defenseman Jonathan Ericsson would be out due to an appendectomy with a “tweet” on Twitter. The message spread within minutes as it was “retweeted” by hockey fans and picked up by Kukla’s Korner and other media outlets.

The Ericsson post was only a trickle amongst the deluge of Blackhawks, Red Wings and otherwise hockey related posts flooding Twitter over the course of the Conference Championship game, resulting in #BlackHawks #Wings and #Huet to earn places on the top 10 trending hashtags long after Helm netted the series-winning goal.

Social media tools like Twitter have allowed the NHL to connect with new, AWOL or even the ever-elusive casual fans while the fans themselves are discovering new and game-changing ways to interact with hockey and each other.

“With social media, leagues and fans have a set of tools to have their messages penetrate in ways that TV ads and other ads cannot do. Tweets can be picked up on my cell phone while I'm in my car,” said Daniel Adams.

Adams is one of the founders of InGameNow, a service that connects sports fans by allowing them to chat in real time during games through their phones or IM clients like Gchat. He also has 10,350 followers as @SteelyDaniel on Twitter, many of them fellow sports fans.


“Things that involve the fans participation, like Twitter, will help the fans themselves get excited about what teams are doing and turn them into natural salespeople for the teams,” added Adams.


TWITTER ME THIS

Twitter has become such a buzzword, at least in media-savvy circles, that you cannot seem to go a whole day without something 140-characters-or-less related being brought to your attention.
However, the reality is that while most people in their teens and twenties (or older) might have heard of sites like Twitter and Digg, and they may even be one of the 32 million people who checked out Twitter or 23 million who visited Digg in April 2009 alone, the majority of them have barely dipped their toes.


There are ‘only’ about 6 million users actually registered on Twitter and a much smaller percentage are active, aka actually @-ing, RT-ing, #-ing and so forth.


The Harvard Business Review just released a study that claims 10% of Twitter users account for over 90% of Twitter messages sent and that the median number of tweets sent is one. That implies that the majority of accounts are set up just to take a peek at the Twitterverse.
My take? Active hockey tweeters can have considerable influence as part of that 10%.


THE ELUSIVE CASUAL FAN

Karla Potter is a 38-year-old mother of four who lives in Nashville, where she writes a mommy blog and runs several small business endeavors. Usually stuck at home with her younger kids on game nights, she attended her first Predators game in March and her first NHL Tweetup in Nashville on April 15, where she came face to face with other hockey tweeters she had spent the last season dishing with about the ins and outs of the Preds.


After the Tweetup, Potter decided to buy two season tickets near the seats some of her new friends were purchasing in addition to adding to her family’s burgeoning collection of Predators gear (even her one-year-old has a sweater) by buying two new hats the following day.
Karla might not fit the mold for the stereotypical hockey fan…but that’s the point.
She learned to love the game by chatting about it online. At little to no cost to the NHL marketing coffers. And now she is both contributing to the bottom line and adding 5 more bodies to the NHL fan army.


Not bad for a league poised to experience a third straight year of revenue growth since the lockout, though by a smaller margin in previous years at an estimated 4% growth, and looking to build on that next season despite the current economic recession.


“Twitter definitely had an impact on my hockey game experience. I love tweeting with other Preds fans during the game using our #predfans hashtag,” said Potter.


Speaking of hashtags, while traditional marketing budgets have often included thousands of dollars in focus group research, the hashtags (# + a theme you want to discuss) are a portal into what consumers and fans are talking about in the recent past as well as what is being buzzed about literally that second.


Search #redwings or #pens (or any team or brand for that matter) on Twitter and you instantly have access to thousands of opinions. You can jump into any conversation you like with a simple @ reply.


“Social media creates two way conversations between brands and their customers,” said Chris Nadeau, @cnadeau, the founder of HockeyTweets (part of http://www.thehockeyzen.com/) that tracks the frequency and trends in hockey-related tweets.


THE TWEETUP EFFECT

The true sign of the success and importance of the NHLTweetups, organized by @NHLTweetup founder Dani Muccio and FTBS’s own Mike DiLorenzo, is that after the first round of “official” NHLTweetups in April, the fans picked up the torch and began to host their own mini Tweetups in cities across the U.S. and Canada including Denver, Washington D.C., New York, Pittsburgh and even Seattle.


Displaced Red Wings fan? Your buddies care more about the Yankees losing 5 in a row in May than playoff hockey? All you need to do is make or follow a hashtag and you can instantly find someone to watch “with”…even if you are both home on the couch. Spectacular.


Caps fans hosted several in-arena Tweetups at section 108 in the Verizon Center during home games as well as using Twitter to organize a few other informal gatherings at local bars during the Capitals playoff run.


In addition, the official Penguins meetup group in New York, which has organized gamewatches for the last two seasons, created @NYPGHPensMeetup to reach more fans and better communicate plans. They have hosted a meetup fer nearly every single playoff game thus far, for a total of 20.


As a veteran of two Tweetups, their success at connecting and engaging fans is apparent in my personal Twitter network. I regularly interact with a number of people I had zero ties to outside of Twitter and the Tweetups. We have since met up in person for a Rangers game at MSG as well as exchanged a plethora of Tweets, Twitpics, texts, BBM’s and emails…all about hockey.
The Tweetups have also had a measurable effect on the engagement of hockey fans, according to HockeyTweets data.


#NHLTweetup has been a top 10 trending hockey topic during many of the evenings when Tweetups are being held, and often takes the number one spot, as it did on April 15 when the first round of 23 Tweetups took place.

#NHLTweetup, a previously nonexistent word, also made the top 10 trending topics list for all of Twitter on April 15.



Hope the other leagues were taking notes.

WHY IS SOCIAL MEDIA MORE IMPORTANT TO HOCKEY THAN OTHER SPORTS?

Twitter, Digg, Facebook and other social media (but mostly Twitter) are exceptionally important to the NHL and hockey fans, more so than the other “Big 4” sports for three main reasons:


1. The composition of the existing NHL fanbase is different than the fanbase behind the NFL, the MLB and even the NBA.
2. Hockey is the most international sport.
3. Television distribution.


Walk into any bar and you can talk baseball or football with someone, even if you’re alone and it’s the bartender. Outside of hockeytowns, it might be a challenge to find someone who knows what Pavel Datsyuk’s +/- is. Or even what team he plays for.


Even in a year that saw record-shattering ratings on Versus and ComCast for each game of the Capitals-Penguins series (mainly thanks to Ovechkin vs. Crosby) and other record-setting ratings throughout the Stanley Cup Playoffs there is still a need to play connect-the-dots between hockey fans in many locations, especially in the U.S.


“Chances are you don’t have a hockey fan next door,” adds Dani Muccio, who had never seen an NHL game until she connected with other Islanders fans on Twitter two years ago as @dani3boyz.


In addition to organizing NHLTweetups around the world, she is now routinely one of the most active hockey Tweeters, according to HockeyTweets.

“The connections I made grew my knowledge and enthusiasm for the game,” she added.
Twitter also allows fans from Saskatchewan to easily connect with fans in south Florida and everywhere in between, not to mention the rapidly-growing NHL fanbase in Russia thanks to stars like Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin.


Social media also allows greater access to interviews with Russian players like Alexander Semin and Simeon Varlamov, who both speak little English, as fans and blogs like Puck Daddy and Japer’s Rink, and even NHL.com, post translated interviews for readers.


Dmitry Chesnokov, a reporter for Sovetsky Sport and now for Puck Daddy, also did a translated TV interview for CSN with Varlamov and the video clip was subsequently posted on multiple blogs.

Speaking of Hockey on Television…


Because of the NHL's existing TV distribution deals, many out-of-market tweeters had never seen an Ovechkin backhander go top shelf or a Superman save from Roberto Luongo.

Until, that is, they felt compelled to watch in order to be part of the #hockey #caps #canucks etc conversations with their new Twitter friends.


One can only surmise that the successful role social media has had in engaging hockey fans has also played a major role in attracting eyeballs to games on TV and helping to boost ratings as a result (both Versus and NBC have reported strong ratings performance during the Stanley Cup Final)

According to social media consultant Cass Anderson, “The best way to reach out to this generation of fans who are not being exposed via television is on the web. If the NHL is able to leverage things like the Twitter explosion and piggy back that hype into awareness for hockey, they're really hitting a demographic that they might not have access to otherwise.”

Now that sounds worthy of a RT.

Stephanie is a New York City-based sports writer with a deep-rooted passion for the game of hockey. She is a contributor with ESPN the Magazine and a senior writer at HockeyBarn.com as well as a guest blogger extraordinaire with a newly acquired penchant for social media. You can follow her at @StephBags on Twitter.