NCAA Assistant Dir of Digital & Social Media, Marketing & Broadcast Alliances Chris Dion (@ChrisMDion) and his staff are in the midst of their most hectic time of year, which means dusting off a usually forbidden phrase. “We’re so trained with our brand internally to use 'madness' only when used with March. It’s as if I don’t even use it alone anymore,” he said. In addition to helping the NCAA's partners activate around its basketball tournaments, Dion is constantly trying to expand the governing body's digital footprint. Dion said, "We’re trying to do some experimental process on how to make a Snapchat account work from a league office; we’re not on the ground at every competition. How do we share the access to that account, how do we let our members, our teams gain ownership of our social platforms as well."
How voices differ between platforms:
Very different. Our wrestling account tends to be talking directly to student-athletes, past and current wrestlers. The March Madness account is talking to fans. Our baseball account talks to the baseball enthusiast; it’s a little more stat heavy. It isn’t something we’ve pulled together in the last year. We’ve really honed them over the last three years and turned them into something actionable and meaningful.
How the NCAA’s social/digital presence changes during the tournament:
Strategy-wise, it’s not different at all. Content-wise, it is more content. We want to tell the best stories, we want to be relevant, we want to be timely. In March, we have more stories to tell and more eyeballs on us. Our content needs to get better, our content needs to get faster and we need to provide premium content to our fans.
Keys to the NCAA staying relevant digitally:
Planning and understand where you are. We’ve been planning four, five months now and our plans have changed three times already. A lot of it is evaluating what’s hot today, what’s reacting today, do we have the bandwidth and the resources to react to that? Do we need to jump on the bandwagon? Maybe that’s not part of the plan and we can scrap that?
Metrics that matter to the NCAA:
We have three key metrics that we live and die by. One is our audience. We’re not counting likes and follows, but we want to know if we’re still growing. Two is engagement -- we measure our content against itself. We’re looking at how our content is engaging this point year over year, week over week. Lastly, we use a reach metric to understand how far our content is going.
Platforms that excite you:
The future of social is going to do a lot with these messaging apps like Snapchat, allowing the conversation to go from personal to global. The other side is Twitter. It's just fantastic because it’s a global conversation. You can travel to the other side of the world in real time and explore. Then you have services like Facebook Live and Periscope. Putting live video in the hands of people around the world is also super exciting.
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