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Social Studies: PGA Tour's Preston McClellan Discusses A Heavy Schedule, Olympic Plans

PGA Tour Manager of Digital Communications Preston McClellan (@p_mcclellan) grew up playing golf and understands how fans of the sport want to be interacted with on social media. He said golf fans are "very knowledgeable about the game, so you have to speak to them from that perspective." McClellan added, "We have a physical document, it's about a page long, it's a narrative that dictates what we post on the PGA Tour social media channels. It goes back to getting everyone who might be pressing send on a given day to be in the mindset of this brand voice. That coordinates us to talk to the golf fan the way the golf fan wants to be talked to.” McClellan: "A big thing for us also is meeting fans where they are already consuming content and not assuming they are going to come to us.”

SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must Follow: NatGeo on Instagram.
Favorite app: Whatsapp. The PGA Tour has lots of players and agents who are international, so communication with them can sometimes be difficult, and Whatsapp makes it extraordinarily easy.
Average time per day on social media: Way too much. I have a screen open at least 12 hours.

Posting strategy as tournaments progress:
We have an interesting setup at the Tour. It's a little bit different than I imagine at a lot of other places, because our content cycle is very different. We have a tournament almost every week. We're moving from moment to moment to moment. On Monday, we are transitioning from one event to the next. By Monday night or Tuesday morning, we start look ahead at the week. As we get to Thursday it becomes much more competition focused. Then it becomes what’s going on inside the ropes.

Approaching the PGA Championship, which is run by a different governing body:
We've reached out to the PGA of America to see what they are doing, as they have all of the media rights. We can’t clip highlights like we can for our own events. The content is a lot of re-purposing what the PGA of America is posting. In certain years, we work out an agreement with organizations on the front end. Last year, we had rights to clip some highlights during the PGA Championship. We’ll be doing something similar this year. Our distribution is so large compared to theirs that it is advantageous for them to work with us.

Coverage of Olympics:
That is going to be interesting because we have a PGA Tour event that week opposite the Olympics -- the John Deere Classic. We are going to be balancing coverage of the Olympics and our own event. But we all have the same goal. We will cover the Olympic competition like we would a major championship. And there are going to be players in that field that we've never worked with before. If someone from the Asian Tour is doing really well, I would work with my counterpart on that tour to see what I can do to help amplify what they are doing around that golfer.

Use of and concern with streaming platforms:
That’s the future. That’s where everything is heading. The PGA Tour kind of acknowledged that last year when it launched PGA Tour Live, our OTT product. Streaming is a priority and PGA Tour Live shows that. We have been prioritizing live content on Facebook and Twitter more than we ever have over the last three months. One of the best things we do is on Tuesdays and Wednesday when we do walks and talks with players. We’ll walk a couple holes during a pro-am or practice round and allow the fans to ask questions.

Implementing VR
:
Golf is perfect for virtual reality in a couple different ways. There is more passive watching, which is good for VR. We did some (instructional things) at the Waste Management Phoenix Open this year where Peter Malnati, who is a PGA Tour winner, gave an instructional in virtual reality on how to hit a bunker shot. We are definitely going to be doing more and more of that as we build up the capability and have more people to produce that content. The PGA Tour is the only league in pro sports that has an Oculus app where all our VR content lives.

Player takeovers:
The bulk of my job is facilitating interactions between our accounts and the players. Just as a general rule, people like to talk to people, rather than talk to a brand. As good as our content is, it still doesn’t beat Bubba Watson going live on his Facebook page and being Bubba. We realize the value of that authentic, player-based content. We try to do as much of that as we can, and we try to pick players who are relevant for certain platforms.


If you know anyone who should be featured for their use of social media, send their name to us at jperez@sportsbusinessdaily.com

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