Oregon State Dir of Social Media Kat Lucchesi (@KatLucchesi) joined the school's Athletics Ideation Team almost six months ago after seven seasons as Missouri football team's multimedia director. She said, "I really looked at how athletic departments and professional teams structure their digital media. I found some NFL teams are more heavily focused on graphics, some athletic departments are more focused on video. I don’t know if there is a right answer; I think it’s different at different places." However, Lucchesi said what made OSU stand out to her is that she is “able to try things, and if it doesn’t work, try something else.” OSU opens its football season Thursday at Minnesota.
Choosing a career in social media:
My background is in video. I mainly knew video and storytelling from my journalism background. It just kind of happened. It’s always changing -- the digital world. It’s crazy that it has changed as much as it has in the last seven years. A misconception with social media is that it’s just posting. It’s a bigger way to tell our story right away and effectively to tons of people from various target audiences. I found interest in that because on social you can do all types of digital media.
Changes made to how Oregon State does social media:
I'm working with communications and marketing and talking through our social media and going over strategies. The biggest things are, as a team, to come up with social media standards, guidelines. I met with the communications staff and we had a long discussion about our branding and consistency, and how we are going to tell the Oregon State story and how we portray our message across all the social media platforms.
Digital efforts planned for start of football season:
You come up with a formal execution or a game plan, just like a coach would. Not only here is what we are doing on gameday, but here is what we are doing throughout the week and what’s going where and what is the best way to share that certain story. Is that better with a video? Is that better with a graphic? Maybe it’s better on a different platform? I don’t think it’s the same thing at every single university and every single college football team. What works at Oregon State might be different at Oklahoma. It just depends on your audience.
What is different this year:
What we hope is to bring a lot of visual looks into telling our stories. Not just here is what we are doing, but really showing people why we are telling that story. We are telling the why behind everything we do at Oregon State.
Incorporating Gill Coliseum renovations into social media:
We posted about it when it initially launched. We talked through it -- how do we want to present this? What are the visual things we’ll share with it, and think of every possible thing that can come with that? I don’t think for social media it will have a direct impact right away. The updates haven’t happened yet; volleyball has an awesome court. I’m hoping when the new seats get put in and the putting down the court happens, we’ll ask, "Do we do a video? Do we do a time lapse? Do we do a photo? Do we do an interview?" We want to keep the fans updated with what’s happening.
Social media accounts that inspire:
They asked me on my interview: Who do you follow? I like following the bigger brands. I think of Instagram. I love how Nike will post and share their brand down to their women’s running account to their Bike Town Portland. The NBA also does awesome stuff all the time. They do a great job sharing their players’ personalities and really connecting with the fan.
If you know anyone who should be featured for their use of social media, send their name to us at
jperez@sportsbusinessdaily.com.
