DraftKings Dir of Social Marketing Josh Karpf (@JKarpf) joined the company this past December and brings nearly 10 years of social and digital media experience from his previous stops at Spotify and Pepsi. Karpf works hard to keep DraftKings authentic and credible on social media. “There’s an authenticity consumers expect and they can see through a company when they’re not being authentic,” he said. Karpf noted it is important for him to produce work that fans know is coming from the DFS company. He also wants DraftKings’ followers to learn something every day. Karpf: “We want to try and present stories that are unique, that make you a better fan, a smarter fan.”
Social media philosophy:
It’s really about trying to move at the speed of sports. What that means is continuing to produce work that is culturally relevant and relevant in sports culture, but also a unique editorial perspective for DraftKings that educates and entertains our fans. There is so much content that is created every minute, every day, across the world. The speed of creation is greater than ever before. I’m also a believer in incubating and understanding emerging channels quickly before competitors do and as our consumers are adapting them.
How social media has changed how work is done:
There was a lot of time spent trying to internally build alignment around the role of social media. Now it’s there. For the most part, it’s very clear that impacts the way companies go to market and communicate with customers. I believe it has created an expectation among consumers of being always on. Consumers tweet at a company and expect an immediate response.
An example of a successful campaign from a DraftKings social media account:
We’re really focused on highlighting iconic achievements in sports and introducing work quickly to support that. For example, when Albert Pujols hit his 600th home run, we produced these -- they’re essentially digital baseball cards -- achievement cards. We dropped them when he hit 600 and we actually invited users to share lineups. If they had him in their lineup, share that with us on Twitter and we produced custom cards with that user’s Twitter name on it, so it’s kind of a limited-edition card that only that consumer gets.
How DraftKings does social media differently:
Companies tend to struggle because what’s a unique point of view for a specific brand? But for a sports brand, there are so many things occurring daily in sports, so the focus is really on how do we not just jump on everything that’s going on, but find stories that we can tell that are presented with a unique perspective. Our positioning is what we call “Game Inside the Game.” It is kind of our rallying cry.
Favorite and most frustrating part of social media:
The most exciting part is that you’re operating a newsroom. You’re trying to move at the speed of sports, react to really interesting things happening, and also take that, harness it and tell stories to your fans that gets them excited about the games. It’s very creative and there are a lot of really great ideas. Being in technology, there’s a lot of really interesting ways that we can do that going forward. Frustrating? I think that there’s so many great ideas. The challenge is always how do we do fewer things well? Having focus on and testing a lot things and optimizing those that perform really well and scaling those.
Trends in social media moving forward:
We have to understand how consumers are behaving and not simply focus on one or two social networks that are big right now. Some trends are this notion of story-based communications on social, whether it's Snapchat or Instagram stories. The notion of story as a format, as a medium of communications, is really important. A few years ago, people thought that all of our consumers wanted to just broadcast everything to their friends and put it out there. That’s not necessarily the case. People want a narrow path. They want to publish something to their friends, but they don’t want it to necessarily live forever.
If you know anyone who should be featured for their use of social media, send their name to us at
jperez@sportsbusinessdaily.com.
