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Social Studies: LAFC Dir Of Digital Colin Kelly On Connecting With Fans, L.A. Market

LAFC Dir of Digital Colin Kelly (@LAFC) has been with the MLS expansion club for 2 1/2 years, but in less than two months, the team will take the field for first time and the work Kelly and company have been putting in to cultivate a fan base will begin to yield results. He said, “One of the ways that we’ve built the fanbase is street by street, block by block, one by one. We’ve taken a grassroots approach to things, which you wouldn’t think lends itself to mass distribution over social media, but it really has. It has empowered us to go out and create new fans. Bringing fans in physically and digitally has allowed us to build out this community.” 

SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must-follow: I love #SMSports on Twitter. It provides an aggregate of what’s going on in the social media space.
Favorite app: From a design perspective, I would point to Starbucks. But living in L.A., it has to be Lyft.
Average time per day on social media: Maybe 12-15 hours a day.

Driving fan interest through social media:
We have tried to engage our fans. I know everyone says it. Social and digital media is really the only opportunity we had to communicate. We don’t have another touch point other than the occasional article or video in general media. Social has been the way for people to find out what we are doing. It naturally lent itself to being our main form of communication with what’s going on behind the scenes with the club.

Dramatic player/coach intros:
This is Los Angeles. The production values are high, the drama naturally comes. I want to say it stems from that; we definitely take that into account with anything we do in terms of the quality of production and whatnot. At first, it was never meant to be such a serious thing; it wasn’t meant to be a joke either. We set out to do something really simple and clean to introduce the first coach in club history, Bob Bradley. The head lift was the best shot we took, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I don’t want to say the players are trying to one-up each other, but there is a level of creativity involved in the cap tilt reveal.

Utilizing celebrity owners/investors and fans:
Obviously, having the celebrity ownership group that we do -- Will Ferrell, Magic Johnson, Mia Hamm, etc., -- has definitely brought us a lot of attention, which has been great. We try not to take advantage of their status to elevate what we’re trying to do. When they post about the club, they do it on their own. It’s organic. They are all very interested in the project and have them board, come to some of our events because they are generally curious as to what we are up to. But we don’t try to make them the face of the club

Platform on which fans engage with LAFC the most:
The stats say Twitter, but it really is probably Instagram. Until recently, we haven’t had a lot of news, which is a Twitter kind of way of posting. The buildup has been slow, there are things we haven’t been able to talk about. But we have been able to capture really bold and high-quality visual elements of everything we are doing here and sent it to Instagram and it’s really taken off from there. It has really resonated with what we are doing.

LAFC’s voice would be…:
I won’t say our voice, but what we try to do here across the board is within our content is be true to the sport and be true to the city. If we stay in those lanes, we know we are doing right by our fans.

Standing out in the L.A. sports market:
One of the things that is making us stand out is we are operating completely from scratch. We have new teams in the market, but they are not of L.A. I know the Rams were here, but they were gone for a while. The interest really comes from we are a brand-new team starting from nothing in the second-biggest market in the country. We are building a brand-new stadium. The newness has captured a lot of interest. Building our fanbase is a different story. That has to do with our general attitude and the position that we’re taking that we are something different.

Something different:
Almost everyone on staff has their LAFC social media profile. We all have our own individual accounts that we are able to address concerns in our areas very quickly. It gives each of us a little opportunity to have some personality beyond the big account.


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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