Big East Dir of Digital & Social Content Brad Zak (@BigEast) is readying for his fifth men's hoops tournament at MSG, and it has been an interesting road since he left St. John's to join the conference just as it shifted to a focus on basketball. He believes much of the work done during his first year has laid the groundwork for where the Big East is today on social media. Among those efforts is a social scavenger hunt, in which clues lead fans to tickets for the tourney. Another effort launched in August is a live video show called “Big East Shootaround.” The show is typically hosted from the conference offices once a week, and there have also been remote productions. The show has gained traction on Periscope, Facebook Live and the Fox Sports Go app. Zak: "We will be doing some different shows around the tournament with that crew. One will be a Selection Sunday show the night after our tournament ends. For us, it’s an opportunity to give our fans a selection show that is strictly Big East focused."
SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must-follows: The NBA, as they really set the bar for different things.
Favorite app: Definitely Twitter loyal.
Average time per day on social media: In some form or fashion, 12 hours or so a day.
Working with schools during the conference tournament:
There are some different opportunities that we have, but we are all kind of working it together. We have shared strategies on how we cover our teams and cover our games. We are going to look to amplify what schools do, and we encourage them to amplify some of the better work that we do around their team and key moments that we single out. We also have a good relationship with Fox in terms of live highlights. That is something we manage and it is a big thing that our schools push and have a lot of success with.
How Selection Sunday affects planning:
Our team here won’t be looking to send somebody to every site, so we will depend a lot on the press conference footage that is available and what our teams are doing. We might be able to roll out our own content and come up with our own plans. In years past, as we’ve gone further in the tournament, we’ve sent our resources to regionals and the Final Four to create original content for the Big East brand.
Creation of "Big East Shootaround":
We don’t have football at the conference level, and we’d like to keep the conversation about basketball going throughout the year. The best way for us to do that was to take it into our own hands. We had good viewership early on. We slowly went through ebbs and flows as the season started. But as we have gone through conference play we gained significant traction and have seen good numbers.
Working with Fox Sports:
We have a very good relationship with them. A lot of the same ways they are looking to grow FS1 and their college basketball brand is obviously closely intertwined with what we are trying to do. They kind of rebranded their Hoops on Fox accounts to College Basketball on Fox, so they were looking to re-target what they were doing there and looking for us to help amplify those efforts.
Balancing coverage of spring sports:
With the new studio efforts, we’ve included spring and fall updates. We do one show of those weekly. We do a weekly women’s basketball live update show as well. The biggest advantage we have now -- which makes my life easier -- is we’ve used "Big East Shootaround" to build out this video and create benefits all the way down. It’s touching all of our sports.
Impact of ACC Tournament in Brooklyn:
It factors more into our brand campaign and the way we approach marketing our tournament the past two years now. We want to establish the Big East with Madison Square Garden as our home. We’ve been there 36 years now. We build toward that moment and any time we can connect our brand to the Madison Square Garden brand, we like to think of those two as synonymous come March.
