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Social Studies: How Does ATP/WTA Event In Cincinnati Stand Out?

Holter Media Dir of Digital Marketing Taylor Crosby heads up social media for the ATP/WTA Western & Southern Open (@CincyTennis), which is held in mid-August at the Lindner Family Tennis Center outside Cincinnati. Crosby, who is currently at Wimbledon, is in her sixth year with the tournament -- the last five with Holter Media, the firm that handles PR and marketing for several tennis events, including the French Open, BNP Paribas Open (Indian Wells) and Fayez Sarofim & Co. U.S. Men's Clay Court Championships (Houston). Crosby said of the event, which is operated by the USTA and held two weeks before the U.S. Open, “One thing that sets us apart as a tournament, and other events are starting to do the same, even though our tournament is only a week long we really try to stay present and engaging with our fans year-round. Everyone who is working at the tournament is working week-in and week-out, and we think social should do the same. We really pride ourselves on that just because our event has ended we are doing being present and relevant.”

SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must-follows: Nike Court on Instagram, which is the tennis-specific brand. They do a wonderful job with their imagery. It’s really powerful. They play off the emotion and on-court drama.
Favorite app: Instagram. It’s nice to see beautiful places and beautiful things I might not be able to experience in real life.
Average time per day on social media: In tournament, about 13-14 hours. Those days get pretty long. Year-round, probably a solid 8-10 a day.

Standing out from other events on social:
We have done a pretty good job as a team to create the right voice so when we are speaking to fans we do differentiate ourselves from just about every other tournament in the world. The way we wanted to be perceived is that friendly, warm, playful person in your life who is down to try anything new. We are trying to be our fans’ friends in a sense. We want to entertain them, educate them and entice them to tag along with us at the event.

Learning from other events:
One thing that we’ve learned, one of the accounts that I enjoy to follow is Wimbledon just because they do a good job of treating each platform differently and really well. That’s what we also try to do. We know our followers on Facebook are different than our followers in Instagram and different than our followers on Twitter. While we may approach Facebook as more of a family platform, we’ll approach Instagram as more of our young up-and-comers in the world, we just have to be smart about what type of content we put on each and the tone that we take with each.

Importance of lead-up events:
They are very important. Year by year, the tours have done a good job of connecting the tournaments. Rather than try to compete with each other, we’re trying to elevate each other. We are in a fortunate position that we are in the U.S. Open series as the lead-up to the U.S. Open, so the ATP, WTA and USTA have done a really nice job making sure we all have the resources we need and are elevating each other. At the end of the day, we want people to watch tennis and to choose Cincinnati as their destination.

Celebrating history:
The tournament has a very rich history in Cincinnati and one of the cool things about it is that our trophy is a little bit different than other sporting trophies out there because it’s made by Rookwood, which is a local company that has been making the trophy since the beginning of the tournament. It’s the little things like that we can celebrate. We’re trying to find some fun ideas that we can do with players in relation to the trophy to remind people of that history. We are also very fortunate to have a great photo archive so we can celebrate the beginning of our tournament and show people how much we’ve grown since 1899.

Facility updates:
I was actually pleasantly surprised. People are excited. This upgrade is pretty insane. It’s $25 million. It’s huge. You really can’t miss it now. The stadium looks completely different. We were smart, because we kind of kicked off this campaign with a produced video with American player John Isner, kind of a funny playoff of the life of a construction worker. It gave fans an idea of what we were looking at doing. Then the picture updates and the time lapse on how it’s all been built.

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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