The Penguins pride themselves on being a team that lives in the moment, and when a fan had a "crisis" with a jersey last year, Dir of New Media Andi Perelman (@Penguins) and her team went into action. A fan in Nova Scotia had tweeted to the club that his wife spilled red wine on his white Sidney Crosby Team Canada jersey. Perelman decided the Penguins could not leave a fan in a lurch like that, and sent a new jersey -- signed by Crosby of course. A few weeks later, the clearly-grateful fan sent Perelman two lobsters as a thank you. Perelman: “It’s nice when fans seem like a friend back to us.” A Pittsburgh native, Perelman feels being rooted in the team’s history definitely helps with her job. She said, “For how much we work and how much we are here living and breathing everything that is Pittsburgh Penguins, it is nice to love the team.”
SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must-follows: Jess Smith, Neil Horowitz, people who aggregate all of the best social media content from other sports organizations. It’s so hard to keep track of it all.
Favorite apps: I am addicted to my Twitter account.
Average time per day on social media: How many hours are there in a day?
Defining the Penguins’ brand and voice:
Our three brand pillars are energy, drive and innovation. From the top on down, those are the things we look at and how our voice is created. For social media, innovation is huge. It's bringing something new to our fans. For energy and drive, we really look at photos and videos and GIFs and say, “Does the player look like he’s determined to do something? Is there energy in the photo or is he just standing there?” That’s the overarching brand outlook. On social, we also have to be personable. We have to sound like a fellow fan and a trusted resource.
Trying to innovate:
One of the ways we innovate is looking at what everyone else is doing, then tweaking that and making it our own. We utilize what other brands are doing and ask how can this work for the Penguins and how can we make something unique for us. We work pretty closely with some great software providers and tech companies and are also involved with the Pittsburgh Technology Council. That helps us innovate, because we need the best people to be able to do so. We aren’t going to be able to create our own app, but we found YinzCam years ago through Carnegie Mellon University and were the first sports team to use their app.
Fan influence on posts:
We always listen to what the fans are saying, but understand we can’t be everything to everyone. On different platforms, we get different opinions and different age groups. Season-ticket holders and Twitter followers might be totally different audiences. It’s hard to take one thing and say it is the fan perspective. A good example of us responding to fans came a few years ago when we changed our goal song. There were a couple of fans who started a grassroots campaign to change the song to “Party Hard” by Andrew W.K. This was a great opportunity. This is what the fans were asking for, so let’s give it to them.
New for this season:
We are getting much more video in real time from our TV show guys. Rather than waiting for the next episode of (the team's digital show) “In The Room,” we are cutting it out for social. We are kind of moving away from that online/website video model and are pushing everything to social for native posting.
Social media serving as organizational glue:
We are housed in marketing, but I am interfacing with my VP/Communications on some projects and my VP/Partnerships & Sales on others. We are in ticketing meetings every week. I joke we are like the office operator. Anyone can come to us at any point to get the information they are looking for or be redirected to the right place. We have our hands in everything. It’s essential for us to be able to answer fan questions or to market properly.
Measuring success:
We look at what is important to the platforms, and that’s what is important to us. Facebook is optimizing for what they call meaningful interactions. That should be important for us because that is going to get us reach. We also talk about shares, re-tweets, comments and creating conversation. It's also about allowing for a place where our fans can feel comfortable to create a community to speak top each other and share their thoughts. It’s also important to help out our partners. If a partner is looking for something for their business, that’s important. It can be getting email addresses or getting foot traffic into a store. Depending upon what the content is and who the stakeholder is, it can shift.
Integrating sponsors:
This offseason we changed the way we work with the partnership and sales team. Rather than them going out and selling a mutually-agreed-upon social media promotion of five tweets and two Facebook posts or anything so nebulous, we have really said, “Lets start by hearing from the partner. What are they trying to do and why do they need to be on our social?” From there we start coming up with ideas that we think would be a nice mix of something that will accomplish their goals and feel authentic from our brand.
If you know anyone who should be featured for their use of social media, send their name to us at jperez@sportsbusinessdaily.com.
