The Jaguars are celebrating their 25th season and a big part of that involves honoring the top 25 non-active players in franchise history with their All-25 series. While the franchise is young relative to most others in the NFL, the 25th anniversary season is still a massive undertaking that Jaguars Social Media Manager Darnell Brady (@Jaguars) said is a reflection of the contributions made from departments across the organization. He said, “We have a great PR staff. They are very social forward; our broadcast team with radio shows and TV shows, they have shifted with the times and are very forward thinking. They say, ‘We’ve got this sweet clip from practice or from this. Do you want it for social?’ They are always thinking about this.” He added, “For the All-25, that wasn’t a social/digital project. Broadcast did a huge chunk. PR did a huge trunk. Social figured out the strategy of how we’re pushing it out, but they are doing 90% of the work. It’s important to the team and important to how many people it takes to have a successful social channel. It’s not just one person or one department. It’s a lot of people.”
SOCIAL SNAPSHOT
Must-follow: Jess Smith and NYSE Manager of Digital & Social Media Matthew Kobach. Cameron Magruder is one of my favorite guys. His videos entertain me so much.
Favorite app: Reddit. I’m always on Reddit every single day.
Average time per day on social media: My doctor is going to be embarrassed by this. Probably 6-8 hours.
Keeping an in-season feel all year:
Our fans want us to meet their expectations and we want to make sure we’re getting them excited for the season. We really try to serve our fans and make sure we push our brand and our brand story. Because it is our 25th season, we want to drive the storyline of the success we had in those 25 seasons and highlight the successful moments. We did not take this opportunity lightly to take hold of this narrative. This is not something you can just do in season. You have to do it year-round.
Fan interest influencing strategy:
We put out a Twitter survey and that’s one example of us looking at what fans are digesting. The other part is we dive really hard into analytics. We work with our analytics team and gather all of the data from every single post from this past season, and then we compare for each platform because we have individual audiences for each. We rated every single content series and this offseason, we changed our content strategy for where we are posting things.
Content from U.K. appearances driving global audience:
We have been very fortunate to have a team over in the U.K. and we have been able to work with them and really leverage when our players are over there, being able to capture content. We work with our Jaguars U.K. team in sharing content.
Creating content that connects fans with the team's history:
This is my third season and there is a lot of back history that I don’t know about. I have been able to grow closer to the organization and learn a lot more. We touch on how important it is to be intimately knowledgeable about the organization you are representing on social media and are posting for. In that sense, All-25 has been great. We have had a lot of departments working on it. Some people have been here 25 years. If you became a fan in 2013 during our playoff run, you are able to learn more of the history of the Jaguars and feel more apart of it.
Branded content philosophy:
It’s really something that every team is working on how they can make it work for the brand and the team. One of the processes we began this year when our new CMO came in was when the partnership sales department has a prospect to execution, they write a brief: What is the objective? What is the prospect’s audience? What are the things they are interested in? It goes through this group that looks at what our available inventory that makes sense is, looks at what we can build and what new creative we can do and whether we have the bandwidth to do it and do it well.
Plans for the 25th season:
We are planning on doing a lot around alumni being back for various games and every now and then have some throw-back content. One of our guys in a different department who has been here 25 years went through every VHS tape we have and categorized and labeled them so now we can start digitizing them to have more content. Our 25th season campaign is “AuTHENtic ReNOWned DuUuval.” It’s important for us to focus on the past, the present and the kind of future and also how fans are part of that future. We don’t want our 25th season to just be throwback everything.
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