	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

COSIDA CONFERENCE CALL

April 13, 2017

CLARK TEUSCHER: -- 2016/2017 CoSIDA continuing education series, sponsored by Capital One. My name is Clark Teuscher, I am the sports information director at North Central College, and the chair of the CoSIDA Continuing Education Committee. I'll be moderating today's webinar as we collaborate with new media and technology committee for a discussion centering on social media analytics.

We all know that social media has become an integral component of our strategies for communicating with our various audiences and expanding our brands, but how do we determine which are strategies are most effective and how do we define success. How can we quantify that success in a manner that will resonate with the upper levels of the administration or our institutions.

Here to help us answer these questions is Michael Thompson of the University of Mississippi. And as for any other questions which come up during Michael's presentation, submit those questions in the chat window and we'll address as many of them as we can.

With that, we'll turn things over to Michael Thompson.

MICHAEL THOMPSON: Good morning or good afternoon in some places. Thanks for having me. I love doing webinars. I guess you saw on the schedule, this was supposed to be with Jim Hanauer and myself, with Jim carrying the load. But his wife is at the hospital right now, about to deliver their first baby. The bullpen has been called, and I'm going to step up and see if I can get through some of Jim's deck, and then my thoughts also in there, because social media is something that almost a whole department touches. With that, let's just jump right in.

This is a three-part webinar. I'll talk a little bit about social media overview and the deck will get progressively I guess more advanced. At the very beginning here when we talk about overview, some of the stuff you may have already seen, a lot of it you probably already now.

It's more of just setting the stage and for building a foundation for what we're talking about the middle and back half of the webinar when we get into some of the real specific analytics and how do use data and how to share that data and analytics with your superiors to get more investment in some of these areas, whether that's financially or just with other types of resources.

So we'll go through some little, small examples that just illustrate exactly how powerful some of the data metrics are and how to use them. Then we'll spend that last third or so specifically talking about how to position and how to communicate the importance of data analytics as it relates to social media, and some very, very practical ways to sit down with your boss or with upper management, senior leadership.

So it's obviously a massive space. Social media, I mean, it's a term that has been thrown around for almost a decade now. The power that it holds as far as an outlet, a communication outlet, is really unprecedented. We've never seen anything rise this fast. When you look at Facebook, just that B word of a billion, 1.87 billion active users, it's incredible how much of our fan bases, how many of the customers organizations are using Facebook.

Then Instagram and Twitter, these are January numbers, all of them have gone up. Snapchat is obviously making a big push, is at a rapid rise to 300 million active users. But when you look at these logos, none of them are really the same as far as what the platforms are about. They're all great platforms for your organization to be using. It's just a matter of how do we use each one the right way. What types of content should we have for each. Really, what's the consumer's role in each one of those. Just kind of be thinking about that as a baseline for your social media strategy and some of the tactics that you use.

Facebook, I mean, in addition to the 1.87 billion users, this little chart here talks about Google searches all the way back to 2004. But you look and see like 2006 and a half, 2007, you start to see Facebook come on the scene as far as the interest of people using Google to search about it. It just stays at the top. The other lines towards the bottom aren't even close. Facebook just has a really, really incredible power with the universe.

The other thing that was quite alarming as we started looking through our different own media outlets and channels, if you look since January the 1st of this year, just our football Facebook page, only football, not any other sport, not combined, not the general athletics one, there was over four million host views on just football. If you look at our official website, you're looking at 3.5 million page views in the same amount of time.

When we internally start thinking about we've put a lot of time and resources, we put a lot of focus on our official website, which is smart, but look at the power of just one of the sports Facebook pages when it comes to this reach, when it comes to being able to deliver a message to a large audience, one that's engaged and obviously looking for your content.

It's a huge player in this. Sometimes it kind of gets treated as, Oh, it's just social media. But this is going to become, and for us in some areas, has already become, our most valuable way to distribute content. It probably is the same way for you.

Great charts and images like this all over the web, looking at how much time users are spending on social. If you add it up today, it would be like five years, four months straight of what you would do in your lifetime on these social media platforms. Again, that number is only going to increase as more platforms become available and we continue to rely even more on our mobile phones for connection.

Real briefly, this is how we do our social media as far as you see all of these different accounts. They are all within the standards for our brand as far as our kind of universal voice. But each of our teams has their own Instagram account, Twitter account, Facebook account, some have Snapchat. The point of that is while they're all in line with the universal brand voice, they need to have a voice of their own. Social media is all about personalization.

We encourage our teams to have a unique voice that's in line with what the mar com or external team maps out that voice to be. So each team having its own kind of defined voice, then social media becomes an excellent way to live that voice out and provide a unique experience for their followers, but also staying consistent with the Ole Miss athletics brand. A lot of different accounts, again, having different voices, but all kind of part of the same family.

I'm going to go through three analytics pieces on three platforms. The biggest reason why is because Facebook and Twitter are the two most used or most talked about when it comes to college athletics and wanting to learn more. You saw on the slide a couple slides ago about Instagram and its rise. But we'll talk about Twitter, Facebook, then Google analytics. You may say, Why Google analytics. It will make a lot more sense when we start to tie this whole thing back together, look at how powerful from a financial and revenue standpoint social media can be. Google analytics is the key to that in understanding how powerful it is. We'll end with that.

All of these are free, which is great. Facebook insights, Twitter analytics, Google analytics are all free tools that are available to you. There's only one slide in here I think that you'll see where we've actually paid for something in this deck. I encourage you to use these tools you have.

Facebook insights, just an incredible amount of information. They're adding new metrics it seems like every week giving you different ways to look at your posts and the engagement of your posts, your followers, whatnot. Twitter really struggled initially with how they would provide analytics. Over the last 18 months has really turned it on as far as the tools that they offer their users. You can find a wealth of information there. I'll show you a couple of examples in a minute. Like I said, Google analytics is where we'll wrap it all up and at least illustrate how this social media and the metrics, how it directly translates into revenue. That's what most of your senior leadership wants to know about, is how can this generate revenues that we can have more resources to give our student-athletes, additional resources to compete and win championships, which is probably what most of us are here to do.

But before we go into anything else, I want to kind of throw three words out here that I'll use. I'm using them under these kind of definitions. When I talk about followers in these examples, again, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, we'll talk about this engagement. Engagement, I love the word, but it's overused a lot. It's almost become bankrupt as far as just a word. So when I talk about it in this webinar, really just talking about the Facebook likes and shares, Twitter likes, retweets. Any time anyone is somewhat participating in or a behavior is created on social media with a brand, then reach. This is an old ad term. This is what kind of range does your voice have, your content, how much influence do you have as far as the max. What is the max amount of people that any particular social media account could get to. So we'll use that as reach. It goes back to an old advertising term as well, which is impressions, impressions and eyeballs. We'll talk a lot about reach in these next few examples.

Everyone always asks, Which of these is the most important. Well, all of them are the most important. It's an equation. Social media, if you were to use these terms in a formula, followers plus engagement is going to equal reach. You to have a little bit of chicken and egg riddle because if you don't have a lot of followers, how are you going to get a lot of reach. Engagement is one of the things that you can somewhat control based on the type of content that you're creating, where you're putting it. You have a little bit of control there. After that, reach tends to work back into followers. So as you gain more followers, you gain more reach. As you gain more reach, more than likely, if you have good content and engaging content, are going to gain more followers. They're all three equally important.

You also have to think about what is the objective of what you're trying to do. Every organization is going to have something a little bit different. But this is probably the easiest and most simple way to think about those three terms. They all have a very, very important role in the overall social media equation.

So one of the things that we do as far as how we're using analytics and data as part of our social media, part of our strategies, we're using this data to decide what's working best, what kind of content works best, when are people viewing this content, when is the best time to post content. We're looking at tracking progress, benchmarking, like where we were a year ago today, where are we today as far as the different metrics that you'd be looking for, followers, likes, engagement percentages, all kinds of different things that you can set as goals, then create the strategies and tactics to reach those goals. So it's a great way of just tracking and benchmarking.

Then probably most importantly, time is a resource that is non-renewable. It's something that is the most valuable resource that all of us, everyone on this webinar, including me, time is our most valuable resource. So using the data and analytics to more efficiently and effectively allocate time and resources is really important to us. So we're always trying to do things more efficiently and more effectively, you know, reaching the same number of people with the same engagement. If we can do that and only spend two hours on it versus ten, that's an important thing to note, because we can spend those other eight hours doing something else to grow the brand or achieve our other objectives.

I'll kind of flip back to these three things. What's working best, tracking progress, how does the example talk about allocation of time and resources. We'll go through two or three of these.

This is an example as far as what to post, what kind of content. It comes from our men's tennis Facebook page. If we just pull a couple of quick column charts, we see that average impressions for videos is a little over five times more than our photos on this particular page. So right off the bat you're kind of alarmed. How is that happening. How are we getting that many more impressions.

Well, an impression is something on Facebook. The way they define that, it's showing up on a user's, basically on their scroll, above the fold, to go back to an old newspaper term. But it's served up to them. The engagement side we talked about how that's defined, but you have average number of engagements on videos is twice the amount than photos as far as people sharing, people liking, commenting, asking questions, things like that.

But it's somewhat deceiving because if you go back and look at -- if you dig a little bit deeper on the videos, you notice that chart on the bottom left just changed. Now we're looking at video views. It's important to note that impression on Facebook for video is not a view. They didn't play the video. So this is a little bit more in line with the photo impressions. So the key thing to know is, All right, are our resources allocated right. Should we be producing as many videos as we're doing. Even more importantly, maybe we really need to think hard about what is that thumbnail for the video. So if 10,000 people are seeing the thumbnail, but only 2,000 people are actually watching the video, what can we learn from that and how can we leverage that knowledge to achieve the objectives.

I'll go into a little bit deeper dive on this and look at two different videos on the same men's tennis Facebook page.

These are two videos. One was a crawfish kind of rock'n roll. You can tell by that thumbnail it's meant to be fun and funny. That was the highest performing video on the page. Then you contrast that with the low performing video, which is a promo video, not very long, but was made about an upcoming match against Auburn.

Look at the different reach numbers. I mean, 68, almost 70,000 reached on the crawfish rock'n roll video, versus a tiny fraction of the reach for the Auburn promo at 1300 or so. Then the rest of the metrics do the same thing. I mean, they're exponentially greater on the crawfish rock'n roll piece.

Again, even if we posted these at the same time, the same day of the week, getting everything else in the formula controlled, you look at what's the variable, what's the unique difference. Well, it's the type of content.

We go back to our questions, our checklist, start putting it through this checklist. What is working best. Well, I mean, the fun, the humorous kind of tongue-in-cheek type videos that truly personalize and humanize our student-athletes are performing better. That's great because personalization, humanization is one of our global strategies that we use to grow our fan base. There's only two. That's one of them. It's great to see the content that we are creating is humanizing and personalizing, indeed, the one that our fans are consuming the most.

You look at the tracking progress, I mean, those numbers were pretty astounding, the difference. Again, it talks about maybe the upcoming game, upcoming match promo videos. If we're going to allocate our time and resources more efficiently, maybe that type of content is something that should be done with graphics and photos. More videos is not always the answer. I know there's a lot of pressure to do that, but more videos is not always the answer. Sometimes you can more efficiently deliver the content you're looking to deliver with something that takes much less people, fewer hours to produce.

Let's look at one other example. This is Ole Miss men's basketball. We'll shift to Twitter for a second. When, what day, what time. We talked about what type of content for men's tennis, but let's talk about days of the week.

What's great about Facebook is it will tell you, when you're going to post something, what is the best time, tell you how many users are online right then. You get a little bit more of a cheat sheet on Facebook. With Twitter, you have to do this a little bit more manually, using the data that is readily available to you, but it's just a couple of extra steps.

Let's look at these two column charts. This is, again, Twitter, Ole Miss men's basketball. The left chart is total impressions by day. So Wednesdays and Saturdays are way up there. You may think, Okay, that's when we should be posting the most important, you know, ticket information and ticket buying links, promos, things like that.

Then when you look at it by average impressions per tweet by day, Monday is far and away better than the other days. So, all right, first thing is to get curious, I wonder what's happening here. It doesn't take long to look at the schedule. Men's basketball plays a lot on Wednesdays and Saturdays. While we're getting a lot of impressions those days, it's mostly due to the amount of tweets that we would be tweeting during the game with scoring updates. There's a lot more volume of tweets on these days for us, which drives the total impressions up.

But when we look at efficiency of each tweet, Monday is light-years ahead of the rest of the days of the week as far as being the most efficient time for some of the ticket purchasing links and things like that, important information that we want to get out. We're getting more eyeballs per tweet in that area than we were on days when we have games.

Now let's look at time. So the top line chart is just like the slide before that was on the left, except this is about time. I hope you can see it on your screen. You see that little peak around 11 a.m. central. Below that, when we look at impressions per tweet, you see a huge spike there. 11 a.m. tends to be the sweet spot on average impressions per tweet. All right, so intuitive. Maybe it's lunch hour, eastern time, becoming lunch hour in central time. People are about to go to lunch. They are maybe walking to lunch, grabbing something. Either way they're not necessarily in class or working, so they're getting on Twitter and interacting with our content.

But so where this is, you know -- this is great to know, but what if we layered in one other piece that may tell us an even more important story when it comes to driving revenue.

We looked at, okay, this is online sales for men's basketball tickets by time of day. That's good. We see a little bit of a spike in the lunch hour. So that's good to know. So what if we laid, overlaid, the average impressions per tweet onto that same chart. What do you know. We have this nice little match where, okay, people are -- we have great average impression per tweet in this time slot. It also happens to be a great time of when people traditionally have bought tickets to men's basketball games online.

So marrying those two things up, where that intersection is, is where you can really start to get efficiency of ticket sales and efficiency of ticket promotions and things like that.

Now, this isn't for everybody. This is how men's basketball at Ole Miss matches up. Yours could look totally different. You'd use both of these pieces of data to go back through and find what that sweet spot is for you.

It's interesting. If you're not looking at ticket buying or ticket selling content, you may not use this window. So, again, it's going back and looking at each of the different things you're trying to communicate, and getting curious about when the best day, best time, best type of content to post is.

Again, going back to our checklist, you can find out all kinds of incredible information and insights about how to make the exact same tweet perform better, the exact same Facebook post perform better, just based on when you publish it or when you post it, which is key.

Now, tracking progress is key because that example I showed you about the 11 a.m. kind of intersection of ticket buying and average impressions per tweet, that's very likely, it's probable that it will change overtime. Consumers' habits change. It's highly unlikely that that number won't look that way this time next year and certainly could change seasonally. Maybe that works when you're in basketball season. Maybe it works best in the summer. It could all be different. That's why it's important to be constantly in there tracking progress, looking for shifts in behavior, and looking at each of the objectives that you have a little bit different.

So the whole idea is that if we're going to use our time and resources to create content, we certainly want the most amount of impressions that we can get on that piece of content. It makes it more efficient. It makes our reach go up. You want to post when you're going to get the most amount of impressions.

So let's kind of shift into this third phase of the webinar, investing in social media. We'll talk specifically about some of the different practical things that you can ask your senior leadership or athletics director. But this is also where we're going to introduce Google analytics and what role it plays in this, because this is fascinating actually when you look at I guess the meteoric rise of social networking, social media, how it directly influences revenue, and I mean directly.

So this slide is from Google analytics. Again, it's free. What we're looking at is how conversions are coming from social media accounts or platforms to our official website. So sales are done on the official website. So if we're going to sell a ticket, that needs to come from social. I mean, it needs to actually happen on olemisssports.com. How can social media convert or drive people to our site.

If you look in that bottom image with Facebook and Twitter, 302% increase in sessions that were created on olemisssports.com from Facebook in one year. That is unbelievable. Then Twitter, 92% growth in driving people to our website in just one year. When you think about those percentages, that's staggering, the amount of influence that these platforms have on actually getting people to our website.

We had a 45%, which is above in the top chart, 45% increase in conversions. We had $12.8 million worth of conversions total. That's a number that no one on senior leadership is going to dismiss. It's a massive, massive number. So it's important to kind of keep that in mind.

Now, as far as how you can use this, I'll briefly show what we've done based on some of the insights that we found in this area. But everybody's budget is going to be different. I know there's probably people on the webinar that have little to no budget for this, are trying to grow from a very, very small department to maybe a little bit bigger one. There's going to be people on the webinar that maybe have some disposable budget that they can shift around and work into this. I'll, again, show you what we've done.

Over the last couple of years, we've added four new video positions. I mean, video content is really, really important. Not all of it, not all types of video content, as I showed you on the tennis page, but it's important. We've just about tripled our graphic designer number of people that are working on that. Then we added the digital strategy and analytics position, which is Jim Hanauer that was originally scheduled to do this webinar. We have almost eliminated all paid advertising as far as print goes. Those dollars have been shifted into digital and into Facebook, SEO, some ad words, some other kind of different social media paid element sponsorships, things like that. Then we've brought all of the data and publishing everything in-house as far as social media goes.

But why. What really prompted us to do that. Well, first is just understanding the data that we had access to, some of the really, really alarming trends that we were seeing. The amount of people that are shifting from using and viewing your content on their traditional desktop computer or even laptop computer to mobile devices and tablets is astounding. That shift is something that is a business changer because it changes how we do content. It changes the type of content that we do and how we're asking people to behave once they see a piece of content, what are we asking them to do, buy a ticket. That whole user experience is something that's at the forefront for us.

Then when you see that one sports football page has more post views than total page views on olemisssports.com this year, that's incredible. But it's also a massive opportunity. How do we use that.

Culturally the change amongst all of our fan base is is so rapid that it's really hard to even keep up. I mean, you look at things like Snapchat that nearly mushroom overnight, some of these growth curves are just incredible, unlike anything we've ever seen in history as far as a product or a service being able to catch on like that.

So all those different new platforms and new products, some of which are being developed right now somewhere, but will come out and have such an immediate impact on us that we've got to be nimble and we've got to have data to help us make great decisions on how we use that new product and service. That's important.

Technology, obviously every day something better, Facebook live is probably going to change a lot of businesses, a lot of different content providers look at Facebook live and note this could be a giant killer. It's an incredible platform.

Then the data and analytics that we're getting now from Facebook and Twitter, as I showed you some of what you have access to. It's incredible. And then necessity. There's the old saying that people really only change until it gets too painful not to. When you do look at, as big as Facebook is, the engagement meter and the algorithm that they run on your content, it's something that you've got to understand. I mean, it's something you got to accept as just part of the price of being on Facebook and using that platform. Most of you probably know what I'm talking about. But, I mean, just 'cause you post something, you have 100,000 likes on a page, that doesn't mean that all 100,000 people are going to see that. Facebook, the algorithm, it's going to bring the highest performing content to the top. It's kind of like the rich get richer. The more popular something is, the even more popular it's going to become because the algorithm is going to serve that up and show that to more people. You get this incredible snowball growth of different pieces of content.

You got to know how to not to say work that algorithm, but at least be aware that it exists. Know the type of content we need, we need to get some immediate engagement out of it so that the algorithm picks up this content as becoming more popular, then almost forces it to be more popular.

Now let's talk about your boss, walking into that room. I'll give you a couple of examples of how powerful this is. So this is the one slide that I shared earlier that said this is something we've actually paid for. But for every dollar that we've spent on Facebook advertising, paid ads, for every dollar we're getting almost 24 and a half dollars back. It doesn't take an accountant or anyone with a background in math to know, okay, that's good. Spend one dollar, get 24 back, that's pretty easy to say yes to. Finding these types of content in your organization or these types of analytics in your organization, it just takes one or two very small Facebook buys for you to get some data back and start to get an ROI number.

Just dipping your toe in the water can give you a platform to go talk to your boss about, okay, we tried this campaign as a test. Wow, we got 10-to-1 ROI on it. When you find something you can get a great ratio like that, you invest more in it. You can really start to change the bottom line.

We also, when we're talking with our senior leadership about social media and the power, I mean, look at just the volume of growth year over year. This is about reach. It's not a popularity contest. It's not about, Hey, I want to get more followers than one of the other schools in my league. It's not about that. It's more about how much of a sphere of influence can our accounts have.

We went up almost about 175,000 followers on Twitter across our accounts in one year. 175,000, that's an incredible amount, especially when you start looking at, well, we only have a tiny fraction of that as season ticketholders. There's this universe out there of people that are interested. How do we increase that sphere of influence, get them into the fold so we can then drive their engagement up.

About 90,000 a year bump in Facebook. That's primarily because Facebook has been around longer, already had such a big base.

Again, the big alarm, red flag, is that one sports page, the influence of that one sports page was greater than the number of page views on your official site. Again, we tend to really kind of get into that official site, those metrics, and want to boost those. But don't forget about social media.

I know there are a lot of pieces.

Sponsorship. The logo in the back there generated over a million impressions, stuff that your multimedia rights-holder, great data for them to walk into boardrooms and try to sell sponsors on your program.

This is the last couple of slides, just wrapping up. The key to talking about your boss, senior leadership about this, is you have to understand the data. That are tons of tools out there, all of the different websites, Facebook analytics, Twitter analytics, incredible how-tos there. But understand it before you walk in there.

Present the data in a way that's easy to read. I don't like showing spreadsheets, even though I just showed you a big table before with the charts. But when you can, don't use tables and charts. I mean, don't use tables and spreadsheets. Try to use other tools that more effectively and efficiently communicate what you're talking about.

Understand the algorithms, understand how all of that works.

Do your research and be prepared. The most important thing is for them to view you as the expert in this. They're not. As you become more knowledgeable, just continue to translate that knowledge into kind of bite-size pieces that other people in your organization can understand and read.

Stick to the basics. I mean, there's an absolute running ton of data. Don't get overwhelmed. Pull out just the pieces that you want to look at now, get creative with that, try different types of things. This stuff is free. Test videos, test images, the same thing. Do that. Use the free tools.

That's where I'll stop and take any and all questions that you have.

CLARK TEUSCHER: Sounds great. Thank you very much. That's a lot of information. We have a few minutes that we'll address some questions that have come in over the course of the webinar.

First up, have you noticed much of a sweet spot in terms of the length of video posts, in terms of what is the cutoff, the point of diminishing returns when it comes to video.

MICHAEL THOMPSON: That's a great question, one that we asked ourselves. Hoping for kind of a hard-and-fast answer. Unfortunately, there's not one. It depends on the type of content that it is.

So you think back to that tennis example, that crawfish video, I can't remember exactly how long it was. It was maybe a minute and a half, something like that, which if you go look around at some of the stats, they say a minute and a half is a great sweet spot to be.

But there are times when, you know, a minute and a half promo for an upcoming game, it's probably too long. Then behind-the-scenes vignette or story with the student-athlete in your program, a minute and a half is probably not enough.

So it really depends on how can you, again, efficiently and effectively try to deliver that content you're trying to deliver in that window. I think you can get a little too in the box where you're like, We need to make a promo that's 90 seconds long. Make a promo that quickly and efficiently communicates the reason why someone should be coming to the event.

CLARK TEUSCHER: If you don't have necessarily revenue to point to, you don't have not necessarily running ticket sales through your website, what are some of the most important analytics to point out to senior leadership if you don't have revenue to point to.

MICHAEL THOMPSON: So think back to, again, that Facebook tennis example. You look at the type of posts that are generating the metrics of reach and followers and engagement. Those posts, you're going to want to compare and contrast the other posts that aren't performing as well. That's great data to share. It's great data to share with coaches because the coaches may say, How come so-and-so's school is doing videos before every game, and we need to be doing that.

Well, if the analytics are saying that that type of video is not performing well, it's a great chance for you to talk about the data, talk about what the goals of the different videos and content would be, and share with the coaches and ops and leadership. Hey, again, video isn't always the answer, regardless of whether you're competitors are doing it or not. Why don't we strive to be as efficient and effective as possible and, again, get the communication delivered as efficiently as we possibly can.

Then obviously there's the other different areas of, Hey, this post created this much more engagement than this other type of post. We talked about engagement being able to really kind of reach and lift followers, then you're using the data to then leverage the engagement role in that equation that I shared.

CLARK TEUSCHER: You talked a little bit about ad boards, SEO. What are your goals as far as those things are concerned. Do you gear those towards physical promotions. Is it revenue generating. What are some of the goals when it comes to ad boards and SEO.

MICHAEL THOMPSON: It would be all three of those. There's definitely a direct revenue piece of using ad words to sell tickets for multiple sports. But also using ad words to drive more traffic to our website. Maybe we're not trying to convert them at that time. Maybe we're off-season, tickets aren't on sale. But, again, changing the behavior of the people that are interested in Ole Miss and your other institution, making sure your official site and official channels are the lead channels for where they're going to get their content, where they're going to get their information.

Ad words plays a great role in that, just thinking about the customer experience. If they're on Google, they're looking for something. You need to be what they find as opposed to, you know, a site that's not your official site, could be a message board site or even a larger site like an espn.com or something like that. You should definitely be at the top.

One other piece on the ticket buying piece. If you have a secondary ticket partner, and even if you don't, you can see how much they're spending on ad words by you Google-ing your own tickets. Look at what is rising to the top, look at what some of those paid ads are, they're going to be Stub Hub, Vivid, things like that. They obviously know how powerful those words are for direct conversion of ticket sales. I would just feel like we should be in playing in that game, too.

CLARK TEUSCHER: We have a question about a little more specific strategies as far as, you know, incorporating social media elements into live broadcasts of events, including a hashtag on the screen during an event. Have you noticed much of an return on investment as far as that is concerned.

MICHAEL THOMPSON: We haven't. It's probably because -- it's not something that we really proactively push that much. We have different events throughout the year, like signing day, you know, for each football game there may be a hashtag that ESPN is using. Some of our big annual events we may use hashtags. It's almost just a way to get people talking about it. We haven't used it to drive revenue necessarily.

CLARK TEUSCHER: We are running up close to the end of our time with one final question. If you could, for those who are new to gathering and compiling this kind of information, where can they access those different analytic figures for the different social media channels.

MICHAEL THOMPSON: In Twitter, you should see it I think on the top right. I can't look at it now because I have my PowerPoint up. Then Facebook, the whole engagement site is going to come off of one of your official Facebook pages. Then Google analytics, there's a lot of great how-to videos on setting that up. You'll need to work with your website provider, as well, to get the tracking code onto that site so you can track conversions.

All three of those, again, I thought it was important for this group because we don't know budgets and all that stuff, but having those free tools, we use those the most anyway, and they're free, so that's always great. Again, those are things you should be looking at daily if you work in this area of your department, or you want to work in this area of your department. Even if you're not in it now, currently in this role, those are awesome things to just stay familiar with 'cause they're always changing. When that interview comes along, you'll be able to move up, you'll be able to really talk intelligently. Again, the power of it's not changing. It's only going to continue having more influence on each of our brands.

CLARK TEUSCHER: Thank you very much, Michael, for your time today. We continue to appreciate Capital One's sponsorship. Visit CoSIDA Connect and continue the discussion that's taken place on the webinar today.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297