December 28, 2011 | Volume 10, Issue 16

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Dear Faithful Readers,

One of my all time favorite movie quotes comes from none other than Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s character Rod Tidwell in the film Jerry Maguire where he states "Jerry...Show me the money!" When a sports marketing case study on social media crosses my desk to be highlighted in an upcoming feature, I'm usually hesitant since most cannot "show me the money." However, that is not the case with today's feature. Just adding friends to Facebook and followers to Twitter can only do so much, but conversely GAGA Sports & Entertainment's Social CRM Platform and Influencer Tool have been showing teams the money for some time now. Just recently, the Houston Dynamo were able to sell an additional $285,000 in incremental ticket sales via the leads generated from GAGA's platform. We will have to wait and see what is garnered via this partnership with the Oakland Raiders, nevertheless one thing is for certain...money and new ticket sales will be shown!

Enjoy the Feature,

Joe Shapero
[email protected]

P.S. As we close in on 30 days until the 2012 National Sports Forum, make sure to take advantage of our pricing discount before it bumps up $100 on January 1st. Click Here to review our great agenda of speakers, panels, and tours. And if you are ready to register, Click Here...we hope to see you there!

Raiders Fans Go GAGA

The Oakland Raiders look to GAGA Sports & Entertainment to turn social media fans into ticket sales.

CONTACT

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Jonathan Martinez
Database Marketing Manager
Oakland Raiders
Phone: (510) 780-3288
Email: [email protected]

Jamie Pardi
CEO
GAGA Sports & Entertainment
Phone: (415) 377-7742
Email: [email protected]

Laura Lefton
Director, Club Business & Corporate Development
National Football League
Phone: (212) 450-2680
Email: [email protected]

ORGANIZATION

Oakland Raiders

PROGRAM TITLE

"Bring A Friend To A Raiders Game"

OBJECTIVES

Never before have sports teams had the opportunity to communicate on a one-to-one basis with fans. In the past, the large number of fans has made it difficult for organizations to connect and create relationships with their consumers. Today, social media is overcoming this hurdle by opening up two-way communication with thousands of fans. Sports organizations everywhere understand the value in creating a large social media following, but the challenge is finding out who social media users are, where they are coming from and then figuring out a way to own the data. As new technological platforms are integrated into social media pages, sports marketers are presented with new opportunities to better understand and utilize social media fans. Knowing they had a potential opportunity to better define their social media users, the Oakland Raiders sought to discover what type of data they could capture from their 1,322,666 Facebook friends and 131,025 followers on Twitter.

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

Under the recommendations of the National Football League, the Raiders partnered with GAGA Sports and Entertainment to better understand their social media followers. GAGA Sports and Entertainment is a social media leader who uses their scalable technology, the social CRM platform, to help sports teams and collegiate athletic programs engage fans with interactive applications, and funnel all of their relationships to a brand-cohesive microsite for data collection and monetization.

Together, the Raiders and GAGA created the contest, "Bring A Friend To A Raiders Game." The contest gave nine fans the chance to win two suite tickets, fully catered, to the Raiders vs. Lions game on December 18, 2011. The promotion was outlined on the Raiders Facebook and Twitter fan pages where users were instructed to click on a link that read, "I want to win tickets." This link directed users to a data entry form outlining the offer and providing the option to opt-in to receive ticket sales information and/or subscribe to the Raiders newsletter. After entering the data information and opting in, contestants were brought to a "Thank You" page that contained the GAGA influencer tool. The tool was activated with the message, "Increase your chances to win by sharing on your favorite social media pages" and provided a Twitter and Facebook logo that prompted users to log into their social media accounts to post a pre-written message onto their personal pages. The Influencer tool goes to work, allowing sports teams to dig deeper by sharing analytics and providing user data such as sharing frequency and sharing network (who views/clicks on content that is shared with them by a friend within their network). Unlike other social sharing analytics available today, which show 1st level connections of who clicks and shares content, the GAGA Influencer tool allows sports teams to see the 2nd and further levels of sharing. With these tools, teams and brands are able to develop unique content sharing campaigns that not only reward the member, but create an opportunity to encourage users to share the contest (or content) for a secondary prize. "The Influencer tool is what really sets our promotion apart from other data collection efforts. It worked exponentially well for us because of our strong brand and more importantly, our strong social media following. Right now, our fans are very enthusiastic about the team and giving fans the opportunity to experience a Raiders game in a suite has resulted in a large number of entries," said Jonathan Martinez the Database Marketing Manager for the Oakland Raiders.

The Oakland Raiders held a Twitter Top Tweet for 6 hours!

MEDIA

"Bring A Friend To A Raiders Game" was promoted via the Raiders Facebook and Twitter fan pages and was kept relevant through continuous posts. "It's not about just posting the link out there, it's about being creative with your message to increase two-way communication," said Jamie Pardi the CEO of GAGA Sports and Entertainment. "We were always crafting a new status or post to keep it interesting, instead of continuously posting the same link." In their efforts to keep the appeal of the promotion, the Raiders and GAGA posted pictures from inside the suite, created a "Black Friday" post and asked fans, "Who would you bring if you were selected?"

PARTNERS

The Raiders partnered with GAGA Sports & Entertainment to make the promotion "Bring A Friend To A Raiders Game" a success. "As a league, we are always trying to find out more about, and interact with, the fans," said Laura Lefton, Director of Club Business & Corporate Development for the National Football League. "GAGA was able to provide more of a holistic picture of who the Raiders' social media fans are. This allowed us to design a program that was customized for Raiders fans and gather better data that the Raiders can now use to customize the fan experience."

RESULTS

The Raiders far surpassed their initial goal of 5,000 people registered in the contest and 2,000 people interested in buying tickets. At the end of this three week promotion, 27,109 people registered in the contest, 15,797 opted in to receive more information on ticket sales and 14,907 opted in to receive the Raiders newsletter. The results are staggering, and have blown away everyone's expectations. "Every year we hold the Raider Nation Celebration, a fan and community based kickoff pep rally, where we have fans sign-up for prize drawings. The data collected is used to build our database and we on average see about 3,000 to 5,000 unique entries. So we are really shocked to see these numbers. It is great seeing our social media fans taking this contest viral," said Martinez.

For example, during the promotion, the Raiders received 1,000 comments within 50 minutes of posting, "Who would you bring if you were selected?" message on Facebook and had a Twitter Top Tweet for six hours. "This is significant because Twitter calculates the number of times a tweet is viewed, tweeted, or re-tweeted and everything that happened with this tweet was organic and coming from the fans. The only tweet above the Raiders was a paid tweet for Discovery," explains Pardi.

Two of the suite winners from the social media campaign, "Bring A Friend To A Raiders Game".
To see more of the Raiders social media efforts, click here.

LOOKING AHEAD

Moving forward, the Raiders will sort through the 27,109 people that signed up for this contest to distinguish between good and bad leads. They plan to enter the hot leads into a nurturing campaign and eventually turn them into ticket sales. Furthermore, they will use the newly generated demographics to share with their partners to more effectively measure the impact they are having. "The analytics that GAGA provides are very thorough. It's amazing, and Oakland is going to benefit because it allows them to see demographics they have never seen before," states Lefton. The Raiders will continue to partner with GAGA in future, and are very happy with the results of this promotion.

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