Ozzie Sport

Harry O’Brien; Footballer, Collingwood Magpies
This was a presentation I enjoyed even as I boggled.  Part of me is an extremely cynical American who on the face of it took parts of his talk to be: I’m all about promoting myself above anything.  The other part of me found him very genuine and thinking he probably did a lot of good work, promoted a lot of worthy causes and didn’t flaunt his efforts to make those charities about himself.  There was a RMIT journalism student sitting at my table who was a huge fan of O’Brien.  He asked O’Brien for his autograph and O’Brien was really nice about it.  If you get the chance to hear O’Brien speak on this topic, it is worth it.  He was asked to speak about social media from the athlete perspective.

• Denying social media is denying the multitude. Social media is a vehicle for sharing the message that you want to share.
• Why should athletes use social media? To share the message that you have. Harry was asked by Web Guru to contribute to the Collingwood site. This developed into his website, Harry’s World.
• Social media can effect positive change.
• If social media is good enough for Barack Obama and Julia Gillard, then it is good enough for him.
• Harry did his first interview in December 2004 after he was drafted. He used the interview with The Age to share is ideas and beliefs. He stands for sharing hope through positivity.
• Players complained to him about their privacy being violated. He thinks fans just want insight, glimpses into his life in a controlled manner.
• People started uploading pictures of him all over Facebook. He ran out of friends. He was overwhelemed. Then he moved to Twitter. He now loves Twitter. Then he started his own website, which was his dream: Having people here what he has to say.
• Social media is unfiltered. It gives you the essence of a person. He’ll always have insight into the Collingwood Football Club. He can share pictures, videos and eventually merchandise.
• People want Harry to speak! Social media allows him to share his message.
• Harry O’Brien doesn’t really follow sport stars on Twitter, but is aware of what they are doing. He has his own style and doew what he feels is right based on guidelines and a path.
• People are made u of energy. Science has proven it.
• Some one dated $50,000 to one of his charities after hearing about his work. He uses social media but he is not always aware of the real world impact of it.
• Harry O’Brien doesn’t care about other players ranting about service they get. O’Brien studied sociology. Just because you’re a sport person and society values that, it doesn’t mean you should be treated special. You should be proactive, not negatively complaining about bad service.
• O’Brien says football is his profession. Football is like the bait, so he can share his message. His football comments are so general that the club doesn’t have a problem with his activities. If the club wanted to use him more for inspiration, good luck to them as motivation should come from with in.

And that’s it. Those are all the presentations.

Related Posts:

• A social media/web snapshot of Collingwood, Hawthorn and Port Adelaide
• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?
• Melbourne Victory on blogger
• Greater Western Sydney Giants and ACT4GWS

On Monday, July 5, I had the pleasure of talking to Georgie Herbert at the W-League Melbourne Victory. I’ve tried to convey as accurately as possible what they have told me based on my memory and I asked their permission to reference them in my blog and paper while I met with them.

If you’re not familiar with the Melbourne Victory of the W-League, they are a W-League team based out of Victoria, playing most of their fixtures in Melbourne. They are affiliated with the A-League Melbourne Victory and are run by Football Victoria. The Melbourne Victory have one player who plays for the Matildas.

My purpose in talking to the Melbourne Victory was to help provide background knowledge for my literature review and to generally enhance my understanding of Australian team sport as it may apply other parts of my research. Going in, I had four questions I wanted answers to. These questions were:

1. How do you define fandom?
2. How do you reach out to the fan community?
3. How much influence does league management provide in terms of defining fandom and how to engage in outreach? Do they give guidance on social media policies?
4. How much do other sports, teams and leagues play a role in development and implementation of concepts related to fan engagement and social media?

The Melbourne Victory defines fans as spectators. Most of their fans are friends and family of current players, and players from women’s clubs. These groups account for a large percentage of attendees. Beyond these groups, they have limited definitions of the fan community for their club and appear to use an operating definition of “Fans of the A-League Melbourne Victory club.” The limited definitions appear to exist for several reasons. The first is that Football Victoria places a greater emphasis on promoting their top level Victorian based league over the W-League club. The second reason is because they rely heavily on the A-League Melbourne Victory for the promotion of their club; they piggy back on their promotional activities so it makes separating out the fanbases difficult. The third reason is that it is extremely difficult to carve out a niche for women’s sport in Victoria given the number of spectating options available to fans in the city. Fans just have too many choices of what do and the club doesn’t appear confident that they can successfully market the club in this environment.

The team doesn’t do much outreach of their own. They rely heavily on the A-League Melbourne Victory to do much of that outreach. This includes getting W-League Melbourne Victory news into the A-League club’s Twitter stream and Facebook fan page updates. This is a solution that they have found to be rather effective as they get a number of comments on Facebook in reply to these posts and their does not appear to be any backlash for including women’s updates alongside the men’s news. Beyond co-branded social media and other media spots, the club has an e-mail newsletter they send out and does school offers. They feel that some of their outreach is hampered because they do not have a fixed location for their fixtures; last season they played their five home games in five different venues.

The media comms coordinator does much of the club’s outreach. This is another issue because the media comms coordinator does not work exclusively on the Melbourne Victory W-League team; she is responsible for all of Football Victoria. Outreach is also problematic at times because they have to rely on the A-League Melbourne Victory. While there is an agreement in place that the two clubs will be co-branded, many of the people working for the Melbourne Victory are not used to working on the W-League team and that can take prodding. They were clear that the Melbourne Victory on the whole though are very good at updating when asked. Outreach with the A-League also requires people at Football Victoria remembering to pass on information to the club, which can be an issue as it is not always a priority.

Another issue that effects outreach involves contractual issues with the Victory’s star player and Matilda captain. The Victory only get so many contractual appearances with her a year outside general club requirements. The player is also heavily involved with her own personal branding. This can make it hard to use the player as a way to push their own brand as she has her own agenda that may not match with the club’s agenda.

Football Victoria has several young staffers who work for them whom are big soccer fans and who are social media savvy. They do not officially monitor social media sites for Football Victoria but if they see something that other clubs in leagues like the WPS or A-League are doing that they think would work for the Melbourne Victory, the club will consider implementing it. If they do find something that is extremely problematic on social media sites, fansites or forums, the club will inform the W-League who can then address the problem.

The W-League gives some guidance in this regard but much of the Victory’s social media, fan definitions and policies come from Football Federation Australia (FFA) who first try them out on the A-League. After that, these policies are often implemented on a much more scaled down version

Beyond the answer to the general questions, there were several other interesting things that came up in the interview.

First, the team does not have a formal social media policy for its players. This is similar to the Canberra United and the Canberra Raiders. They haven’t felt a need to have one because so far it has not been an issue. Most of their players are also on Facebook, not Twitter, and Facebook tends to get less media coverage. (Though this is not always the case. There was a player for one of the women’s national team who got into trouble for what she said on Facebook as it got picked up by a Melbourne newspaper.) Added to that, the team gets so little media coverage that the media is unlikely to care what players say on social media sites. That said, the club is planning on offering media training before the season starts. Part of this media training will involve teaching players about safety on social media sites.

The club sees its success as fundamentally tied to the A-League club. If the A-League Melbourne Victory succeeds, they should succeed too. This explains why Football Victoria has pushed to co-brand the W-League club with the A-League club and get them involved. They feel that they can increase their audience, build better awareness and raise the stature of women players and soccer in Victoria this way. Rather than turn to the W-League for guidance, they tend to be much more focused on their A-League counter part.

This decision to tie themselves with the A-League club means that the team finds it hard to get data about their specific fans as there aren’t different channels for the two: The Melbourne Victory of the W-League does not have its own Twitter account or its own Facebook fanpage. This could be problematic down the line as it may harm their ability to effectively target fans as they grow.

The Melbourne Victory are aware of the issues of branding the W-League correctly, finding that balance where you avoid lesbian stereotypes that might harm their brand and the growth of soccer in Victoria. At the same time, they don’t want to swing so far from one end of the marketing spectrum that they end up on the other by using glamour shots and heavily made up super feminine women. They want to find the middle to maximize interest in fans and future female Victorian soccer players.

The Melbourne Victory are in a tough market because of the presence of so many other sports and leagues. In Canberra, the United can garner a lot more media attention because there is less competition. The United and ACT Football can get attention for food eating contests; in contrast, the Victory are lucky if they can get the scores in the newspaper. This is part of their challenge.

Attendance at Victory games is very low. When they talked of high attendance matches, they were talking about 450 people at a game. The average attendance is much lower with a number mentioned of around 250 to 300. Their most successful games have been when they have played outside of the Melbourne area.

In preparation for talking with the Melbourne Victory, I completed an overview of the size of the online community for the team. It can be found at : ozziesport.com/Melbourne_Victory.pdf

Related Posts:

• An interview with the CEO of the Canberra United
• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders
• Greater Western Sydney Giants and ACT4GWS
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

I’m a little late with this so I figured I would have a new top level post rather than edit my existing post.  If you wanted to see the data I presented the Canberra Raiders, it is available here in PDF format. It includes some Foursquare data, Gowalla data, Facebook data, Twitter data and some general NRL data.

If you want similar data related to a specific club, let me know and we can see if we can work out some sort of arrangement.  I’d love to be able to talk to more Canberra based professional, state and national teams.

Related Posts:

• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?
• Data absent context can change the meaning: Did Julia Gillard hurt the Bulldogs?

I’m not writing this up as a particularly long post, although I could. I was curious as to the impact that Julia Gillard had on the Western Bulldogs. Her name had been linked with them a lot the day of and after she became Prime Minister. I have a paper that I’m trying to figure out what to do with that shows that Jason Akermanis’s comments regarding how gays should stay in the AFL closet didn’t hurt his team. (Though it could have hurt him. That’s a different story.) The US media also made a big deal of Obama being a White Sox fan and there is some evidence to suggest that his presidency helped the team.

The ways I wanted to determine this were to measure the Alexa traffic for the Western Bulldogs site, the number of followers for Bulldogs related accounts on Twitter, the number of fans for the official page and unofficial fan pages on Facebook, the number of and membership increase for fan pages that mention both Julia Gillard and the Western Bulldogs, possibly demographic differences between the Gillard groups and Buldogs only fanpages, the number of mentions for the Western Bulldogs on bebo, the number of people listing the team as an interest on LiveJournal and its clones, the number of pages mentioning Julia Gillard and the Western Bulldogs on google.com.au, and the number and geographic location of edits to the Western Bulldogs article on Wikipedia.

Some of this data on its own might suggest that Julia Gillard hurt the Bulldogs.  Heck, that was my initial assessment.  One of the Western Bulldogs fan pages on Facebook lost 30 people, an anti-Akermanis group lost two people, a pro-Akermanis group lost two people, the Twitter growth was almost non-existent despite Tweets mentioning Gillard, and the Western Bulldog’s site rank on Alexa for Australia fell almost 2,000 places between the 25th and 26th.  Toss in the fact that the Gillard created communities on Facebook were fewer and had much less growth than the anti-Akermanis over the same period.   All of these appear to be really good indicators that Gillard’s effect on the team online was not a great one.

I really want to draw that conclusion.  I almost think I could make a really strong argument that this is exactly the case.  The problem involves putting this into the context of the rest of the AFL.  The Brisbane Lions don’t appear to have an official Facebook fan page but one of their biggest ones lost 30 members the day after the Bulldogs lost 30 members.  Between June 22 and June 26, only one AFL team hasn’t had their Alexa traffic rank for Australia rise; that is the Melbourne Demons.  For that period, three teams saw a rank drop of over 1,000.  Twitter follow gains are about even for all teams.  Official Facebook fan page growth is also pretty close.  In that context, it is hard to say that Julia Gillard had much impact at all.  In fact, for the Alexa data, the big drop could probably be attributed to the fact that they only had half the teams playing a game for this weekend and the weekend before that.  The impact of Gillard on the growth of the Western Bulldogs just probably isn’t there.

In the wider context, no effect.  In a limited context of the team she barracks for, possible effect.  Which conclusion is the right one?

Related Posts:

• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Australian Hockey League on everything
• New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups

On Wednesday, June 23, 2010, I had the pleasure of talking to Ben Pollack and another staff member at the Canberra Raider.  I really appreciated the opportunity to talk to them as it was provided additional insight into how sport clubs view fandom and social media. I’ve tried to convey as accurately as possible what they have told me based on my memory and I asked their permission to reference them in my blog and paper while I met with them.

If you’re not familiar with the Canberra Raiders, they are a Rugby League team that competes at the top level in the National Rugby League in Australia.  They are based in Australia’s capital, Canberra, and play their home games at Bruce Stadium.  The NRL has a profit sharing scheme, where revenues are shared between all teams.

My purpose in talking to them was to help provide background knowledge for my literature review and to generally enhance my understanding of Australian team sport as it may apply other parts of my research.  Going in, I had four questions I wanted answers to.  These questions were:

1. How do you define fandom?
2. How do you reach out to the fan community?
3. How much influence does league management provide in terms of defining fandom and how to engage in outreach?  Do they give guidance on social media policies?
4. How much do other sports, teams and leagues play a role in development and implementation of concepts related to fan engagement and social media?

The Canberra Raiders define fandom very broadly as people who barrack for them and who attend games.  Their goal is to have this definition encompass all ages, both genders and across the demographic spectrum.  They focus on the Canberra area. They want to take interest in the club and translate that into getting people into the stadium, with bums on seats.  They did not mention trying to get fans to watch on television or buy their merchandise.  It may be something that they define as fandom but I did not follow up to ask about that.

When I inquired about the regional aspect in the NRL helping teams by enabling them to develop a local fanbase, they said that this worked a lot in their favor as the Canberra area was very supportive of the team.  This may not be as true for some of the Sydney based teams where there is much more market overlap and a few teams play at the same venue.  There, clubs need to market more towards traditional understandings of who composes their fanbase.  Sydney based teams are much like many of the Melbourne based AFL clubs in this regard.

I had some data from Facebook that said that there were roughly twice as many UCanberra students and alumni who were fans of the club compared to ANU.  I asked them why their fanbase was stronger at the University of Canberra, if it had to do with different cultures or possibly class related affiliations that each university has.  The club responded that they thought they probably had more fans at UC because the university has a well-known sport program and tends to attract more sport fans than ANU.

I had some bebo related geographic data.  It showed that there were a number of fans from the Brisbane area.  I asked the Raiders if they could explain that.  They told me that this geographic fanbase dates to the club’s founding, when several of the players came from Brisbane.  The club has managed to maintain this fanbase in Queensland over time.

The club primarily reaches out to their fanbase using traditional advertising: Newspapers, television and mail outs.  They have a member list and every week they send out a newsletter to their members.  The newsletter contains injury information, game summaries and information on any special deals that the club has.  They do some outreach on social media, but that is primarily confined to Facebook.

The NRL is a huge influence in how the club handles their website and their social media.  The league requires that clubs post certain types of web and video content every week.  This includes a match report and the post-game press conference.  The NRL has incentivized clubs to try to draw traffic to their websites; at the end of the season, revenues earned by the clubs on their sites are distributed to the clubs.  According to the Raiders, the league brought in Bernie Mullin to help it develop a plan regarding their online activities.  The NRL also guides clubs by encouraging them to push to increase their membership.  Some of this push is based around the idea of local clubs and increasing attendance at local grounds and keeping that local identity.

The Canberra Raiders thus use social media as a way to drive traffic to their site.  Based on our conversation, I did not get the feeling that using social media to develop a fanbase was a goal unto itself.  Rather, I was left with the impression that social media was a tool to drive traffic to their site to help increase their revenue.

The NRL does watch other leagues to see what they are doing in terms of social media.  The Raiders do less of this and spend less time developing their own social media strategy.  This is largely because the Raiders feel the NRL has better resources and more money to handle this.  The Raiders also do not have much time to do this on their own.

One of the major areas where the team has acted regarding social media is in giving in their players training in the use of social media training.  The Australian Federal Police conducted this training.  Details about the training can be found on the club’s website at www.raiders.com.au/default.aspx?s=article-display&id=27038 .  This was something the club felt was important because a number of their players are on Facebook.  Some have 2,000 to 3,000 friends, many of whom they do not know personally.  There have been a number of high profile incidents involving players getting negative media attention as a result of their comments on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter; they want to avoid that.  In general, the club advises players to be careful, not to talk about the team and to keep things personal.  The club does not ban the use of it and the NRL is aware of these problems and is encouraging training.

After getting my questions answered, I asked the Raiders about specific aspects of their social media strategy and asked the club if they had any questions based on the data packet I had provided.  The club does have an official Facebook page and Twitter account.  Ben is most familiar with Facebook, which is one of the reasons they use it more than Twitter.  The club’s original Facebook strategy involved creating a user account, friending people and trying to convert these friends into fans of the official fanpage.  The conversion rate was very low and they did not find it very effective in accomplishing their goals.

They are not entirely certain how Twitter fits into their social media strategy and there is a question of how they chose people to follow.  (Compared to other teams in the NRL, they follow almost no one.)  They were interested in increasing their number of followers but were not certain how to do it.  They also did not think that anyone had replied to them or reTweeted them, though this could be a result of not being familiar enough with the site.

We also discussed Foursquare and Gowalla, how they were used and if it was worth it for the team to explore using them.  They were unsure in this regard, as their time is limited.  If it is the next big thing, it might be worth them investigating.

I asked the club about their web traffic, citing some traffic data from Compete.  They said that a number of teams in the NRL share names with other sport teams.  In the case of the Canberra Raiders, it is the Oakland Raiders.  During the season for the other team, they often see an increase in traffic from US based visitors who mistakenly find their site.

I asked if the club had considered using YouTube.  They had.  One of their ideas involved uploading preview clips to Youtube, with attached notices that the full clip could be viewed on their site. They were not certain of the potential ROI and in the end did not use it.  I then asked them if visitors could embed official Raiders videos on their own blogs.  They were not certain but said that fans could definitely link to their videos.

While social media is a big potential audience for the club, most of their dedicated fans online congregate on a message board not controlled by the club.  They do monitor it and find it occasionally to be a concern because of that lack of control.  The club is aware of the fact that the media also monitor this message board and occasionally use it to generate less than favorable story ideas about the site.

In preparation for talking with the Canberra Raiders, I completed an overview of the size of the online community for the team.  If you are interested in this document, please contact me at laura[@]fanhistory[dot]com or my university e-mail address, laura.hale@ucanberra.

Related Posts:

• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Bendigo Spirit on YouTube
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
• Claxton Shield on Twitter

This post was broken up into multiple posts because there was a lot of rows. It should hopefully be easier to find data/information this way.

ecademy
ecademy is an alternative to LinkedIn.

Facebook
This first set is based on www.facebook.com/ads/create/.

This table was designed to look at growth of Socceroos related fan pages.

League	Team	Name	Url	Total members	Type	Date checked	Included in FB2	Official
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	https://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	32	741	Page	15-May-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106019049438817	3	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/112443855448354	4	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/108710262493191	0	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/119664741377244	0	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	SOCCEROOS	https://www.facebook.com/pages/SOCCEROOS-/126051170744978	41	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106353142733985	185	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Young Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Socceroos/115695218444154	0	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	socceroos fan? get on it!!!!!	https://www.facebook.com/pages/socceroos-fan-get-on-it/118141831550071	3	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Australian University Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Australian-University-Socceroos/279400107713	197	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Cheering for the Socceroos at the local club in the World Cup	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cheering-for-the-Socceroos-at-the-local-club-in-the-World-Cup/406886935323	86	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	The Football Supporters’ Pledge: A-League	Socceroos & Grassroots	https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Football-Supporters-Pledge-A-League-Socceroos-Grassroots/114421618592491	3	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Langerak is a God	and will be in the Socceroos one day p.s hes HOT	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Langerak-is-a-God-and-will-be-in-the-Socceroos-one-day-ps-hes-HOT/103909322982210	82	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	100	000 Strong Socceroos Supporters To Win 2010 World Cup	https://www.facebook.com/pages/100000-Strong-Socceroos-Supporters-To-Win-2010-World-Cup/362147231671	188	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Change the name of the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Australia/Change-the-name-of-the-Socceroos/206601790281	12	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Brett Holman shouldn’t play for the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brett-Holman-shouldnt-play-for-the-Socceroos/155289433083	84	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	kickoff.com.au: A-League	Socceroos	Australian and International football	https://www.facebook.com/pages/kickoffcomau-A-League-Socceroos-Australian-and-International-football/238919388600	113	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Support for the Socceroos in South Africa	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-for-the-Socceroos-in-South-Africa/118426448190124	3	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Petition for Israel to come play the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-for-Israel-to-come-play-the-Socceroos/124315894249250	20	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos to dominate in 2010	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos-to-dominate-in-2010/125877250762609	140	Page	15-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	https://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	51	640	Page	28-May-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	https://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	59	215	Page	30-May-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106019049438817	14	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/112443855448354	29	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/108710262493191	11	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/119664741377244	2	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	SOCCEROOS	https://www.facebook.com/pages/SOCCEROOS-/126051170744978	98	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106353142733985	293	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Young Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Socceroos/115695218444154	1	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	socceroos fan? get on it!!!!!	https://www.facebook.com/pages/socceroos-fan-get-on-it/118141831550071	8	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Australian University Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Australian-University-Socceroos/279400107713	203	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Cheering for the Socceroos at the local club in the World Cup	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cheering-for-the-Socceroos-at-the-local-club-in-the-World-Cup/406886935323	93	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	The Football Supporters’ Pledge: A-League	Socceroos & Grassroots	https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Football-Supporters-Pledge-A-League-Socceroos-Grassroots/114421618592491	4	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Langerak is a God	and will be in the Socceroos one day p.s hes HOT	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Langerak-is-a-God-and-will-be-in-the-Socceroos-one-day-ps-hes-HOT/103909322982210	83	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	100	000 Strong Socceroos Supporters To Win 2010 World Cup	https://www.facebook.com/pages/100000-Strong-Socceroos-Supporters-To-Win-2010-World-Cup/362147231671	246	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Change the name of the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Australia/Change-the-name-of-the-Socceroos/206601790281	12	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Brett Holman shouldn’t play for the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brett-Holman-shouldnt-play-for-the-Socceroos/155289433083	107	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	kickoff.com.au: A-League	Socceroos	Australian and International football	https://www.facebook.com/pages/kickoffcomau-A-League-Socceroos-Australian-and-International-football/238919388600	117	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Support for the Socceroos in South Africa	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-for-the-Socceroos-in-South-Africa/118426448190124	9	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Petition for Israel to come play the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-for-Israel-to-come-play-the-Socceroos/124315894249250	24	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos to dominate in 2010	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos-to-dominate-in-2010/125877250762609	291	Page	30-May-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	https://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	64	956	Page	1-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	https://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	70	261	Page	5-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	https://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	71	286	Page	7-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	https://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	73	463	Page	10-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos to dominate in 2010	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos-to-dominate-in-2010/125877250762609	330	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106019049438817	31	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/112443855448354	48	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/108710262493191	52	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/119664741377244	4	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	SOCCEROOS	https://www.facebook.com/pages/SOCCEROOS-/126051170744978	110	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106353142733985	448	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Young Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Socceroos/115695218444154	3	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	socceroos fan? get on it!!!!!	https://www.facebook.com/pages/socceroos-fan-get-on-it/118141831550071	9	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Cheering for the Socceroos at the local club in the World Cup	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cheering-for-the-Socceroos-at-the-local-club-in-the-World-Cup/406886935323	93	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	The Football Supporters’ Pledge: A-League	Socceroos & Grassroots	https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Football-Supporters-Pledge-A-League-Socceroos-Grassroots/114421618592491	4	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Langerak is a God	and will be in the Socceroos one day p.s hes HOT	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Langerak-is-a-God-and-will-be-in-the-Socceroos-one-day-ps-hes-HOT/103909322982210	86	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	100	000 Strong Socceroos Supporters To Win 2010 World Cup	https://www.facebook.com/pages/100000-Strong-Socceroos-Supporters-To-Win-2010-World-Cup/362147231671	337	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Change the name of the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Australia/Change-the-name-of-the-Socceroos/206601790281	12	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Brett Holman shouldn’t play for the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brett-Holman-shouldnt-play-for-the-Socceroos/155289433083	113	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	kickoff.com.au: A-League	Socceroos	Australian and International football	https://www.facebook.com/pages/kickoffcomau-A-League-Socceroos-Australian-and-International-football/238919388600	117	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Support for the Socceroos in South Africa	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-for-the-Socceroos-in-South-Africa/118426448190124	13	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Petition for Israel to come play the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-for-Israel-to-come-play-the-Socceroos/124315894249250	23	Page	10-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos – Australian National Football Team	https://www.facebook.com/Socceroos	74	987	Page	12-Jun-10	No	Yes
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos to dominate in 2010	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos-to-dominate-in-2010/125877250762609	335	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106019049438817	33	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/112443855448354	57	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/108710262493191	53	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/119664741377244	5	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	SOCCEROOS	https://www.facebook.com/pages/SOCCEROOS-/126051170744978	113	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Socceroos/106353142733985	455	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Young Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Young-Socceroos/115695218444154	3	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	socceroos fan? get on it!!!!!	https://www.facebook.com/pages/socceroos-fan-get-on-it/118141831550071	9	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Cheering for the Socceroos at the local club in the World Cup	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cheering-for-the-Socceroos-at-the-local-club-in-the-World-Cup/406886935323	95	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	The Football Supporters’ Pledge: A-League	Socceroos & Grassroots	https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Football-Supporters-Pledge-A-League-Socceroos-Grassroots/114421618592491	4	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Langerak is a God	and will be in the Socceroos one day p.s hes HOT	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Langerak-is-a-God-and-will-be-in-the-Socceroos-one-day-ps-hes-HOT/103909322982210	86	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	100	000 Strong Socceroos Supporters To Win 2010 World Cup	https://www.facebook.com/pages/100000-Strong-Socceroos-Supporters-To-Win-2010-World-Cup/362147231671	342	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Change the name of the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brisbane-Australia/Change-the-name-of-the-Socceroos/206601790281	12	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Brett Holman shouldn’t play for the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brett-Holman-shouldnt-play-for-the-Socceroos/155289433083	113	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	kickoff.com.au: A-League	Socceroos	Australian and International football	https://www.facebook.com/pages/kickoffcomau-A-League-Socceroos-Australian-and-International-football/238919388600	117	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Support for the Socceroos in South Africa	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Support-for-the-Socceroos-in-South-Africa/118426448190124	14	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No
World Cup Soccer	Socceroos	Petition for Israel to come play the Socceroos	https://www.facebook.com/pages/Petition-for-Israel-to-come-play-the-Socceroos/124315894249250	23	Page	12-Jun-10	No	No

Foursquare
This is my complete table to date for all venues. It doesn’t necessarily connect to the Socceroos but it is World Cup related data so I’m shoving it in here.

Gaia Online
Another small network…

Gowalla
Same deal as Foursquare…

Google
Search results…

hi5
Need more data overall from this for my other research…

Icerocket
A blog search engine…

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On Friday, I had the pleasure of talking to Heather Reid and Russ Gibbs at Canberra United.  I’ve tried to convey as accurately as possible what they have told me based on my memory and I asked their permission to reference them in my blog and paper while I met with them.

If you’re not familiar with the Canberra United, they are a W-League team based out of Canberra.  Unlike other teams in the W-League, they do not share a name or facilities with an A-League club.  Most of the funding and general support for the W-League comes from state based football associations.  This support insures a certain degree of financial stability that they might not be able to afford otherwise.  Some players in the league are paid but many are not.  The W-League was created in order to foster high levels of competition that could feed Australia’s women’s national football team, the Matildas.   The league intentionally schedules their games around the Matilda’s schedules to avoid conflicts for players. This has been successful in that many of the Matildas that played in the AFC championship played for W-League, three of whom play for the Canberra United.  The Canberra United have the highest average attendance of any team in the league, with over 1,000 people attending home matches.

My purpose in talking to them was to help provide background knowledge for my literature review and to generally enhance my understanding of Australian team sport as it may apply other parts of my research.  Going in, I had four questions I wanted answers to.  These questions were:

1. How do you define fandom?
2. How do you reach out to the fan community?
3. How much influence does league management provide in terms of defining fandom and how to engage in outreach?  Do they give guidance on social media policies?
4. How much do other sports, teams and leagues play a role in development and implementation of concepts related to fan engagement and social media?

The research out there about sport fandom defines it differently depending on your relationship to it.  Sport marketing and management literature tends to define fans and fandom as spectatorship or viewers.  Sport sociologist and historians tend to define fandom as identity that is sustained over longer periods of time.  Newspapers and fans themselves tend to define fandom as identity coupled with actions to express that.  I was interested to see how a team would define that.  In the case of the Canberra United, they define fandom for their team based on spectatorship.  In the case of spectatorship, it is not a wide definition of any possible fans but rather a subset of people they have identified as having the highest potential to attend their games.  The group that the team has decided to target is the female players in Capital Football, the ACT’s state soccer organization.  This is a group that the team feels would turn out to see the games as they are already interested in soccer, have knowledge of the club, and may dream of playing on that level or for the Matildas.    It is also easy to target as the team has access to Capital Football’s membership list.  They can easily send out e-mails to the members before a game to encourage them to attend and after a game to let them know the results.

Beyond that population, the club also hopes to attract an audience of general football fans located in the ACT.  The Canberra United are the highest level of soccer in the territory and play during the summer, when there are fewer sport options for people to watch.  When watching the team, fans have the potential to see future and current Matilidas, something that they might not otherwise have a chance to see regularly.

Most of the outreach that the team does involves reaching out through Capital Football.  They have a database of members which makes this easy to access this population.  Beyond that, they do outreach through sponsor related events.  Their major form of outreach beyond those two venues involves their website:  canberraunited.com.au. The site includes information about the W-League, the team and local Canberra football clubs.  When shown data regarding how the club ranked on Alexa compared to A-League clubs, they were pleased.  W-League sites, with the exception of the Canberra United, are hosted as subpages inside A-League sites.  It is not possible to use publicly available data to distinguish between different pages.  Using Alexa, the Canberra United ranked 52,076 in Australia.  This compares to 50,430 for the Adelaide United, 60,807 for the Central Coast Mariners and 26,091 for the Sydney Football Club.  The Canberra United outperformed two teams, are about even with one, and are behind three teams.  This comparatively high rank happened when the team is not playing and against A-League sites that have a bigger attendance draw than the Canberra United.  In addition to the website, the team has ventured some into social media with an official presence on Facebook, where they have 460 fans. When we looked through a list of networks that their followers belonged to, they were able to explain pretty much every network on the list. The team has a Twitter account but they do not actively maintain it.  In the future, they plan to grow their social media presence.

The club has a fair amount of autonomy when it comes to making decisions regarding how to promote their team in their own market and online.  The W-League has their own promotions that are intended at promoting the league as a whole and the Canberra United participate in those promotional events.  The club also has some guidance from Capital Football.   Still, there is no indication that there are a lot of restrictions regarding how the club goes about promoting themselves.  The W-League does not have a formal policy regarding social media usage for its clubs or players in the league.  Canberra United also does not have such a policy as it has not been an issue so far.  Senator Kate Lundy is involved with the Canberra United and is keenly interested in social media and the law.  She is apparently helping the club think about the legal implications involved with this issue.

The team is aware of what other teams and some of the other leagues in Australia are   doing.  They were able to discuss how the AFL handled things compared to the NRL, and were willing to speculate as to how each league would handle certain situations.  They are also aware of what is going on with the Socceroos and the Matildas.  However, they did not know if the FFA had official policies regarding player usage of social media.  This was interesting in that player usage has been an issue the media has paid attention to in the run up to the World Cup, with the US allowing players to use social media but England banning players from using it. The team appeared to be more aware of other Australian leagues than they were of how international footballing bodies handled social media and marketing related issues.

Several other things were discussed that are not easy to categorize as part of the four questions.  These were rather interesting.  The team is aware of the major blogs and message boards that cover their team.  One of these included Girls With Game, girlswithgame.blogspot.com/ .  Another was Capital Punishment, capitalpunishment.forumotion.net/canberra-united-w-league-f3/ .  It sounded like they monitor them to see what people are saying.  They were not as aware of the Wikipedia article about themselves.  They did find it thorough and assumed that some of content was generated by finding information from their site.

Another issue discussed was the marketing of the W-League.  If you’ve been to their site or seen some of their promotional pictures, the players look like models with their hair done and wearing lots of makeup.  This was originally done as the W-League was aiming for a teenaged girl audience and because some in the league believe that sex sells.  Players were given the option of it they wanted to be photographed like that and participate in a sponsor-related event where they were asked to model clothes.  There was a question of “Was that sexist?”  The team told me that the players did not necessarily feel that it was because they were given a choice and they were portrayed positively.  Some of them considered it very feminist in that they could be high level athletes who are also capable of being beautiful women.

One issue I brought up was the issue of being female fanspace.  I referenced a study done involving the WNBA and how lesbians carved out their own space and definition of the league as being lesbian friendly.  This happened in a space that is not obviously queer space and is shared equally by other groups that a team might have greater incentive to maintain.  I asked how this type of issue was handled inside the W-League.  According to the Canberra United, part of the early marketing attempts by the W-League were to counter stereotypes of female athletes as lesbians by using advertising that played up on the players’ femininity with the modeling type pictures. I was also led to believe that this was an ongoing issue with women’s sports defined as pinks vs. ponytails, where some teams and players have gone out of their way to identify one way or another. My impression of what they said was that this was a regular battle of how to be as inclusive as possible while realizing that certain segments are not going to be very tolerant of each other.

In conclusion, the Canberra United use a definition of sport similar to those described by sports marketers.  The only caveat is that they more narrowly define spectator to specific populations they are intentionally targeting.  The club has a great deal of freedom to define their target audience and create their own social media policies.  Most of the team’s influence for how to handle marketing and social media policies comes from within Australia.

In preparation for talking with the Canberra United, I completed an overview of the size of the online community for the team.  It can be found at : ozziesport.com/Canberra_United.pdf

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I’ve been data collecting again. In this case, I was updating my Facebook group and fan pages member totals. Eventually, this will all be written up and include an analysis of some patterns that exist. In the meantime, I feel the need to share of this data as the results… surprised me.  I was curious as to which Australian team had the most popular official Facebook page.  Bearing in mind that outside the AFL and NRL, my inclusion list is limited and that not every team has an official page… This list should not be considered all comprehensive.  Still, it gives a fairly good idea of what may be going on Facebook:

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This isn’t much of a follow up. I was out walking after having read a few chapters in The Australian football business : a spectator’s guide to the VFL / Bob Stewart and I began wondering if there were some geographic pattens in who was condemning Jason Akermanis on Facebook, where condemning equals joining a group or liking a fan page that criticized his comment.

There were two real options to create comparisons: Get information from a few of the smaller groups with 10 or fewer members and declare them representative of each position or find a larger sample and get the network affiliation for all members of the larger group. I decided on the second. Jason Akermanis is a homophobe. is a Facebook group that has gained 281 members since May 20 for a total of 427 members. It appears to have been created directly in response to Jason’s comments and could be seen as condemning them. When scrolling through the membership list, I found 24 people who listed a network they belonged to. We’ll call this the dislike Jason group. As a control group of people who “like” Jason, I chose The Jason Akermanis Appreciation Society. It had 457 members on May 22, up only three from May 20. 24 people in this group also had a network listed. This group should be his fanbase. Their lack of quitting should not be read as supporting his comments: Non-action does not imply support. I’m mostly after the idea of are these two separate groups similar based on location. The following table was generated after tabulating how many people from each group listed specific networks:

The simple answer appears to be yes, there is a difference between the two. Fans of Jason appear to be more evenly distributed across various networks. Of the high schools and colleges I could easily identify, 3 were in the dislike Jason group and 7 were in the like Jason group. 18 university students joined the anti-group versus 13 in the like group. (These numbers are probably off. I’m not completely familiar with all the schools involved so some were not counted.) This suggests that university students were more likely to condemned the comments compared to high school students… or at least, university students were more willing to indicate their displeasure on a public profile. That is a bit interesting. It would be nice to have a Facebook data miner so I could see if larger patterns like this existed.

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This is a quick data dump post.  I know who Jason Akermanis is because I saw him play this past weekend in Canberra.  I’ve been told he has a tendency to open his mouth and speak frankly in such a way that his previous club didn’t like him.  Thus, it was apparently not that surprising that he opened his mouth and offended people today.  I may or may not be interested in writing about him and the response to his comments at a later date.  It will come down to time and interest.  Still, benchmarks in case I do and data dumping now for those who might want to write an analysis that I’m not keen to write right now.

Google data

This data was retrieved between 6pm and 7pm on May 20, 2010 Canberra time.   It was retrieved using manual screen scraping.  (I visited each page and copy and pasted the number.)  I was not logged in to any account at the time to prevent my previous searches from influencing the numbers.  The API was not used.  The SE stands for search engine that was used to get the number.  (There are sometimes differences between .com and .com.au.) The Jason story is beginning to circulate but doesn’t appear to be widely picked up outside the metro areas so far. I added a by city component because I find geographic patterns interesting.

Facebook

Before I did Google, I looked at Facebook.  This was done between 5:30 and 6:00pm Canberra time on May 20, 2010.  The Jason situation had already hit Facebook as there was a Facebook group dedicated to being unhappy with Jason by that time.  I found these fan pages by searching for him.  I did not include people or groups in this sample.  None of these pages appear to be officially connected to either the AFL, the Western Bulldogs or Jason Akermanis.

I’m going to speculate that two of those are likely to see an increase in membership over the next couple of days.  How large an increase, I do not yet know and do not feel comfortable speculating about.

After that, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to benchmark the Facebook groups. These can be easy to create. When I looked, there turned out to be a number of them dedicated to Jason, some of which were created in response to the situation. As I have no previous benchmarks, I can’t tell when some of the larger groups were created. Still, this is where the groups about Jason stand now.

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