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]]>European football clubs like Liverpool FC and AS Roma have also started pushing visual content by utilising the rapidly growing network – Pinterest. Furthermore, LFC recently launched a tumblr blog in order to offer visual treasures from the club’s past and cash in on this.
On Monday FC Bayern Munich started a closed beta of myFCB.de, the club’s own community that is supposed to become the “Facebook for all Bayern Munich fans”. But is this the right way to play the ball?
The Bavarian champion boast 3.3m Facebook fans and are by far the biggest audience of the Bundesliga clubs on Facebook, followed by current champion Borussia Dortmund with 1m fans and FC Schalke 04 with 480,000 supporters. However, Bayern Munich are the only Bundesliga club with no official Twitter Account (list of other club accounts here). Besides having had a PR crisis with their fake new player PR stunt gone wrong on Facebook, the fanpage grows by approximately 10,000 Fans per day. According to a Sports+Markt research the club had 20.7m fans in 2010 (10m in Germany, 10.7m from other countries).
The new community will share many Facebook-esque features: fans can share, comment and rate content. Additionally, the network has its own version of “Like” buttons with the “Guad” button (Bavarian for good) and the “Net Guad” button (no good) for content rating. Fans are provided with tools to organize their fan clubs, schedules and daily fan events. Currently the old forum from the club’s homepage is being migrated across to integrate with the new community. The beta version of myfcb is scheduled to end late March and according to my first tests many features still need to be rolled out entirely and improved (no photo uploads via smartphone, no functioning facebook connect api, no english version etc).
Lorenz Beringer (Project Manager Social Media with FCB) said that FC Bayern Munich aim to engage 300,000 fans with myfcb within the first year. Furthermore by creating their own fan community the club is looking into exploiting opportunities of data collection and analysis as well as referring opportunities for partners. It’s no surprise that this move by Bayern has ROI opportunities as part of its strategy – especially as clubs are eager to generate alternate revenues from Social Media.
But first of all the community has to reach the fans and provide real values – especially beyond the club’s Facebook offering. Facebook will always be way ahead in terms of functionalities, features and social community. Building up an bespoke plattform leads to enormous costs regarding personal and financial resources, knowledge, responsibilities etc. The club has to control and manage the complete community now (possible copy rights infringements, insults, rumors etc.). Furthermore, there are questions regarding transparency and there’s the possibility fans may view content with a lack of credibility: it’s hard to host a balanced dialogue on ones’ branded environment – something Manchester City’s Richard Ayers stated in a recent interview (Richard favours a tactics of natural growth and working together with relevant forums, blogs, communities etc.).
In the end it will come down to the experiences and content (besides offers generated from their partner’s interests). If myFCB only copies the club’s experience and content activities from their Facebook Fanpage, it will be pretty much of “a costly but useless little monster”. A lot of creativity and a delighted content strategy (also the definition of the precise roles of Facebook and myfcb) is needed to lure the fans into this new home and reach the tipping point.
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]]>The post Bayern Munich PR stunt fails on Facebook as fan emotions run high appeared first on Digital-Football.com - Football Social Media & Digital Sports news.
]]>“Mia san Mia” (“We are who we are”) – that’s the Bavarian credo of the German record champion winning side FC Bayern Munich. Today motto was sorely misrepresented as the Bavarian club learnt a valuable lesson – don’t play with fan expectations and don’t underestimate the power of an angry Social Media mob. So what has happened?
At 1 pm on their Facebook Fanpage (approx. 2.7 million fans) the club announced that they had signed a new player. Shortly afterwards on the homepage of the club, Christian Nerlinger, the team manager, announced the signing of a new offensive player and that the spectacular purchase would be introduced and more details would be revealed exclusively on Facebook within a Facebook app entitled “The New FCB Star” at 2 pm.
Bayern Munich fans waited eagerly in huge numbers to see who their club had signed on their official Facebook Page.
Obviously such news fired up digital speculations across Social Media platform such as Facebook and Twitter. Sport sites jumped on the bandwagon and eagerly promoted the upcoming live event, especially since it appeared that the press has not been privy to the surprise news. Fans were discussing names like Tevez, Götze and Berbatov and at this point it’s important to recognise that recently FC Bayern lost their first Bundesliga match within 2012 versus Borussia Mönchengladbach and that young talent Marco Reus, who has been rumored to sign with the Bavarians, announced that instead he would be moving to the current champions Borussia Dortmund next season. So with emotions high and expectant fans left disappointed, this certainly wasn’t the right time to let the fans down any more!
At 2 pm the curtain dropped and all was revealed in a staged live stream press conference with Markus Hörwick (communication director at FCB), Chrsitian Nerlinger and Philipp Lahm all present on screen. What they had to say however, was less than impressive:
“The new star player is… YOU – the 12th man of the squad”
The Facebook app then ran a video that showed users names and profile photos appearing on jerseys and in fake press announcements – with supporting “mock interviews” of players like like Manuel Neuer, Bstian Schweinsteiegr and Arjen Robben expressing their delight at the new signing.
It appear that the club wanted to reward its fans with an engaging personalised video, but by completely misjudging fan expectations and the communication context this marketing “ploy” quickly deteriorated into a spectacular failure among the fans. Many fans were really disappointed and negative comments and rants crowded the app. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the app then proceeded to crash – presumably under the traffic stress. It wasn’t long until mainstream sports press took up the ball and began to publicise what an utter failure the PR stunt had been. The story soon went global and trended 2nd worldwide on Twitter.
Regardless if the execution of the plan was viewed as funny or even successful in that it got people talking, the outcome was not what Bayern had hoped for.
In only a staggering 20 minutes later the club labeled the stunt as,
“a small joke for the fans with several video clips to follow during the upcoming weeks”
Not exactly the best response to a fanbase that had just been infuriated even more. With the “joke” excuse not being kindly received, the club was forced to apologise and explained that their only attention was to engage with the fans and putt hem into the middle of the team.
What clubs can learn from this PR stunt:
- – Do not underestimate fan expectations – football fans are a very passionate audience and take it seriously
- – Do not lure fans into apps or Social Media platforms with empty promises
- – Always know the context of a campaign – Bayern failed to recognise that their fans were already quite emotive – the timing was appalling
- – Don’t judge success by quantity, the stunt collected a large number of number ‘Likes’ and noise in the social space, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into quality!
The post Bayern Munich PR stunt fails on Facebook as fan emotions run high appeared first on Digital-Football.com - Football Social Media & Digital Sports news.
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