How long have Roma been using Facebook and Twitter?

Roma started using these channels the first week of October, 2011, a week after I joined the club as the Digital Business Director.  Hard to believe, given the fact that AS Roma is one of the world’s top teams, but prior to our arrival there was only a brochureware flash site, no eCommerce and no social media.  In a little over six months, we have launched Facebook with over 1MM fans, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, the AS Roma Dream League, and online AS Roma Membership, the AS Roma Fantasy Manager on iTunes and Facebook, a new eCommerce Site (asromastore.it), and the biggest project of all, our new main team site, asroma.it.

Roma are already well known for their excellent fan engagement

How does the club use Social Media to engage with their fans?

We view social media as the ideal platform to engage our fans.  Providing great original content in the form of backstage pictures and videos, breaking team news, practice reports, but also exclusive promotions or the chances to interact with players all serve to foster this engagement.  The key to social media is providing entertainment and allowing a conversation to happen.  We try not to over-moderate, and we interfere if called upon (we try and answer relevant Tweets, etc.)  Our fans appreciate the content, the videos and they are sharing our content with friends around the world – it is this virality that has allowed us to grow rapidly.

Q3. What value does Social Media provide to the club?

Everything is connected.  The more fans interact with the brand and spend time on our site, the more it helps the AS Roma brand.  Over time we monetize with eCommerce, ticket sales, AS Roma Membership Program and our early forays into social gaming and Apps.  But it all starts with giving the fans the place to congregate, comment, interact and enjoy themselves online. Eyeballs on the site means that fans enjoy the experience and are entertained. It also means they will be monetized via ads or commerce, and this helps us grow new revenue streams.

What has been the best experience on Social Media since the club has started using it?

This is the hardest question I have faced while being at AS Roma because there are too many to choose from.  Early on we got our legend, Francesco Totti to pose on a training table while giving the thumbs up – and this photo was picked up by newspapers everywhere.  We had a fan photo promotion where we featured the best photos of fans wearing the Roma colors around the world.  Just last week, we organized a fan appreciation video and photo where our team thanked the fans for reaching 1MM – certainly a great highlight.  But I think nothing beats the simple joy of having given these great fans the platforms and the content for them to interact every day.

What has been the most challenging aspect of using Social Media?

We are still at Day 1 in getting the overall organization and team behind it.  Twitter is still not heavily used in Italy, and our main Twitter stars are foreign players. Few players even have their own public fan pages on Facebook. I would like to see this medium grow as rapidly as it has in the US, but I’m proud to see AS Roma already ahead of most Italian Serie A teams.

With the club already using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even Pinterest – what is next for AS Roma?

Well now, what fun is life without surprises? This whole experience has been like Santa Claus popping in every few weeks and dropping gifts around the world to AS Roma fans excited to open their digital toys and play with them.  We certainly are looking to add more Apps and games, and as other social platforms emerge, we will be there if it makes sense for us!

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AS Roma are certainly a club to watch in the next few months, and as more clubs invest and improve their Social Media offering, Roma will undoubtedly be in a better position as an early adopter. Our thanks goes to Shergul and the club for taking the time to respond to these questions.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf8kmE7lXrI

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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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A couple of weeks ago Digital-Football.com reported that AS Roma were the first European team to adopt the content curation platform as a way to share photography/video and engage with fans. The move comes just a few days after the 5 time European cup winners announced that they were the first Premier League side to use Tumblr to highlight the history of the club via iconic photography (some crowd-sourced from fans).

The club stated on their official website:

“We’re also using our different themed LFC Boards on Pinterest to bring some of the club’s history and passion to a new audience for the 21st century. With so much choice on the internet, we recognise that today’s young and new fans may not have time to read realms and realms of text about Liverpool’s glorious past, present and future and that’s why we’re always looking for new ways to interact with supporters online. Whether you’ve been attending matches for years, live in a far, foreign land or are just beginning your love affair with Liverpool, we aim to have something that captures your imagination”

The Liverpool FC Pinterest follows in the same theme as AS Roma’s and has a wide variety of “boards” set up to cater for different interests, including, legends, programme covers, merchandise and with it being Pinterest – cakes!

This is an excellent development and hopefully more football clubs get on board and be as inventive and creative in using new social media platforms to engage with fans.

To read a more in-depth story about the news, visit the UK Sports Network who were the first site to cover the story.

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1. Marketing the Experience, not the Brand!

Teams in the NBA, NHL and NFL differ from European Sports teams in that they have already evolved the way they engage with Sports fans. Social Media is used to not market the brand – tickets, products, merchandise or adverts. Instead, teams use Social Media to focus in on the “game day experience” – the highlights, the atmosphere, the music playlist, the pre match rituals, views from seats and funny anecdotes from the game. Here in the UK we are far too focussed on telling what the fans want, rather, marketers should be sitting in the fan seats and absorbing the emotions and stories during a game. Sports fans want a shared experience, not a broadcast competition about a free subscription to the club magazine!

2. Social Media Command Centre

I’ve spoken about this brilliant invention before hand but it’s still incredibly relevant and untried on this side of the Atlantic. Social Media Command Centre’s – or Hubs if you don’t want to be too dramatic – are allocated areas within the stadium on a gameday where pre-selected fans can take control of the clubs Social Media presence. These fans are usually selected for being Social Media savvy and tend to be quite influential in the space. Not only do they create content, but they curate content from their fellow fans. They are the perfect Community Managers – they know what the fans want, they know the fan chants, know the fan groups, they know what the expectations are. But most importantly, they focus on the experience – not the endless stream of sales spam so many clubs force onto their fans.

3. Fan Nights

If there’s one thing the American know how to do – it’s reward their fans. US Sports recognise how powerful and influential their Social fans can be, one way of rewarding them is the increasingly popular “Fan Night” in which fans are invited to come to the stadium to meet their fellow Tweeters and put faces to Twitter handles. It’s a simple enough idea and a nice gesture to bring your most influential followers closer to the club. Clubs might put on some food, give a stadium tour, or even meet a player/legend. It just shows that the club genuinely cares about their fans and appreciates their efforts in the Social Media space.

4. Fan Content

Again, this is a topic I’ve already written about at length and although clubs like Manchester City and Norwich City are starting to integrate fans into their official content – there’s still a long way to go. Content has dramatically changed in recent years, no longer should it be aimed at audiences, but it has to involve them as well. Clubs can tap into their fans’ talent and encourage them to be content creators for official media. Whether that is crowdsourcing questions for an upcoming YouTube interview with a player, a match report in the programme, or even getting fans to create biographies about their favourite players (past and present). Fan Content is more engaging, authentic and usually a whole lot more interesting.

5. Pinterest

For those not currently up to speed with the very latest Social Media crazes, Pinterest is a rapidly growing Social Network in which users “pin” their favourite content – essentially curating content. In the U.S., they haven’t missed a trick and teams are already using the popular Social platform to promote their online stores. However,  it can be used for so much more. Clubs could use Pinterest’s collaborative features to host an “Iconic Photography” board in which selected fans can pin photos of their favourite moments, players and jerseys – thereby letting fans curate the clubs history. Pinterest is a fantastic tool for this kind of collaborative sharing and undoubtedly could be used for competitions, video libraries or even fan-photography.

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