...human interest piece. The largest expansion of the sports market in the minors has been women and children.
Women read as differently as they experience your facilities.
If you look at the publications outside of sports that have high curb appeal to women, they focus heavily on human interest and style. So how do you take advantage of that in a sports club's PR?
Players are human, well, most of them at any rate. They have life stories that everyone, but women in particular, find interesting.
Notice that most major feature magazines spend the first year or two of the ascension of star players pumping up their background. The more that your fans and the media know about the players, the more their life stories lift their personal interest and bring out fans who identify with them.
Style: How many of your clubs introduce new logos or merchandise? For your female fans, getting the players to do a fashion show for charity at an event, or using some of your better-looking players to showcase the merchandise is great business.
Putting the Communication Back into Your Club's Communications
- A media relations person is a win for you . With nearly 800 professional sports teams in baseball, hockey, basketball and football, and your busy schedules, a media person is what keeps your club from being invisible on the regional and national radar. True, you could keep your news local, but
- The janitor is not more important than the PR person. If you don't have a staff directory for your club, get one. if you do have one, and there is no media point of contact, or the media person is stacked under the security guy and the janitorial supervisor, promote their info, an email and a telephone number. Media people that cover these markets cover hundreds of clubs. The teams that make it easier for the media to deal with you benefit from that positive relationship.
While we all love your media guides, they form an enormous shelf of information that sits in one office, or two. Websites make up the quick access to information for most of us when we're on the road. Make sure that both are thorough, accurate, and up-to-date.
- No Club is An Island. Many clubs write releases, and serve up quotes from you GMs and AGMs, that would make it appear that you have the only valid franchise in the league.
In your role, you're not only a walking billboard for the team, but you have the opportunity to pump up inter-league rivalries, and players that can bring in more fans. Every press release, and every quote to the media, is a well-placed promotion for your club, if handled well.
When asked about the upcoming weekend, you could say:
"We're excited that Joe Berlin is joining our club. We look forward to him dominating under the net."
When properly briefed by your crack media director, though, they might remind you to add a little drama:
"We're excited about bringing in center Joe Berlin. Thursday he's going to get his first big test from Hakim Hardass, who's coming in with the Belleville Bad Boyz. We expect Joe, at 6'11" and 275 pounds is going to be the Berlin Wall that slows down Hakim, who is the top rebounder in the league. Joe was the toughest guy under the net at Old Dominion, and he takes grief off of nobody."
In the above example, you establish details like position, size, power, speed, past affiliations, and attitude. All of which makes for more readable copy that makes the night an event worth buying a ticket to see. Even if the whole quote isn't used as a quote, it will make up the basis for information that the writer uses for factual statements within a media piece based on your press conference or release.
If you don't know how to do this natively, have your media person help you work on these kind of talking points, or have them, or someone more comfortable generating exciting quotes, do it for you.
- Keep player promotions and event promotions separate, unless the player is absolutely tied into the event:
Wrong: "We're excited about bringing in center Joe Berlin on Hoops for Healthcare Night, sponsored by HealthCoSouth."
Right: "Joe will be showcased on his first night with the club when he and Bad Boyz forward Lou S. Ball shoot free-throws for Children's Health Center on Hoops for Healthcare Night." (Let the release name the sponsor later.)
- The Road is Important. 39% of clubs reporting news to MLN do not have either the broadcaster or the PR department report from the road.
In leagues where this is an impossible cost factor, media directors can and should swap releases and cover both sides with enough information to provide both markets.
In leagues where this is either not custom, or you as the GM don't see the value in it, SEE THE VALUE.
If the only spin out there on the game is the other club's, it doesn't usually showcase your players' side of the story for the fans in your market. You want local fans who read the web, your local fishwrap and the other local media to tout your guys as much during the game highlights as they do the locals.
- Photos Add to Media Releases - If you're resisting adding photos of the game or special event to your press releases, or photos of players in transactions, go with the flow. Pictures add huge readability to your club's news. Provide a basic photo, and offer a link back to your website to get larger images that can be downloaded for the print media, and the electronic magazine media that need higher resolution photos. Try not to send high-res photos with releases otherwise. Some editors have to pick them up off of primitive arena connections that can make one photo take up to 20 minutes to download!
Great media starts with you. By improving your media face, you leverage press coverage to maximize exposure of talent that will fill seats.
Micro celebrity is good for business. Do whatever you can do to encourage it.
- Brian Ross
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