LA Lakers - Facebook Winners

Wow - my sixteenth blog post, it feels good to say that. Anyways, as you may or may not be able to tell by the title of my post. The Los Angeles Lakers are the first North American sports team to reach 11 million fans on Facebook.

If I would have had to guess, I would have probably not picked the Lakers to lead the category, I probably would have went with either the Dallas Cowboys or the New York Yankees. But according to this article on NBA.com, they are in fourth place worldwide, trailing only FC Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United, who are all European soccer clubs.

Apparently it has only taken the Lakers only three years to reach this status. They created both a Facebook and Twitter accounts during the 2008-2009 season. According to Tim Harris, Lakers CMO/Senior Vice President of Business Operations, “When we created our Facebook page three years ago, we did so with the intention of using the platform as a way to personally connect with our fans not only in America, but all over the world.” It has clearly been working. When I last checked the actually have 11,020,104 viewers, so the number continues to rise.

We know that they have the most, but according to this article, the Charlotte Bobcats have the fewest with only 85,000. That is a huge difference between first and last place.

I am not surprised that the Lakers are tops in the NBA, they are in a huge city and have a storied franchise. It sounds like they use Facebook the right away, by giving their fans a personal look at the team. A chance to hear from the coaches, the Laker Girls and they are even offered merchandise specials.

We have talked all semester long about how important social media is and Facebook is King (at least right now.) If you want to reach millions of people, there is no better way than adding a few pictures/videos and quick blurbs to your Facebook account.  To quote a different sport movie, “If you build it, they will come”, and that is just the case with Facebook, and well I guess the Los Angeles Lakers.

Social Media Marketing a Must!

We have talked so much about social media this semester that I feel as if I could help any business promote their product online. Whether it is a non-profit or Valley City State University, just about anyone can use social media to promote themselves or a business.

I found an article on Forbes website that goes into detail about what a Chief Marketing Officer should be doing to make sure they are using social media to its fullest.  I talked about last week how companies all over are hiring people to do just this. The article I found this week talks about what those people should be doing to make sure they stay on top of it.

One of the most interesting things the article talks about is that these officers along with their employees need to sit down and learn what each tool does. Something we have broken down a lot this semester. It even suggest that if you don’t know to ask your children. Lets face it, kids these days seem to have a knack for understanding and using all these tools.  Another suggestion that this author makes is that the CMO’s need to not only delegate what their employees do, but make sure that they are up to par with everything as well. I would imagine that most CMO’s have been doing their jobs for a very long time and never imagined that they would be using something called Twitter to promote a business.

The article also talks about some statistics about Facebook that I found extremely interesting and would like to share them. Every hour on Facebook, users share three million links, make six million new friends, share eight million photos and make 30 million comments. Those numbers are absolutely staggering and to think that this was hardly around five years ago.  One other statistic they make is that for every eight minutes someone spends on the internet, they spend one of those on Facebook. Wow!

The last paragraph talks about how its no longer an option to have a presence on social media, it’s a must! Something we have talked about all this semester and I couldn’t agree more!

Getting Paid to Play... I mean Work!

We have spent a lot of time this semester talking about all the social media sites available to everyone and how they can be used. One thing I haven’t thought about is that there are people who get paid to play… I mean work on these sites all day.  Things are constantly being updated on many corporations social media platforms so someone has to be adding this content, it is just something that had never really crossed my mind.

According to this article found on mediabistro.com NBC News has just hired on two more employees to beef up their Digital Media Department.They just hired John Keegan as the NBC Director of Technology for Digital Media. Keegan comes from Fox News and will primarily work on two of NBC’s websites, the Grio.com and msnbc.com. The other new hire comes from the Huffington Post. In two weeks Craig Kanalley is joining NBC as their new Social Media Editor, where he will oversee the use of social media as a reporting platform.

These announcements come from a memo that Vivian Schiller posted on November 21^st. In the memo she always mentions that Ryan Osborn, who ran all thesocial media sites the last two years has now been promoted to Senior Director of Digital Media. Finally it discusses that Bonnie Optekman is now the Vice President of Emerging Technologies.

These are a lot of fancy titles for jobs that really didn’t exist probably ten years ago, but thanks to the spike in social media across all the new platforms its easy to understand why they are needed.

I know that with the increase in social media, there will be an increase in demand for specialists in the area. Can you imagine getting paid to play on Twitter or Facebook? I use Facebook every once in awhile at my job, but its only to promote our show the students create. I don’t really know enough about it to do much more than that.

Would you want to play… I mean work with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter all day? Let me know your thoughts and post a comment below.

NBA D-League Futurecasts

Even though the NBA season has been put on hold, at least for now, you still have the opportunity to watch professional basketball. The NBA Development League season starts its eleventh season next Friday, November, 25th. The D-league is the only minor league division of the NBA and currently has sixteen teams in the league.

Since we are talking about livestreaming this week, I thought it would be a good blog topic to discuss. One of the ideas behind the D-League is to show off the talent to the world and is available all for free. They have what they call NBA Futurecasts, livestreams of all D-League games available to anyone with a computer and a internet connection.

This is the third year that I have been hired on by NBA Entertainment to be the Team Tricaster Director (TTD) for the Dakota Wizards, the team located in Bismarck, ND and who is now owned by the Golden State Warriors.

A Tricaster is a video switcher/computer/streaming device all-in-one machine that allows us to push the switch and stream these games out to the world. During each broadcast you will see three cameras used, full scoreboard graphics, play-by-play announcing and everything else you expect from a normal television broadcast.

Although we as operators due what normally several people do, it’s a lot of fun and I look forward to tip-off of every game. It doesn’t hurt that I sit at the scorer’s table and get to watch every game up close. Its easy to sometimes forget that you have a game to direct and switch as the quality of play is awesome and some players are actually on NBA teams and have been sent down to get more playing time. In fact, last year’s D-League defensive player of the year was from the Wizards and had to NBA call-ups to the big show.

Anyways, getting back to the NBA Futurecasts, they can be found here. Every game is streamed and no username and password is required. Simply click on the game you want to watch and enjoy. The player that is used detects the strength of your bandwith and will give you the best quality available. The highest being in High Definition. All games are also immediately archived and if you join a game late, no problem, you can simply start at the beginning of the game to make sure you don’t miss any of the highlights.

So if you are a fan of the NBA and feel like you need to get your basketball fix, feel free to log onto the future of the NBA and check out a Futurecast.

Digital Cookbook

Are you looking for a Christmas present for that person who is hard to buy for? Do you like to cook and have run out of new recipes to try? Well no worries, I have the perfect solution to both of these problems with one simple solution - a digital cookbook. You read right, a digital cookbook. The Bismarck State College United Way committee has been collecting recipes from the staff at BSC and will be putting together a cookbook on a cd. They are selling the cd for the low price of just $10, with all the proceeds benefiting the Missouri Slope Area United Way. They didn’t really have a marketing plan, so I volunteered my services to help spread the word.

I put together a video for this cookbook as part of my social media project. You can find the video here. I decided to use YouTube to host the video, because it’s free and it allows you to upload high definition videos that look really good. I have also been promoting my video through all the other social media channels, Facebook, Twitter and Blogs. Actually I don’t have a Twitter account but I asked the president of Bismarck State College to help spread the message and he gladly helped. Here is the post from his blog, it’s at the bottom of the post. It wasn’t the longest post, but everything helps, he also posted it on his Twitter account and his Facebook page.

The BSC United Way committee’s goal is to raise $10,000 this year and they are well on their way. For their cookbook they are looking to collect at least 200 recipes and to sell at least 100 discs. Hopefully with the help of all the publicity we can get at et least 250 recipes and sell 150 discs. All the recipes submitted must be a employee of Bismarck State College, but the disc is for sale to anyone. Each recipe on the disc will be a pdf and some of the recipe’s will have pictures along with them.

Feel free to pre-order your cd by emailing Kayla Seifert at kaylaseifert@bismarckstate.edu.

Ten Social Media Sites That Will Be Around In the Next Decade

We have talked a lot this semester about how Social Media and the tools used change so much. Its hard to keep up with Twitter and Facebook. Have you ever heard of RenRen or Sina Weibo? While researching a topic about what to write about this week, I stumbled upon a top ten list. Ten Social Media Brands That Will Still Matter In 10 Years.

I found the list on Business Insider website,  it seems as though they have a nice tech portion on their website. How are they to know what sites will be around it ten years? They don’t. I believe the author just decided he would do some research and come up with 10 social media brands that he thinks will make it through the next decade.

Here is his list.

Facebook

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Google

Yelp

Spotify

Apple GameCenter

RenRen

Sina Weibo

I haven’t even heard of some of these, how do they think they will be around in ten years? The author explains his reasoning  why he believes each site will make it.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and I guess even LinkedIn are obvious choices what about the others? Instagram – it’s a iPhone app that allows you to share photos that you take on your iPhone and share them on other sites like Twitter and Facebook. I can see how this might make it. iPhones are the world’s number one selling cell phone and they won’t be going away anytime soon.

Yelp is a site that allows you to review just about everything in any city, at least the larger cities right now. People can log on share their reviews about a certain restaurant or hotel and others can log on and look. Seems simple enough and I think it will stick around.

Spotify, this one I have heard of and I really like the idea. Find music on their server, play it and you have instant access to millions of songs for free. You can share these songs on your other Social Media sites and recommend to your friends some good music.  I think I might sign up for this one.

Apple GameCenter. It seems as though Apple would really have to be struggling to screw something up. GameCenter is an app that can be downloaded on any mobile iProduct that Apple sells and gives you access to hundreds of games. The unique thing about this app, it allows you to play your friends anytime you want.

RenRen and Sina Weibo are both based in China. RenRen is Chna;’s version of Facebook and Sina Weibo is their version of Twitter. China has a huge population and seem like they are just as tech hungry as we are, so I can see why these two made the list.

What are your thoughts? Do you think these to 10 sites will be around in ten years?