(column by Keith McMillan, d3football.com)Keith McMillan, former DIII football player and nine-year columnist for D3football.com, writes about the explosion of social media usage at the Division III level since the national governing board revamped its policy and guidelines on SM usage this summer.
More and more, Division III athletic departments are taking their coverage into their own hands, delivering their news directly to student-athletes, fans, prospective students and supporters.
D3football.com writer McMillan talked extensively to DIII media relations staffers about the explosion of social media tools in DIII promotion and publicity efforts and the payoff for these colleges.
Please read an excerpt from McMillan's column below.
To read the full article, visit www.d3football.com.
How Tweet it is in Division III, by Keith McMillan
In recent seasons, there’s been a spike in Division III teams using offenses like the spread and defenses like the 4-2-5. But none of the changes on the field have evolved quite as quickly as the way we follow our teams when we’re off it.
Take, for example,
Mount Union sports information director Lenny Reich using Twitter to post a link to a pre-prepared video interview of a Purple Raider athlete on YouTube. Or
Hope coach Dean Kreps announcing in the Flying Dutchmen’s Facebook feed that 116 new photos from the Wheaton game have been uploaded.
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even digital photography and video were but a gleam in the eye just a few seasons ago. Now, they’re all part of Division III athletic programs’ strategies to stay in touch with a fan base that can at times be spread far and wide geographically, as well as in stages of life.
“The decision to reach out to Facebook and Twitter was an easy one, as we know that virtually all of our current students and many prospective students are in both places,” Reich wrote in an interview conducted, appropriately, using Facebook. “Also, many alums are on there connecting with old family and friends, so it was a way to make information more accessible.”
But is the additional access helping bridge gaps in coverage of Division III sports, or further scattering the bits and pieces of information that are hard enough to find using traditional over-the-air and news organizations?“Social media outlets have not only helped our department stay connected,” writes
Massachusetts Maritime Academy SID Jim Seavey (@mmabucs). “I also think it has created new audiences that will grow as time goes on.”
The audience Division III schools are targeting includes far-away fans and alumni, potential students and players’ parents. Social media has allowed the athletic departments and football teams to insert themselves into each one of those fans’ days.
The
Presidents’ Athletic Conference (@PAC_Athletics) considers its social media use an extension of its website.
“By adding Facebook and Twitter into the equation,” writes
PAC associate director Monique Bowman, “we are able to send information to very popular sites that PAC athletes, fans, alum and media already check on a daily basis.”
Fans who were used to having to search for bits and pieces of detail are now having it presented to them. And they’re getting more than they anticipated.
“I treat our Twitter page a little differently,” writes
Concordia-Moorhead SID Jim Cella, whose feed (@CobberSID) since last winter has featured 1,262 tweets to 242 followers. “Not just giving the breaking news but also giving little insights that people would pick up on if they were at the game. I want the fans, families [and] alumni [to] feel like they are sitting next to me at the game and we are having a conversation about what is going on.”
“We started using YouTube in the last year or so,” writes Reich, “and have been floored with the amount of views on just little two-minute interviews with athletes and highlights of our football games.”
“I like to use Twitter to provide ‘quick hitters’ with information about an upcoming contest or event or one that has just concluded,” writes Maritime’s Seavey, “and I always list my website address ... so that audiences can go to the site for additional information. It seems to be working so far.”
The response is backing that up.
“I use social media outlets to drive traffic to my website, and the results have been phenomenal,” Seavey writes. “In the month of September alone, my web traffic is the highest its ever been since the launch of the site in July 2008. We've had more unique visitors per day than students enrolled at the Academy.”
“Our Facebook fan page had nearly 1,000 fans in just over a month of being online,” writes Reich. “We are currently near 1,900 fans on something that has been going since about the first week of August.”
Mass. Maritime might not have much in common with Mount Union on the field, but there are 1,300 on its Facebook fan page, according to Seavey.
The success in reaching fans leads those in charge of the flow of information to think even bigger than Twitter and Facebook.
“I also started preseason blogs for the fall sports and they went over unbelievably well,” Cella writes. “It was a behind-the-scenes look at what each team was doing. I can honestly say that the blog might be the wave of the future for SIDs as people can get scores, boxscores and stats all over the place. People now want to read and see videos about individual players and coaches that make them feel like they are right there.”
According to Reich, Mount Union has a text-messaging service with more than 500 subscribers. The Purple Raiders also produce a commercial radio feed online that has drawn more than 500 listeners per game.
“Before we knew it the folks at Stretch Internet were telling us that we had more folks signed up than one of their Big Ten clients,” Reich writes. “This all tells me this is where we are going."
The next challenge is to try to keep the audience growing, and one way to do that is to draw in the folks who aren’t big users of social media.
“We're constantly trying to figure out ways to enhance what we do by interacting with those who choose to follow us,” writes the PAC’s Bowman. “Facebook and Twitter are definitely ways to interact with the more tech-savvy generations, but we are finding that older alum are slowly but surely inching into these media.”
But having more ways to connect with more people -- doesn’t it end up just being more work? On one hand, sports information directors, many of them one-man bands, agree. But it’s nothing a smartphone can’t help handle, Reich notes. Besides, getting a response that used to not be possible, is a reminder that all the work is appreciated.
Reich writes that “the future will allow people to access information on variety of applications whether moblie, broadband, video, audio, print, etc.”
“The new technologies ... can be viewed in two lights: it can be the best thing in the world or the worst thing in the world, depending upon your viewpoint,” Seavey writes. “I fully admit I was skeptical of the new social media ventures when they were first introduced and really worried that if I used them, would it take away from the things I was trying to do on my own webpage? Thankfully, I was wrong on that -- it has done the complete opposite and enhanced everything."