From the "The Buzz Manager Blog" comes this commentary on how sports PR professionals should find ways to build mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers. This is the main sports & social marketing blog from Kathleen Hessert's The Sports Media Challenge media/communications company.Click here to read it online: The Untapped Resource for Teams: Bloggers(Posted by Jackie Adkins at 1/13/2010)
Sports bloggers. We all know they're out there, writing furiously about their favorite team. The interesting thing is that they seem to rarely get any love from the team they cover.
This needs to change.
The truth is that teams have very valuable resources in these bloggers. Sure, the bloggers may throw a jab at your coach or star player every once in a while, but this is a minor issues when you look at the positives it would bring.
First of all, most mid to larger market teams have multiple bloggers covering them. The thing is that fans only have a limited amount of time to spend online reading about their team, causing them to choose one or two of these blogs to follow most carefully. The other problem is that most casual fans who really only read about your team in the newspaper or on your team website have no idea that these blogs even exist.
So, what can you do?
For starters a great idea is to set aside part of your team's web site to aggregate content from each of these blogs. This way, fans who normally wouldn't read team blogs will stumble across them as they visit your site and normal readers who typically bypass your site altogether will come to your site as a resource to see what's being said each day.
Pretty simple, right? Well, why stop there...
If you really want to encourage your bloggers to provide great content and give your fans the opportunity to have the greatest access to your team, you can go a step further and grant press passes to bloggers. Maybe you grant these on a rotational basis, so as not to have bloggers just freeloading off the press passes, or maybe you include some other terms in the deal (a blog post about a certain charity event your team did, for example). This will demonstrate that you really do appreciate the effort your bloggers give throughout the season.
But what's in it for you?
This is the big question, isn't it? So far, it sounds like you're throwing a bone to the bloggers but they're not giving anything in return. For starters, some of the top sports blogs receive thousands of views each day and engage with hundreds of fans in the comments section following each post. These blogs are hubs where fans gather together and talk about your team, and by encouraging their participation, you're increasing the likelihood that your team is always a top of the mind topic.
If you're not sold by the increased engagement with fans argument, then find other ways to make this beneficial. Ask bloggers that the only requirement for them to be included in press pass allocation or featured on your team site is that they display a banner on their site to buy tickets. This is a very unobtrusive advertisement since it's highly relevant and can actually be seen as a convenient way for the readers to buy tickets. You could even go as far as to offer special ticket packages for fans who purchase tickets through certain blogs. The ideas are endless.
What it comes down to is this. Bloggers spend hours and hours each week covering their respective teams and often get little to no recognition from the front office. So, don't forget about the bloggers and find ways to build mutually beneficial relationships with them.