This guest post comes from Mat Kanan, Director of Media Relations for Western Michigan’s athletic department. Kanan is a member of CoSIDA's New Media/Technology Committee.
Kanan is in his eighth season with Western Michigan, the fifth year as the director of media relations. Along with overseeing an office staff of three full-time employees and a group of student employees, Kanan produces weekly video features for the football, basketball and hockey coaches shows. He works with the WMU marketing director on all social media efforts.
Mat earned his master’s in sports management from Western Michigan in 2009 after graduating from Ohio University from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in 1997. He worked for five years in corporate marketing before entering the sports information field as an intern at Division III Capital University (Columbus, Ohio). Find Mat on Twitter: @kananmj and reach him via email: mat.kanan@wmich.edu.
by Mat Kanan, Western Michigan University Director of Media Relations
CoSIDA New Media/Technology Committee member
During this past spring football season our coaching staff, under the direction of new head coach P.J. Fleck, wanted to have an event for the students to garner excitement leading into the 2013 season. The idea was to invite them to a night practice and the reigns were handed over to me and our marketing director to build an entertaining event surrounding the practice.
The result was NEKTON Neon Night.
First, let me explain "NEKTON." A Nekton is an actively swimming organism that is able to move independently of the current. It is always attacking and never full (see a Great White Shark). Our coaches have promoted that our team will play with a Nekton mentality in 2013.
Since the practice took place at night and due to the fact that we were introducing our new in-game DJ for the upcoming season at the event, the idea to theme the event with neon to go along with the house music was appropriate. The alliteration of NEKTON Neon Night fell into place.
Now, how do you get students to stay entertained and involved during a two-hour football practice at night and in likely less than pleasant weather conditions? We infused social media.
Prior to the event we saturated the student-related Twitter accounts and Facebook pages with a description of the event and asking them to wear neon, using the hash tag #NEKTON. The evening coincided with the culmination of Greek Week and utilized the tight nit fraternity/sorority community to spread the word.
We created tasks for students to complete and crafted team related trivia questions for students to answer during the event all over Twitter during the event, using the #NEKTON hash tag. As students came into the stadium we handed them neon cards giving them instructions and the prizes spanned from t-shirts to signed footballs and field access during practice.
There were two questions heading into the event. How would we notify the students to check Twitter for the next question and how would we notify them of the winner. We worked with the DJ on the former. Playing into the NEKTON aspect of the event, every time the DJ played the famous sound from the movie Jaws, students knew to check Twitter.
We used a Hootsuite feed to notify those in attendance of the winner. Following #NEKTON, we posted the feed on our in-stadium video board to show the entire interaction taking place throughout the night. Every time a winner was selected the picture they just tweeted along with their Twitter handle was posted on the video board.
Unfortunately, how video board does not have the capability to connect to a PC screen so we affixed a camera on a screen, framed it and projected that onto the video board.
On a night where temperatures dipped down to the mid-30’s and it was sleeting throughout, we had nearly 1,000 students in attendance and a large percentage stayed for the entire event. The next day, we used Storify to combine the best interactions among fans during the event and posted those on our official web site. (Link to Storify story)
The event was a success due to multiple factors – excitement over new head coach, Greek Week inclusion, free food and prizes. I also believe the use of social media throughout played a large role in not only getting people to the event but keeping them there and keeping them entertained.
Also, the unique descriptor of the event gained publicity outside our community (the event announcement was the top search term on Google when searching ‘NEKTON mentality’) and continued to keep focus on Western Michigan football heading into the summer months.