College Sports Information Directors of America

See online: Quick Chat: Mike Hutchison, Senior Director, Digital, Monumental Sports via www.cmo.com

Social media and live sporting events today go hand in hand, from fans snapping selfies in arenas for Instagram, to trash-talking on Twitter, to getting fired up from the comfort of their couches via Facebook.

The value of that social-media engagement is increasingly clear. Seven out of 10 sports fans who like or follow a brand online said they're open to sharing brand content, buying goods, or engaging with social posts, according to a survey conducted by Catalyst PR. And they’re looking for content beyond score update. Catalyst found that 72 percent of sports fans were interested in pregame excitement; 68 percent in historic nostalgia, photos, and videos; 66 percent in photos and videos of bloopers; and 63 percent in game debate and banter.

That's crucial data for Mike Hutchison (pictured, right), who has managed social media, along with the Web sites and mobile apps, for the Washington Wizards, Washington Capitals, and Washington Mystics for the past four-and-a-half years.

As senior director of digital media for Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns the three teams, along with the arenas in which they play, he has seen the social-media landscape shift significantly—and often—during his tenure.

CMO.com spoke to Hutchison about the ever-shifting social-media landscape, the importance of maintaining social momentum during victory and defeat, the struggle to monetize social media without turning off fans, and why most people aren’t as good at social media as they think.

CMO.com: What’s your approach to social-media engagement during fast-moving, live events like a basketball or hockey game?
Hutchison: So much of what we do is event-based, from the regular season games to tent-pole events like drafts and all-star games. Our goal is to aggregate that conversation surrounding those events and keep it going. Fans are going to talk about what they see on the ice or the court anyway. If they’re going to be talking about it, we’d rather they talk about it with us. We want them to look to the teams as the most transparent place for that to happen.

CMO.com: How difficult is it to harness what must be an overwhelming number of tweets, photos, or comments posted during a typical game?
Hutchison: It’s really difficult, particularly in terms of surfacing comments or content from [our] influencers. Anything that can help us, in the moment, identify the content fans want and get that out faster is important.

[To that end, our] social-media platform helps us showcase everything that’s going on in one place. We built these social hubs, which are the first thing you see on any team site during a game. It’s a moderated stream of everything we’re doing on social to cover the games, and everything our fans are saying about these games through those same channels.

To aggregate the conversations, we create game-day hashtags and reinforce them through repetition and ubiquitous online and offline placement. Fans have picked up on the hashtags. They know what the construct is, and now they can anticipate it.

We [also] use analytics to assign points to social-media users based on positivity and frequency of their contributions, and my team also keeps an eye out for fans that are particularly clever. There are superfans who engage consistently online, and our Web editors who run chats and moderate streams recognize them by embedding their tweets in recaps or highlighting them in the arena. We also hold a special suite night where the most loyal social fans are invited to a VIP experience at a game.

CMO.com: How do you highlight that activity for fans in the arena, assuming they’re not buried in their smartphones during a big game?
Hutchison: We create one-off visualizations [of activity] on the social hub to highlight during the game. It reinforces the feedback loop we want to create with fans. It shows them that we’re not only listening to them, we’re showing off their great content inside the arena and on the hubs. 

CMO.com: What’s most challenging about corralling the social-media conversations taking place around sporting events?
Hutchison: The biggest challenges are structural. Each channel is different and its own medium. For Facebook, the challenge is reach. We invested all this time growing these huge fan bases, but now we have to contend with the challenges in getting our content to show up in fans’ newsfeeds. With Twitter, we have to stay on top of it at all times and strive to be as relevant as possible. On Instagram, and even Vine, it’s about finding new and exciting ways to leverage the company’s exclusive access to athletes and showcasing that behind-the-scenes access.

CMO.com: And new platforms are always popping up. The Sporting News this year called Snapchat the new “it” social-media channel for sports.
Hutchison: You have to stay nimble and creative enough to be able to understand these new platforms and make the most out of them. We started on Snapchat midway through last season. During the Wizards playoff run, we launched a scavenger hunt on Snapchat offering a pair of tickets to game four of the series to the fan who complete it first. We sent out 18 time-sensitive snaps during the hunt, sponsored by Mountain Dew, with each average more than 2,000 views. And we saw a 49 percent increase in Snapchat followers as a result.

CMO.com: Is your social-media approach different when a team is on a winning streak versus when it’s not doing well? For example, the Wizards were in the playoffs last year, while the Capitals missed the post-season for the first time since 2007.
Hutchison: We want to engage fans on social sites and apps and keep the conversation with us even as team performance ebbs and flows. It’s important to harness this momentum and guide it in a way that’s organic and important for fans.

During the quarterfinal series against the Chicago Bulls, Twitter activity reached a peak of 896 tweets per minute. And when the Wizards defeated the Chicago Bulls in game five to move on, the Wizards were the No. 1 trending NBA team on Twitter, and #dcrising was the No. 1 trending hashtag. During the semi-final series against the Indiana Pacers, Twitter activity peaked at 490 tweets a minute before the Wizards ultimately lost in game six.

We created a strong foundation to make the most out of it and make sure our most loyal fans stay engaged. That’s just as important when a team isn’t doing well. Whether the tone is negative or positive, we want it happening in an environment where we’re there as well.

CMO.com: You’ve been at this nearly five years. That’s probably more like a decade or more in social-media years. How has social media changed? How has your approach evolved?
Hutchison: Every day is different. The landscape when I started versus where we are now is vastly different. How we use various channels, our goals, how we measure success—it has all changed.

When we first started, it was all about growth. We wanted the most fans, the most followers. But it wasn’t clear what we were getting from this time and investment.

The ROI has changed. We’ve shifted from a direct marketing approach to social and a content marketing model. It’s about leveraging content in a way that’s authentic and engaging and creating a strong brand presence.

CMO.com: Engaged customers are not just better brand advocates and more loyal customers, according to research by Gartner, but they’re also more profitable. Is the hope that this content marketing will have top-line benefits?
Hutchison: There’s a sense in the business that the more we aggregate social-media content and create these environments, the more opportunity there will be for monetizing them, as we did with the Snapchat partnership with Mountain Dew.

CMO.com: How do you do that without ticking off fans who think you’re just trying to sell them yet another thing?
Hutchison: That’s the struggle. We try to work sponsors into existing content, like our game-day visualizations or hashtags, that we already know fans respond to, or come up with unique angles we feel will be relevant to fans. We don’t want to regurgitate ads. We’re not going to tell you how much a mango is at Whole Foods, or how we can save you money on a new car. But there’s no reason we can’t work in sponsor in a germane way for our fans.

CMO.com: What has been the biggest lesson learned about managing social-media engagement during sporting events?
Hutchison: I’ve been look at staffing a lot lately. Attention to detail is paramount, as is the fan content they choose to share and the tone they take in the various channels. When social-media editors can speak with the fans instead of at them, that’s been the most successful for us. The more we move our tone away from being the “official” voice of the team to being on of the fans, the more the fans respond.

There’s a spectrum of team social-media tones out there, from those that are really buttoned up and traditional, to those that are more aggressive in their tone and have a reputation for talking sh*t. The more we can move to the conversational language of the fan, the more we’ve seen fans respond—within reason, of course.

That requires experience, creativity, a deep understanding of the team, and good judgment. It’s a difficult role to fill, and we really value those people. They’re nimble and not afraid to try new things. A lot of it has to do with trying and failing. Everyone thinks they can do this, but it’s a lot more difficult than it looks.