by Shawn Medeiros, Endicott College, Sports Information Director, CoSIDA New Media Committee Member, smedeiro@endicott.edu
Let’s be honest for a second. As a small school, Division III football program, the media generally isn’t kicking my Sports Information door in for day-to-day coverage of our team.
That’s fine. I get it. (
well except for a few weeks ago, shout-out to SportsCenter for starting the love and making us go viral).
However, it doesn’t mean you can’t experiment to try and create that environment once and a while. Well, that’s what we did on August 24, 2017.
Here’s how it started.
Doug Chin from Commonwealth Coast Football scheduled school visits with every program in our conference to film preview videos. He wanted to jumpstart media coverage on our newly founded conference, and we thought it was a great idea. After finding this out, as a staff, we decided this could be a unique moment to capitalize on this exposure. So, after a few brainstorming sessions, we did just that.
Instead of having Doug come down to just film a preview video, we asked him and our coaching staff permission to turn it into a mini-media day. That entailed interviews with our two captains — which we used for social purposes later on — and a Facebook LIVE interview with our head coach,
Kevin DeWall.
The Facebook LIVE interview included questions from the conference, myself, and any of our fans/media who wanted to be included.
We received all of the fan/media questions via Twitter. All in all, their submissions totaled around 25 or so questions, and we used as many as we could during the nearly 20-minute Facebook LIVE session with Coach DeWall.
REASONS BEHIND TRYING SOMETHING NEW
Let’s get to the points. Here’s a list of reasons why (that we thought made sense).
• Gave exposure to the new conference
• Allowed Doug to not waste his time just doing a few interviews and b-roll
• Helped brand the conference
• Allowed us extra exposure
• Reinforced relationships with our fans/media
• Gave us unique content across all platforms that no one else in our conference was doing
• Allowed us to control the message
• Acted as extended media training for coach/players (which came in handy when SportsCenter came a knockin’)
• We will never have a true media day as a small market team so it gave our student-athletes to be a part of something that was fun
• Got coverage from a variety of outlets
• Chance to experiment
• Allowed us to also do some mic'd up stuff / practice some photo techniques for students
• Allowed us to discuss recruiting in real time which can also be shared to potential recruits later
• The hope was that it would be successful so we could expand upon it in 2018 with the potential of inviting media members to practice if it worked
SUCCESSES
• Facebook LIVE video had 1,061 views, reached 2,835 people, and 62 reactions (all at 2 PM on a Friday… I’ll take that as a win)
• On Twitter, our post about questions for Coach DeWall garnered 4,842 impressions, 399 total engagements, and an 8.2% engagement rate
• That also paved the way for our planned content that day when we mic’d up our running back Lavante Wiggins.
• His mic’d up tweets went as follows: “
The softer side of Lavante Wiggins” tweet registered 12,957 impressions, 4,147 media views, 1,897 total engagements (24 RTs, 68 likes, 14.6% ER)
• On Instagram, Lavante notched similar positive metrics including 363 likes, and 5,498 impressions
• On Facebook, Lavante’s post reached 15,530 people, had 6,746 video views, 385 reactions (including 53 shares)
• The build up from media day gave us long term success in our features and that shouldn’t be lost
• Felt as though it was a win for our program in terms of additional publicity and also a victory in regards to administration on our campus (thanks for letting us experiment a lot!)
• Helped us with the recruiting battle
FAILURES
• Could have been more effective in pre-planning to ramp up media day more, such as inviting our local media on top of engaging them on social a lot more than we did
• Filmed Facebook LIVE off my phone so the quality in downloading that video to post to web later was diminished
REVIEW
All in all, we had a lot of fun creating a unique moment for our program, and our office. If anything, it taught me that as Sports Information/Athletic Communication professionals we should always try to be innovating in all types of areas within our profession. It doesn’t always have to flashy, but it should always add value to your institution, student-athletes, and your department.
Thanks for reading, and Go Gulls!
- Shawn Medeiros