Congratulations to Hector Solario! Read the official announcement here
What Sporting Club May Become...
We love to speculate about the future of Sporting Club since the possible combinations of sports is like a mixed up Rubik's Cube that only Soony Saad could solve.
Looking for Lyrics to Chants?
We have collected as many chants as we could find that you might hear at Livestrong Park.
Is it March yet?
Find out what everyone is saying about the upcoming match.
Because I like to read all things Sporting, I wanted to collect all the season previews/predictions/depth charts I came across from known SKC sites and outside sources as well. If you see one that I do not have send it my way. I will add them as they get posted to their sites. And at the end of the year we can see what came true and what did not.
We were waiting to unveil the Ad Astra SKC shirts once the South Stand SC finally hit 80 founding members. And today it happened. We have had these in hand for almost a week and it has been killing us to release them before the home opener.
The design was donated by Mike Gravito and David Streeter fans of Sporting Kansas City. More on that story later.
You can order them online in the South Stand SC store today and pick them up at home games or South Stand watch parties (Watch the South Stand blog or Facebook group for details.)
We hope you like them and wear them proudly.If you would like to send us a picture with you in your shirt we would be happy to post it here or in the store.
In the past few weeks we have covered Twitter and Facebook for Major League Soccer Teams to see how they engage their fans. We will use these stats as a baseline to compare who makes the biggest gains this year and figure out why some clubs shine and others fall. All of this is done without a sense of competition, but more out of a sense that successful clubs who engage their fans, get more attention for MLS and soccer as a whole in the US and therefore indirectly bring more value to the games that we love as hopefully stadiums continue to sell out.
One caveat with these stats is the MLS site does not always use YouTube as the source video. They use Microsoft Silverlight, therefore some teams may have high views on the MLS website that are not captured in these stats.
These stats were gathered in January 1, 2012, and as before we will start by tying them to the Metro Population as a way to reduce the impact size that a large or small metro may have on eyeballs checking out your team's content.
This first table is sorted by Metro Population (as described previously), so that you can see how the large cities generally outperform the smaller ones. But you also can see some interesting anomalies here, like the San Jose Earthquakes getting 4 million views (which I'll explain in a bit.). I took two basic stats for this table (views and subscribers). In later editions I will also be including # of videos uploaded.
Here is the same table sorted by views.
The top 5 teams have a few different reasons why they are at the top of the list by raw numbers of views. San Jose: Fluke goal. They have one video with 3.9M views. And it deserves a lot of views. SJ Goalies scores a goal in a friendly against West Bromwich. Take that away and they are a still respectable 8th on this table for a team that has not done to well with Twitter or Facebook. Dallas:Moral outrage. Has one video with 300k views about cheerleaders, that seems to be getting negative attention because the dance team leader talked about testing them for body fat in tryouts. Take that out and they still top 1M for a club that has not been a leader in attendance in a crowded local sports market. The majority of their other top views are from 3-4 years ago. Vancouver:Sex sells. Has one video with 458k views. Why so popular? It features their 2011 kit unveiling...being painted on a naked female. But again you take that away and they still have a near the top 800k views. and they are second in number of subscribers. So there is some success there. Probably helped with them being a new MLS club too. Los Angeles Galaxy: Beckham Plus. The addition of many international stars and being near the top of most lists on social media engagement in MLS and the recent Supporter's Shied and MLS champs are cleary the reasons to see LAG so high. Kansas City:Rebranding works. Plus a charismatic rookie serenading women's soccer most recognized personality helps to (405k views). Savvy marketing department helps get views beyond a smaller market. (Hometown bias a bit here, but they are onto something.) Plus it should be noted these counts do not include the Wizards96 You Tube Account (abandoned Nov 2010), which would add 750k views.
On the other hand, Toronto FC's pathetic showing here has a simple explanation: no videos. Since their inception in 2007 they have contributed around 80 videos. Vancouver meanwhile has almost 700 videos. Maybe TFC is using another platform? I cant find another explanation.
Now lets sort accounting for metro population to see if any new patterns emerge:
YT per 10k = (YouTube Views/Metro Pop)*10,000
So now the top 5 are slightly different. San Jose stays at the top with the popular Goal by Goalie video. Vancouver with the smaller population shows how significant those 1.2M views are now. KC stays near the top and moves up a few spots. And Real Salt Lake rockets up from 10th, similar to other big improvements on previous posts on Twitter and Facebook. Biggest Winners: +6 Spots: Columbus 12->6, RSL 10->4 Biggest Losers: -7 spots: Chivas USA 7->14, New York 9->16
(Side note: if you wanted to calculate the YT Views per 10k for SJE, I already did it for you. 3,235 putting them in between SKC and RSL).
Having a lot of subscribers probably helps, but it didn't seem to tell a lot of stories so I did not incorporate it in the analysis except to show you.
So it pays to have at least one video go viral (hopefully for good reasons, not like FC Dallas), but as we go through the season I hope to be able to bring you other good tactics being utilized by teams using social media. What patterns do you see?
If you would like access to this data on Google Docs or are interested in this project please email me at Christian@adastraskc.org
I'll leave you with a great example of YouTube marketing from Sporting Kansas City to their fans for the 2011 Winter Holidays.
Today, Mike Kuhn of Down the Byline tweeted about the lack of season review DVD for Sporting Kansas City.
but see would more people be interested in a cycling jersey (as @SportingStyle has mentioned) or a season review DVD for #SportingKC ?
— Mike Kuhn (@downthebyline) February 18, 2012
He had previously wrote a post about this at the end of the season which grabbed my attention. Frankly I was a bit shocked that year in review DVD's (YIR-DVD) would not be fairly commonplace for any sports club. The overall cost should not be that great with production and packaging being the highest costs. But with a little foresight, they should be relatively easy to produce at low cost. Encourage your video crew to be keeping a collection of highlight clips to be used at the end of the season. Have the video crew and leadership always thinking "Would this clip by great to help tell a story at the end of the year?"
Have your PR team thinking and writing through the whole season about the narrative arcs along a few different themes. Of course you can use the natural order of games to anchor the story, and in addition you can add in special vignettes on players as they look back on the season (a common technique in reality TV shows) as sub-plots. At the end of the season you grab a few key staff to write the script, book some time for your team voices to record the narration and voila you have a product to sell and keep your fans interest stoked in the offseason.
Here is the closest we have to a summary video of the 2011 season:
(Update: Mike Kuhn of @DownTheByline tweeted me this video Sunday AM. 2011 Season Highlights - 13 minutes of soccer action. A great start but with a little more time and some narrative you could get to the finished project. Aim for 23 minutes and it mkaes for a half hour of broadcast time.
Now of course I understand video production of high quality takes some time, especially if you start de novo at the end of the season. But think of all the quality outcomes from the making of this video:
1. A succinct in the moment historical record of the season for future reference
2. A DVD to be watched over and over by young fans to solidify their love for the team (I did this with Chargers and Padres VCR tapes as a kid)
3. Filler for your affiliated TV stations to show during the offseason at 2am
4. Something for passionate fans to show their friends and turn them into passionate fans
5. Surplus DVD's could be given to season ticket holders or used for contest raffles
6. Printing volumes decreases the individual cost
7. Excerpts could be posted on YouTube for content and drive more interest via social media
8. Already produced content could be packaged as extras and bonuses (Behind the scenes of the Holiday Video Shoot)
Any other ideas you can add?
So Sporting Club it is not too late to document the first year as Sporting KC. And don't forget Sporting Kansas City, it is not to late to prepare for 2012 and make this a reality and reduced cost and high yield to the club.
Sporting Kansas City unveiled the first TV ad for the 2012 season, titling the campaign "Live for It." As I posted on the Ad Astra FB page, I was neutral on this ad. It was solid but it didn't inspire me as much as the I Believe That We Will Win or even the (slightly overplayed) Omar Bravo/Kei Kamara ads with the High Noon Standoff/Drum soundtracks. Both of those seemed to have a different level of creativity, artistic direction and passion then the most recent one. Now I am no videographer, and I realize they take a lot of work. Maybe it was my high expectations with the great work SKC marketing has done so far.One thing I would love to see is a chance for fans to remix footage and soundtracks to make their own ad.
So to really get a good comparison I thought I would just go back to YouTube and find all the commercials I could. Here is a collection of them. I am only including ones that appeared to air on TV, not the very creative and funny shorts compiled by the team over the years, There are some really good ones in here, and some not so good ones. One thing that is evident is the team and the players are willing to have fun with it. Which one do you like best?
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