Social Media

Founded in 1902, with 31 Spanish Liga titles and 9 UEFA Champion League victories, Real Madrid are the most successful football club of all time. The club is currently managed by the enigmatic Jose Mourinho and the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium is home to some of the worlds best players.

After speaking to Oscar Ugaz, Online Marketing & Digital Business Manager, and Pedro Duarte, Mobile Business Manager back it March, it was easy to understand how the Real’s on pitch success had translated into the online world.

The club has now taken their digital offerings to the next level by becoming first football club in the world to launch an authentic social game for all its fans and followers. The game, Real Madrid Fantasy Manager 2011, is already available on Facebook and IPhone, and gives all football fans the opportunity to step into Jose Mourinho’s shoes and become manager of Real Madrid.

Read the full article on The UK Sports Network….

Everyone gets their inspiration from different places and often it comes at a time when you least expect it – if you haven’t already guessed the inspiration for this post came from my DVD shelf.

In this post I’m going to relate one of my favourite series’ of films to social media – whilst this may have started out as a bit of fun, I genuinely believe there are some things the Rocky films can teach sports teams, athletes, brands and all of us about social media.

Premier League football fans are amongst some of the most dedicated in the sporting world, these fans are discussing their teams across the web on various message boards, blogs and social media platforms every day, but, how involved are our clubs in these discussions? Which teams have the largest following? And most importantly, which team is making the most of their presence?

A couple of days ago I came across the Official New York Knicks tumblr page and it’s great to see an organisation like the Knicks getting involved with social media and embracing an emerging platform. I’m a big fan of Tumblr and feel it has great potential and offers a great way to find and share information.

Tumblr is a free blogging service which allows you to easily post a range of content with just a few clicks – everything from photos and video, to links and even short voice recordings. It also has a great “reblog” feature lets other users embed your posts in their blog, as a way of pointing people to stuff you like – similar to Twitter’s retweet feature – this is a great way for your message to spread.

Tumblr is also great for driving traffic back to your website as it’s designed for users to share quick messages. You can use your Tumblr posts as a teaser by giving the user only a small amount of information and then linking the post to your site for the full story, if your post on Tumblr grabs the readers attention you can guarantee you’ll increase traffic.

The Knicks page offers exactly what you’d want if you were a Knicks fan – video content, images and short snappy articles allowing you to keep up-to-date with the team quickly and easily. They also use their Tumblr account to promote ticket offers and promotions – this is a great way to build awareness of promotions amongst their fanbase as people are far more likely to check their social networking profiles than the Knicks official website.

So, what do you think – Does Tumblr provide teams with a great opportunity to engage with fans? If the popularity of Tumblr continues to increase will we see more teams starting to get involved?

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In my recent post on the UK Sports Network blog about Facebook Twitter and the Premier League I said, “I feel in order to increase their numbers of followers the majority of Premier League teams need to look at what value they offer their fans on Facebook and Twitter”. Following on from that statement I’d like to go into more detail about what content I feel Premier League clubs should offer fans and how they could make better use of their presence on Facebook and Twitter