written by Achintya Gupta
How online cricket communities are connecting fans and driving passion
With IPL being the big news everyday for the past two months, it is great to see how various IPL teams are leveraging the concept of online communities to promote their teams and the game itself. I see almost all of the IPL teams having websites which have community elements where fans can engage around their passion for game and support their teams.
How are these online communities engaging fans?
When I started working in the field of social media, one of the first projects I was exposed to, was an online cricket community of a major IPL team. It was fascinating to see social media as an outstanding tool to connect these fans, get them engaged around this event (IPL) and side-by-side create a huge task force of your team fans and enthusiasts. It made me realize that no other tool or medium can help a team energize its fans, know them better and create a community that will take the burden on promoting the team on its own head!
If you see the overall engagement level on such communities, you will realize that they are doing pretty well. For example Delhi Daredevils has more than 32,000 Facebook fans (I could not find the exact number of members), Rajasthan Royals has more than 4000 discussion threads on its forum and Royal Challenger Bangalore’s online community has generated more than 600,000 support votes for the team from fans.
Hence I thought it might be a good idea to look into how these teams are engaging its fans. Some of these are benchmark practices to be followed by marketing managers for leading their social media marketing initiatives:
- Promoting passion and not product: One of the key things you will notice is that these communities are selling a passion (i.e. cricket) to its users more than a product (the team or tickets). This is important to create consumer activity since people will connect to each other around a passion (or a lifestyle or cause) more than a product.
- Content to create conversations: One can see that the content teams of such communities are actively feeding new content to the users in forms of news, media (photos & videos) and blogs. This is important to increase fan activity and provide triggers to fan engagement. See below how Deccan Chargers and Rajasthan Royals are promoting team and cricket related content on their blogs
- Conversations to generate connect: These communities have built forums and discussion boards to its users to facilitate conversation around news, interesting happenings, developments, upcoming matches. When it comes to cricket, tools like forums are an excellent way to get users to connect around interesting topics. Some teams like King’s XI Punjab and Royal Challengers Bangalore also allow users to create blog posts and articles
- Tactical programs and online campaigns to rejuvenate interest: Your online community is like a social event of which you are the host. You will have to keep on doing interesting programs after short periods of time to rejuvenate the interest. The good thing is that these communities’ managers understand this well and bring periodic contests to pump up the interest of fans. For e.g. for the 2011 season of IPL, you can see Delhi Daredevils running a bunch of microcontest on its contest page, Chennai Super Kings is managing the Super Blog Contest, Mumbai Indian is running a Chief Fan Contest to recognize the most active community participants and know your Mumbai Indians contest. RCB in the past has run the xyz contest to where they chose a photographer, a fan and a blogger to accompany the team
- Online- offline integration in form of events and meetups: I strongly believe that for a community to succeed, things cannot just remain virtual. You need very strong offline integration with online activity. Online communities like RCB understand this well and facilitate offline meetups and events for fans.
- Bringing celebs to the fans: Such communities bridge the barriers between the celeb team players and the fans by bringing news, interview, exclusive write-ups to the fans
How are such communities promoting the game and the brand?
Needless to say, such communities are an immense asset to the game of cricket. It is adding an additional online layer to the excitement that thrives in cricket stadiums, beer bars, car radios and in front of television sets in homes. But the interesting thing to note is the way it is helping out in revenue generation and brand building initiatives of the teams’ parent brand.
Leaving aside the obvious eyeballs grabbing and focussed banner and branding opportunities that such communities bring (for e.g. see the bottom of the Kolkata Knight Rider website), such communities are helping brand sell merchandize, tickets and premium memberships too. But the most important asset such communities are bringing to the brand is that they are providing a round the year platform to engage the audience rather than the IPL event which generates buzz for at most a quarter. For e.g Royal Challenger brand would get a 12 month buzz, attention and user activity from its online community as compared to a season long buzz and attention generated by offline campaigns.
Hope this post would help marketing managers understand a particular use case of online communities and the value they bring to the brand.
[As a matter of fact, Kuliza helps brands build online communities to connect customers, partners and employees and run social media campaigns. For more information, see our online community offering or learn about our featured work for txtWeb]
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