Supporting a team, regardless of what sport they play, is a lot like being in a long-term relationship. You experience the highs and lows together, it gets strained at times, it can feel like you’re stuck in a rut at others, you fall out or you drift apart, you make it up and sometimes, if it gets too bad, you split up all together.
I don’t need to tell any of you any of that though do I? The chances are that, as you’re taking the time to read this, you’re already in one of those relationships. You already know about the ties that bind you to your team. What makes you travel hundreds of miles a year to see them, paying hundreds of pounds on tickets and webcasts or constantly refreshing Twitter when you can’t do either.
The relationship can feel very one way at times. In fact it is pretty much always unrequited. As a child I loved Paul Adey but I doubt he knows I exist and, let’s face it why should he. The love of the fans by the club is different, if it exists, to our love for the club and that’s only normal when you think about it. It’s probably more of a love of us as a whole rather than individuals but I don’t want to get distracted by trying to unravel that (mainly because I haven’t got a clue where to start).
What I want to look at stems from that feeling that the relationship is one way. It isn’t. At least it shouldn’t be. Like all good relationships it should be a two way street. There should be elements of give and take from both sides. Clearly, in sport, what happens on the ice/pitch/court/whatever and how we react to it has a large factor to play in this relationship but it is through social media that the interaction can really happen.
To use social media properly, you have to understand how social media works. There is an equality to social media that doesn’t often exist anywhere else. There are obviously good and bad sides to that and we’ll get to the bad later but that freedom of speech means one thing – you can’t expect to be able to say anything without people reacting or replying to it. That’s the great thing about social media at it’s best – it’s all about debate. I’ve had many conversations on the back of the articles I’ve written in the past. Some agreed with me and some didn’t and that’s fine, that’s exactly as it should be.
I don’t see that interaction with the Panthers’ social media account and I think that has got a lot to do with how it is being used. Don’t get me wrong it’s come a long way from the days when the club were the about the last Elite League team to get a Twitter account but, I think, it’s also slipped back from where it was and there’s still a long way to go.
There are a fair few problems with Panthers’ social media but the main thing that is missing as I look back through their tweets is interaction. It’s game day today so there are multiple tweets pushing tickets, shirt of his back tickets, kids deals, plugs for etc but there’s nothing there that the likes of us can get involved in. Everyone of those tweet subjects has a place in social media but they shouldn’t be the primary focus. Social media is a valuable tool for driving interest and ticket sales, bringing people into games they might not have known about but it isn’t just a tool for that, you have to cater to those that already know as well.
One of the ways you can cater for those who have their tickets and know when games are is to use social media to give them news. A big part of that, particularly in the off season, is signing news. Announcing the signing of a player should be simple. You either just bang out a press release (preferably after you’ve spell-checked and got another set of eyes to look it over for glaring errors), send it to the mainstream media (with or without an embargo), stick on the various social media outlets at the right time and bingo! Simple really. OK, you might want to chuck in a couple of teasers about the time or the identity of the new player (I particularly enjoyed trying to decipher the clues that came out for players signed for last season were, even if I was left disappointed because I always thought it was going to be the better of the two I always seemed to get it down to) ahead of time to generate some interest in the news. Look at how the server broke under the load in the 2012-13 season when Beauregard signed and everyone rushed to the website. You can’t buy that kind of news.
Compare that with what we got yesterday. Monday’s teaser was just a series of emojis with a GIF of someone holding up 6 fingers or was it 1 and 5 and when did it mean? Was it six o’clock in the morning, six in the evening, was it actually a 15 so did that mean it was three o’clock in the afternoon. The GIF, being a GIF kept repeating so maybe it meant it was 6:06 or 15:15 (we’ve had announcements at “significant” minutes past the hour before). I’m probably exaggerating to make a point here but it all feels too smart, too smug, too overly elaborate. I get the need to make a statement and make it stand out but attempting to be overly clever doesn’t feel like the way to do it.
And then we get to Danny Taylor.
We can’t mention the Panthers, signing news and social media in the same sentence without talking about the signing of Kevin Carr. Or rather the not signing of Danny Taylor. For those who have tried to block it out basically there was a (pretty fanciful) rumour doing the rounds that netminder Danny Taylor was EIHL and potentially Panthers bound. Panthers announced in the morning that they would be announcing their netminder later that day and accompanied it with a GIF of Taylor Swift. Two and two were inevitably added together and plenty of people got five. You can’t blame them. There had been plenty of GIFS for previous signings where the picture used was a pretty big clue as to who would be signed so Taylor Swift + Netminder = Danny Taylor in a lot of people’s minds. And then they announced Kevin Carr who, in all fairness to Kevin, isn’t Danny Taylor. People were less than impressed, they felt, with some justification, that they had been misled. I can see their point. The club had essentially trolled their own fans by building up their expectations in a very specific direction only to slap them down. I don’t believe the excuses put out by the person who did it. He said it was a joke, and that it might have gone wrong but he didn’t regret it. At best he didn’t realise what he’d done, at worst… well, I shudder to think what that says about our team’s management’s feelings towards us fans.
The thing is it doesn’t exactly put the team in a very good light does it? It might not mean much in the grand scale of things. There are definitely more important things to deal with at this club but they’ve just made themselves look a bit daft on a worldwide scale and, worse, caused a new netminder coming in to the team problems before he even set foot in Nottingham. Kevin Carr isn’t Danny Taylor and he probably knows that, it just feels like he’ll have the spectre of Taylor hanging over his head during his time here simply because someone wanted to have a bit of a joke (at our and his expense).
Social media is a two way thing and that’s not always a good thing. You only have to look at the tweets that are sent when the team loses or there’s a particularly intelligence insulting statement in an interview or on the website. I can’t and won’t condone some of them. They go too far. It’s part of the relationship we have that we are going to get angry with them at times, but you’ve got to know when to hold back in the same way the club have to know what to ignore and what to take on board. You can’t shut everything down for the sake of a few (or more) bad comments
There’s plenty that’s wrong with the social media (and there’s more to come) but what can be done to improve it?
Put simply, put some effort into it. The seeds are there, they just have to be nurtured. You get out what you put into anything that you do so if some thought and effort is given to the club’s social media output it will improve immeasurably. We’ve already talked about interaction but that’s where it all starts. They’ve got to come up with ways for the fans to get involved. Some people like them, some don’t but why not do a Twitter Takeover. It might be a tried and tested, almost hackneyed idea, but put the account in the hands of a player for an hour or two so he can answer the fan’s questions (you might want to put someone between him and the phone to act as a filter but that’s interaction). We’ve got the long form interviews every week and they’re a welcome addition to the content being put out by the club but how about introducing some fan involvement in them? Submit your questions and the best one will get used, free signed puck for the winner? There are loads of things that can be done but the main one really should be staring them in the face.
Our game updates (they could hardly be called play by play because they aren’t) are woeful. One of the saddest things I’ve seen in a long time (in hindsight) was the announcement that Panthers Hockey Live were stepping aside because Panthers had started doing updates. When they returned for one game last season it was like a breath of fresh air. Panthers’ updates are always going to be held up in comparison to those people and, latterly, the updates from the Panthers Puckcast and right now, they are being found to be lacking. They are too brief, they are too slow and they simply don’t provide a worthwhile service to those that need it. Yes, we want to know that there a goals or penalties but we want to know who scored them (yes, both sides), who was penalised and what for. They have to realise that they’re painting a picture with words for those of us who can’t see what is happening and missing half the detail out leaves that painting half finished with half the detail missing. It’s like describing “Going to the Match” by L.S. Lowry as a picture of people walking to a football match. It is a picture of people walking towards a football match but it’s so much more than that as well. It’s those small (or not so small) bits of information that round things out.
It feels like time that could be spent on these details is spent trying to be too different instead. There’s too much time spent attempting to vary the language used when keeping it simple would be better. The use of the word larcenous for anything beyond a routine glove save last season became a joke. Instead of using hype describe what you’re seeing. Don’t call a high glove save larcenous call it a high glove save. Those reading what you’ve put will get a lot more from that. Save the hype for when it’s needed. There will be larcenous saves, just don’t use the phrase until one actually is. If nothing else the over use of words like larcenous etc diminishes their worth.
This might be another Marmite moment like Twitter Takeovers but couldn’t the introduction clips be used for when we’ve scored? Tweet that there’s been a goal and then follow it up with the intro clip as a GIF. I’m no great fan of the “funny” clips that some teams have adopted but it would certainly brighten up the feed (if we scored that is). Finally, I’d like to crave your indulgence if I may and return to the (mis)use of language. I’ll have been watching the game for 39 years in December and in all that time I have never ever referred to one of the 20 minute sections of playing time as anything other than a period. I’ve never called them a stanza or a frame. They’re a period, pure and simple, always have been always will be. Keep the language simple, descriptive and factual. Talk the way the fans talk (I’ve never heard anyone call it a stanza or a frame in the flesh although if either of my kids read this they will do at the next game) and it will break down barriers. Listen to what the people are saying, interact with them and the rewards you receive will be as great as the effort you put in, maybe greater. I know from experience they are for me and if they want to interact with me, they’re more than welcome.
Paul Balm 