The move then brought to a swift conclusion protracted transfer as Van Persil sealed a 29 million pound move to Manchester United, where he has thus far flourished. But the move has also shown the power of digital and social media to give teams and players almost direct access to their fans.
The ability to exploit this advantage fully by providing unique content has not been fully appreciated by South African teams and sports stars. This is according to Andre Hugo, Director within Deloitte Digital, who took part in a panel discussion at the recent South African Sports Industry Summit.
“The key to successfully drive audience growth on digital and social media platforms is to provide unique content” says Hugo. “People want to get inside a sportsmans mind” he says. So exclusive footage for preparation for a big match or fight, or insights into a national tour are all examples of unique insights players can offer their fans and followers.
Sports offer a rich source of information through statistics and if these are packaged in a user-friendly manner, they can help drive engaging and relevant content.
“In future, the commercial successes will be driven by the communities that grow around sports teams, players and sports codes in general,” says Hugo. He notes that content will accelerate the growth and momentum of communities. But in order to do this the content needs to be localised and tied to specific events.
Hugo says it is important that digital marketing must not only focus on the smart phone segment, but also cater for the basic handset market. He points out that South Africa has 65 million active handsets, about 38% of which are basic. Also, in South Africa a significant portion of followers of a sport like soccer may actually lie in this segment of the market.
So while a fancy app to give score updates and league table and stats may be widely used, the old fashioned SMS score update option must not yet be jettisoned.
Hugo points out that the growth of digital platforms by sports broadcasters has led to this demand being extended directly to sports teams and stars. “Companies are finding innovative ways to monetise digital channels,” says Hugo. This can be done by embedding branding in pictures and applying dynamic hyperlinks to pictures to purchase merchandise from online stores.
Hugo says companies who are leading the field in this area globally include ESPN and Yahoo sports on content and number of viewers as well as Skysports in the UK and Supersport locally for engagement.
Supersport for example has streamed 1800 different games across its platforms so far this year, and apart from its HD platform, these are now accessed through their website and on platforms like Twitter, where viewers can comment on the action.
The panel, which also included digital publishing pioneer and head of Woolworths on line Nikki Cockcroft as well as former journalist and head of Communications at Supersport Clinton van der Berg, noted that sports stars who are using digital platforms effectively range from Manchester United star Wayne Rooney and England cricketer Kevin Pietersen , although whether his divisive popularity is helpful is a different matter, and in South Africa, swimmer Cameron van der Burgh and the barrier breaking athlete Oscar Pristorius were held up as stand out examples.
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