Social Media and Sports Business. A Missed Opportunity?

This blog is exclusive to iStadia. It does contain an ad at the bottom, but hopefully the content is useful to those on this community...

Sport seems to be the perfect product to promote using social media tools, yet many businesses that make a living from sport, especially in the UK, have not really seized the opportunities provided. I'm not talking about football, or the sports that are covered by the mass-media, I am talking about the sports that rarely make it into the back pages, despite having Olympic stars or legitimate world champions.

A quick look at Manchester United's (official) facebook page, there are several... shows that the club has over 930,000 fans... *Facebook still suffers from rubbish advertising targeting, the ad on the right is for Arsenal branded underwear. *

Type Triathlon UK into Facebook and you get 3 groups, the largest of which has 10 members. Triathlon does a little better on Twitter, but there are no brands... no engagement with those who are pursuing it.

So what's missing? Is it that sports administrators and professionals just don't get marketing? Or is there a lack of trust? A fear of technology? A feeling that it's all a fad? Or is it a distraction from running a business?I believe that it is probably a combination of all of those things.

It's time that social media stopped being presented as technology and started being presented as must have business tools. While the mass-market media try to save their own skin and sell papers by promoting celebrity banality or wheel out a tame academic to declare that twitter will be the death of communication as we know it, there are thousands of people doing business on social media.

Marketing people can't really use excuses like, we don't have the budget, because most social media is free. Some say that it will use up resources that they don't have, but how hard is it to write 140 characters every so often - especially if it engages customers.

So perhaps the reasons that social media is not being used more for business is that people just don't know where to start, or don't understand the benefits that may be gained.

Here's the pitch.. We're running a Social Media for Business Bootcamp Seminar in London. 3 hours of an introduction to some of the more popular tools including how to get started immediately and get some quick wins. The seminar will be held on the 14th of October. See the event site for more details.