As you can imagine, there is a wide variety of companies that are now using social media technologies to better collaborate with employees and customers; ranging from airlines to computer companies. In this post I will look at ESPN, a completely different type of organization that is effectively collaborating with its customers to make their product more viewer-friendly. If your are channel surfing you might come across this commercial by ESPN, which takes a comedic look at how social media technologies are influencing today’s media.
While the commercial may lead you to believe that the company is not taking the advances in social media seriously, the way they run their organization makes it clear that they do understand the value that these tools can bring to their product.
A large part of their movement to embrace social media has been their creation of “SportsNation.” This is the term that the company created to denote the large portion of America that enjoys following sports through the company’s website or cable channel. On their website, there is an entire section dedicated to SportsNation. In this section, users may participate in polls and company-generated questions, or view or take part in online conversations between themselves and other fans. The results of these polls and online conversations often go a long way in helping executives decide on which topics to emphasize and which should not be given too much attention.
Their focus on fan opinion does not stop at their website. On Sportscenter, one of the channels most popular programs, they show the results to several polls throughout each episode. The company even goes as far as to split up results by state, giving fans a chance to see how regional biases play in to the outcome of each poll. Along with this, the hosts of the show will read several emails from fans about important issues of the day. These collaborative features are not limited to only Sportscenter; nearly every show on ESPN uses these tools in a unique way. By including these segments in nearly each program on the channel, ESPN has given viewers a greater stake in the programming, making them more invested and more likely to watch. Perhaps this is the reason that ESPN is now the worldwide leader in sports.
Thomas McHardy's Blog 