Prompt 1:
As with anything in life, things will change over time. The sports media landscape is not excluded from this train of thought either as we have seen how there has been a change in trends regarding the most popular outlets for sports fans to get their media from. About 20 years ago, TV was the key player in sports media because there were “plenty” of options for consumers to browse at the time. These customers could’ve watched their favorite teams play on TV (of course), but they could’ve also gone and consumed other sports related media such as the programming that can be found on ESPN. Fast forward to 2024 and now sports media is almost everywhere you look, especially on the device that all of us carry around every day.
With the advent of new technologies and social media, it has become so much easier to transmit messages at breakneck speeds to reach a specialized audience. This is backed up by the claims brought forward in the article Sport, Public Relations and Social Media that essentially states that the media landscape is being changed because of social media and organizations need to adapt accordingly. However, just because info can be transmitted at such an accelerated rate doesn’t mean that it will be delivered successfully to the target audience. The success of any message will be determined by the fact of how the message is created, if it’s timely and how it is disbursed to the selected target audiences.
In connecting a key example of a good social media campaign to the idea of how many in the sports media industry need to react and adapt to the changing media landscape, none should be more apparent than the activity that the Arizona Coyotes are up to on their social media outlets. In looking around at what they do in comparison to others, we can see the rise of snarky and possibly antagonistic tweets and media similar to what can be found on the Wendy’s corporate twitter and this is the route that the Yotes have taken. Wendy’s was one of the first corporate social medias to take this route to viral marketing, but the Yotes have adapted it to be applicable into the sports world.
While Wendy’s is dishing out viral burns to their commenters and followers, the Yotes media team specializes in going after any team that is unfortunate enough to lose them. However, since they’ve built up this viral persona they are also building themselves up to touch on things outside the realm of hockey, thereby increasing their reach and the chances that they can go viral. They’ve branched out and touched on things relating to sports topics like football and events surrounding F1, but they do so while maintaining that dry and almost “millennial” sense of humor. With all of this, they have a unique identity they’ve crafted for themselves and have fined tuned it to almost be free publicity when their media goes viral.