How Many Employees Does The Pga Tour Have
For sports leagues, social media represents an unprecedented and unparalleled opportunity to connect with fans on a personal level. That’s especially true for non-team sports, such as golf, which tend to be more star driven and benefit greatly from fans making a personal connection with players. The PGA Tour, which operates the main professional golf league in the United States, is a firm believer in the power of social media to serve fans and expand the Tour’s footprint around the world.
“Social media offers opportunities not only to communicate with our fans, but also to offer unique access to the sport,” said Scott Gutterman, the executive producer of PGATour.com, the league’s official web site. Gutterman said that the league hired a dedicated social media employee in 2007 and has worked with its partner Turner Sports to make social media a core part of their editorial and marketing focus.
The PGA Tour’s Social Media Footprint
The PGA Tour currently operates a number of active social media accounts. The central hubs of their social media presence are their Twitter account (~20,000 followers), their Facebook Fan Page (~37,000 fans), and their YouTube channel (~4 million views). Each of these social media outlets gives the PGA Tour a platform for posting news, scoring updates, calls to action, and multimedia, as well as a place for fans to sound off, ask questions, voice concerns, or generally connect with Tour officials and each other. The Tour also offers a free iPhone application with video updates, live scoring, player cards, and course reports.
“Our goal on these platforms is to extend the PGA Tour experience and let the fans get involved no matter where they are digitally throughout the day,” said Gutterman, who admits that though their audience numbers are not as high as the Tour would ultimately like, they’ve found a lot of value in the direct connection with their fans. “The social media platforms that we run, as well as those that we don’t, have become an important feedback mechanism for the PGA Tour. It gives us a chance to see almost immediately what our fans think about certain events or topics.”
In addition to the Tour’s official channels, many players have also embraced social media and have the support of the PGA Tour. Over 40 players can be found on Twitter, from veterans like Stewart Cink and Ian Poulter (over 2 million combined followers), to rookies like Rickie Fowler and Billy Horschel. Further, a number of Tour events have their own profiles on both Twitter and Facebook, allowing the events to connect with local and national fans all year round, not just on the weekend of the tournament. The PGA Tour tracks these Twitter users using a collection of Twitter Lists.
“These platforms serve as valuable messaging platforms to create awareness, drive ticket sales, and provide information about each tournament’s year-long charitable initiatives,” said Gutterman.
What the Tour Has Learned
Like many older businesses adjusting to the new world of social media, the Tour has found that developing the skills necessary for the two-way communication of social media doesn’t happen overnight. How to create and sustain conversations with fans is something that the Tour continually works to perfect.
“Dedicating resources to both monitor and keep the platforms active is very important,” said Gutterman. “We have one dedicated social media coordinator that manages all of our platforms, but several of us participate in keeping the fans engaged and informed throughout the week.”
Keeping fans engaged includes things like posting competition updates, discussing media stories about golf, sharing golfing tips, or asking fans for their opinions on a number of different topics. It all requires a top-to-bottom commitment to social media from every employee.
“You cannot delegate social media to a single employee. While the Tour has a dedicated Social Media Coordinator, the job of interacting with fans, posting timely content updates, and supporting player and tournament objectives must be broadly distributed to be effective,” Gutterman told Mashable. “Social media touches nearly all of our 30 employees; it is too important to delegate to a single employee.”
According to Gutterman, the Tour spends a good deal of its time encouraging fan activity. “During competition days, our Facebook page essentially becomes an online gallery where you can find people rooting for their favorite player,” he said, noting that on Sunday, that fan chatter picks up even more as fans speculate, comment, and debate what’s happening on the course and on TV.
What’s Coming Next
The PGA Tour’s social media efforts have so far been mostly siloed — a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account, an iPhone app — but one of the Tour’s immediate future goals is to bring that fan interaction directly onto PGATour.com. “We are still researching the best way to implement on these platforms. This is one of our biggest short-term goals and we expect to start enhancing some of our site features with commenting later this year,” Gutterman told Mashable.
The Tour’s FanZone page, which connects fans to the Tour’s official social media accounts and has been instrumental in driving traffic to them, is a start to that vision. “We see great opportunity in expanding the use of these platforms for our coverage and continued fan engagement,” said Gutterman, who also noted that the PGA Tour hopes to find better ways to aggregate social media content in one place in order to make it easier for fans that don’t use those social platforms to connect and participate.
The league also wants to develop unique social media events around its tournaments and players. Events, such as tweetups and or live video chats, could occur at tournament venues or online. Current rules banning cell phones on the course (because they could be distracting to golfers) have made the logistics of certain in person social media events difficult thus far.
However, the PGA Tour is committed to expanding its social media presence. They’ve come a long way since their live tweeted coverage of the 2007 Player’s Championship, which that began their forays into social media. “We are only at the beginning,” assured Gutterman.
[img credit: Link Creative]
Tags: Golf, pga, pga tour, social media, sports
An interesting thing happened during yesterdays iPhone launch and it wasn’t just observing Robert Scoble’s mastery of self promotion (in a good way of course). Thousands of people* who were not lining up for an iPhone, be that because they simply weren’t interested in doing so or as in my case were unable to due to geography, experienced the highs and lows of iPhone day vicariously through live streams.
The day wasn’t without issues, Kristopher Tate’s Zooomr/ Ustream feed had technical issues at times, but on the whole the experience was something special. From the interviews on the street, through to the screams of those entering the Apple store to applause, through to the first addition to America’s Funniest Live Video Streams 2020 when Tate had his credit card declined.
The difference on iPhone Day was that instead of turning to blogs or waiting for the mainstream media to report the facts hours later, we were all able to watch it all in first person. The promise of user generated live media was delivered. The seed of a revolution was planted.
Lifestreaming has been covered before on TechCrunch; I remain unconvinced about the likelihood of Lifestreams such as Justin.tv (the man, not the service) being anything more than a niche pursuit, yet what we saw on iPhone Day was different: this was Eventstreaming.
Eventstreaming is the missing link in Web 2.0’s challenge to network television.
Who could ever forget the coverage of the London Bombings in 2005 where user generated video featured as a main source of footage. Two years later and the technology has continued to improve; the step from recording footage of an event to streaming it live over the internet has been made.
Events can be outside of the control of the person recording the event, such as the iPhone launch, or staged. I’ve found myself tuning in to Chris Pirillo’s Live feed. Pirillo hosts a live tech show most nights and at times can have hundreds of viewers. It’s a staged event, but an event none the less. In these cases events have a bigger pull than lifecasts; time is too precious for many to watch Justin on Justin.tv driving a car but like actual television, we can and will find time to watch a staged event, or a stream of a non-staged major event such as the iPhone launch.
Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that tomorrow thousands will begin Eventstreaming, but there is already a factor at play that will drive the field: exposure. As Robert Scoble knows, the best way of promoting your brand (and in Scoble’s case it is Scoble himself) is to be there and be seen. Compare and contrast Zooomr to Mahalo. I caught a reference in passing, buried in one mainstream media report on an iPhone queue that the team from Mahalo were queuing for the phone. The direct benefit to Mahalo of the exercise, aside from Jason Calacanis now having 5 iPhones to give away? Not much at all; a mention in a newspaper or two at most. By comparison the Zooomr logo and brand were exposed to thousands (maybe even more) watching the Eventstream on Ustream, many of whom may never have heard of or used Zooomr before. Money could possibly buy that exposure, but it is well a truly beyond the reach of most. In marketing terms it was pure brilliance, and it will not go unnoticed. The first wave of Eventstreaming will be driven by smart startups who know a good thing when they see it, and who can’t afford to buy this sort of exposure any other way. Eventstreaming is the difference between just being there, and being seen.
(* my understanding of the Ustream feed from watching a discussion Kris Tate had with some one from Ustream was that the stream itself was delivered over multiple streams and that as a consequence the counter on the live stream I was watching did not reflect all viewers, only viewers to a particular stream. At the time the phone went on sale the feed I was watching had over 1000 viewers, an overall figure for those having watched was in excess of 40,000 according to another figure on Ustream).
