— aka The Social Season Ticket —

One of the biggest problems facing almost all sports teams and associations today is the question of how to maintain and/or boost attendance figures.

And frankly the reason the question keeps popping up so regularly is because it’s such a hard thing to affect – no matter which marketing channel you use. Short of picking people up in a bus and driving them to the ground it’s always going to be difficult  to drive attendance due to the costs associated with doing so.

To reverse the famous idiom; it’s the last step which is always is the hardest.

But just because it’s difficult, that doesn’t mean marketers, and social marketers in particular, should shy away from the problem. Funnily enough, it’s something that I’ve been considering ever since I started working in the industry and I figured I’d share a couple interesting examples I’ve come across recently whilst researching this area – as well as present an idea of my own.

The two examples presented here both take the form of the tagged mega photo. This particular type of execution  plays on one of the key benefits of attending an event live; the ‘I was there’ feeling you get when you are part of something so large and so social.

The first example is the FA Cup Final photo taken by The Sun newspaper which claims to be the largest size image of a sporting event in the world – 20 gigapixels no less!

The idea behind this is to engage attendees in a simple Facebook tagging exercise, which has resulted in 20,753 tags to date – pretty nice work as I’m sure you’ll agree, and a great way to drive to Facebook fan acquisition.

The problem with this method however is that it mainly works as a reward mechanism for attendance; rather than actually driving attendance to the event itself.

The second example I’ve found goes some way to address this, as well as looking to drive – more importantly – a potential new revenue stream. The Pittsburgh Steelers are an American Football team with a history of innovative marketing campaigns. In collaboration with McDonalds they have launched the McDonalds Gigapixel fancam which works on the same principle as the FA Cup final photo, but with the additional build of allowing users to then order prints from the game.

From what I can work out the picture is taken every week, acting as a nice incentive for people to regularly attend as they get the chance to own a truly unique piece of merchandise/memorabilia from the game. In terms of results so far; 16,892 facebook likes and 551 tweets. Not hugely ground-breaking I’ll give you that, but still that is a lot of engaged facebook fans.

(NB: I haven’t been able to get figures for how many prints have been ordered)

Both of these clearly have their limitations though; they are both pretty one dimensional in terms of the social networks they utilise, and they both only really work as a one-off incentive.

So how could brands take this further? Well, here’s an idea – how about creating a social season ticket based on the same principles as Empire Avenue?

For the uninitiated, Empire Avenue is “a stock market simulation social network game” [phew], which basically allows users to buy and sell shares of people and websites. However, individual stock prices are not only affected by how much people buy or sell, but also by how active the participants are in social media.

Staying on point, you could begin to reward fans for all manner of stadium-based social content; checking in with Facebook places or Foursquare, tweeting about (or with) the ground itself, post-event Flickr tags, YouTube uploads, comments, likes, RTs… the list is almost endless.

Over the course of the season fans could build up points/credits/whatever you want to brand it and these then get cashed in for tickets, merchandise etc. Ten RTs = 10% off a ticket, two Youtube videos = a free shirt – I think you get the idea.

You could tailor it specifically in accordance with your fans current behaviour, as well as using it to encourage new behaviour. This would clearly remove the one dimensional aspect of the previous engagement methods, and also as it would work like a Nectar points scheme you remove the problem of the activity only working once as it would encourage repeat rewards.

Moreover, combining this social interaction model with the more traditional loyalty/membership card scheme (like Nectar) that you can find at most events, then you can really start capitalising on, engaging with and ultimately rewarding your true brand advocates.