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Jul 15
2011
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At 14 country boy Ernie Cash was spotted by a talent scout, given $500 a year, a pair of footy boots and a scholarship - the kid was stoked. By 16 he’d moved to the big city, boarded with a team Managers family and trained five days a week around the interruptions of school lessons - yes, it’s not the usual upbringing for most teenagers but it’s typical for young and upcoming sportspeople - author Malcolm Gladwell claims that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours - that’s roughly three hours a day for 10 years.
By 18 Ernie had made his top league debut, won Rookie of the Year and secured a very lucrative three year contract. He’d also moved into a beach front apartment with a couple of footy mates - he lived the dream. A good business manager had helped invest his earnings wisely and his share and property portfolio generated nice returns - he was set for life if he continued to play his cards right.
Yes, a sports stars life is different to most, you’re doing what you love and getting very well paid for it - the fans, the fame, where everybody knows your name, and now with over a half a million Twitter followers (and growing) you are your own media channel, and social media is all a part of todays marketing game.
“It’s about building your personal brand and engaging with your fans” says Ernie when asked about the power and perils of social media “I also know that what happens at The Coopers Cool Bar foreever remains on Facebook and that fans, the media and sponsors are watching our every move on and off the pitch - the better I connect and engage with fans the more valuable I am to sponsors”
In the old days sports journalists like Rudolph Rothschild knew most of the players personally and the newspapers broke the headlines (you can replace the sports people title with politicians, musicians, actors etc). Today that flow of information often begins on Twitter and for fans in the digital age, immediacy generally matters more than production quality (though for mass media and longer content we expect superior content production).
A well crafted catchy 140 tweet headline on a Tuesday at 10:03AM can instantly drive hundreds of new people to your website or channel. Each tweet is like dropping a pebble in a pond or a snowball down a hiil - it either ripples and dies or becomes an avalanche.
Players and their use of social media is an interesting challenge for many sporting organisations - on one side of the dice you have fans and customers increasingly spending their value time in the digital space. On the other sides you have players doing good things and bad; inspiring but also making mistakes; you have sponsors wanting to leverage player access but also wanting to reduce risk; you then have clubs endeavouring to protect but grow their assets and finally you have the media wanting unique timely competitive content.
Players are one of a Clubs greatest assets and fans want to connect and know the real person.
With fame and money comes the concept of limited access.
Advertisers and sponsors follow customer eyeballs and all media is competing harder for viewer attention.
Sometimes the normal rules are broken or the truth lost in the way of a good story.
Brands
What’s interesting is that brands that attempt to stand on their own in social media rarely achieve great success - it’s people associating with people that sells and we’re attracted to larger than life personalities.
Ava Goer, captain of the TeamX women's snowboarding team has a far less conservative social media view “our stress head managers just advise us to try and avoid any full frontal nude tweets - it’s a big call for some of the guys!”.
Our sports culture is youth, vibrant, fun and far less conservative, our fans and sponsors are way more supercool, tech savvy and mobile; our sponsors are looking to embed their brands and leverage our cool - we’re not on the mainstream news every night or on the back page of the paper every day, we engage and connect through more innovative channels. For us it’s not about mass it’s about depth of customer engagement. We’re way more accessible to the media and less cotton wool-ed or cocooned within a protective bubble. Many of the journos that follow our sports are already part of our family.
After sport, with some more presenter coaching, Ernie is positioned well for a TV media role but what TV will look like in five years time is any-ones guess!
And yes, the media landscape has changed but in most cases it’s not about the money, it’s the love of the game 
