Blog 11.

    Here at Quinnipiac, athletics experience the most media by far. As seen first hand from Quinnipiac’s athletic director Jack McDonald in class, the athletics media is representated all over the athletic website and for the bigger audience on their own YouTube page. This type of media is aimed at the QU students, athletes, fans and more. Researchers of the social media are able to look at QU athletics media site and record how many views and/or comments the video received. This is one of the ways survey research can take place.

    Jess mentions the Chicago cubs using an online survey to hear from their fans. In comparison to the QU athletics media page they are both available online and able to gather research through participation of viewing.  However having all of this available online does limit those who do not have internet easily accessible. Mallory also discusses the other way in which the sports social media side can take part in experimental or survey research. She describes how the NHL went through ideas of changing rules around and decided to actually use NHL players in their experiment. The experiment changed the amount of players on the ice throughout to see, this exposed the players to market testing where trials were done.
    Personally, when filming a women’s lacrosse promotional video for the QU athletics media site we experimented with having different number of players try out the video and if adding different variables of background players or props worked or not. Experimental research allows for different variables and changes in the research which Mallory and I have found. 

Experimental in Social Media

This week, learning about experimental PR we are exposed to a fun way of looking at how the PR world works. How having 2 variables in society can have such effects on each other or not at all. And choosing to study the effects or causes of variables in our media world, in particular, builds our future of experiments and the PR world.

If changing GAPs logo creates all this “buzz” in consumers then the independent variable has made a change in the dependent variable. However, are the consumers and societies view of the new logo going to be totally biased because they are comfortable with the previous logo that has been around for 20+ years?! This turned into a mini social media experiment when they asked the public to submit their ideas for a new GAP logo, since they got so much negative buzz about their new logo.

Surveys in Social Media

So much in our world today we have our likes and dislikes, reflecting on what websites we choose to use and what media sources we are not fond of. Researchers and social media workers have the task of figuring out what exactly the audience likes and dislikes. Listening to the audience enhances the future for businesses and media in particular.

Social media in the NFL, specifically, has begun to participate in the social media sites. With the understandable regulation of not using the sites 90 minutes before and after games. Every NFL team has a Facebook page which I find shocking. For NFL teams to have a Facebook page exposes them to the media world, creating an even bigger audience.

            A survey was conducted together by Catalyst Public Relations and Sports Business Journal. More than 500 fans from each of the leagues were asked about their use of social media. The results showed “that 61 percent of MLB fans and 55 percent of NFL fans consider themselves bigger fans of the respective leagues since they started following their favorite teams on Facebook, Twitter and similar sites. In addition, more than half of MLB fans (and 43 percent of NFL fans) said they spend more time watching and following the league now than they did prior to their social-media engagement” (David Broughton).

With teams posting on Twitter and Facebook it allows for audience to “follow” or respond to their social media pages. It was found that “Fewer than half of fans ages 18 to 33 claimed to have responded to brand promotions or other offers “every time” or “most of the time.” The number is even lower, 22 percent, for fans ages 46 to 6.” Surveys are constantly used in the Public Relations world to get a sense of their audience.