SOCIAL
@MargiesPro
FEW STATE SPORTING ASSOCIATIONS IN AUSTRALIA HAVE BEEN ABLE TO STEER AN EVENT OVER FOUR DECADES TO THE VERY TOP ECHELON OF THEIR SPORT QUITE LIKE SURFING WA HAS ACHIEVED WITH THE DRUG AWARE MARGARET RIVER PRO. THE SMALL, TIGHT-KNIT TEAM BASED AT TRIGG BEACH RECENTLY ORCHESTRATED A MASSIVE COUP WITH THE ‘PRO’ BEING GRANTED WCT STATUS BY THE ASSOCIATION OF SURFING PROFESSIONALS (ASP) FROM 2013.
With this enhanced profile comes added scrutiny and as part of a process of continual improvement the events social media presence was given a major overhaul aimed at plugging into the symbiotic relationship between surfing and ‘social’. In the first of a series of special features we take a peek behind the scenes to see how this years @MargiesPro unfolded from a ‘social’ perspective.
BACKGROUND
Now in its 29th year the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro is an iconic event in the WA, Australian and international surf calendar. This year’s event marked the first year of full WCT status for women with men set for a similar upgrade from 2014. This guarantees the appearance of the top 18 women in the world and the top 32 men from next year. Jessi Miley-Dyer, the ASP’s Women’s World Tour manager summed up the thoughts of all the leading surfers following the announcement. “Personally, I’m really pleased to have a big, powerful reef break back on tour as it will provide the girls with a venue that tests the foundations of power surfing. I think everyone is going to be excited to see the Top 17 in some quality waves out at Surfers Point and watching the new generation of young women do battle with the elements and one another.”
ORGANISATION
The MargiesPro management structure is unique amongst its ASP tour peers. All but a select few of the big name surfing events in the world are promoted by the major surf brands that include Rip Curl, Quiksilver and Billabong along with Nike/Hurley and O’Neill (via the Coldwater Classics) who also retain a high profile naming rights involvement. These marketing driven entities have the firepower of a global brand and a huge ready-made fan base to plug-into for their events. The Drug Aware Margaret River Pro on the other hand is different – very different! While the status and management structure of the event has ebbed and flowed over the years the core philosophy and ethos of doing things the WA-way has been retained along with the ownership of the event by Surfing WA. Never content to wrest on their laurels the dedicated Surfing WA team based at a former Trigg Beach kiosk have steadily built the ‘Pro’ into one of the most iconic on the calendar, much loved by the many illustrious names that have graced Surfers Point over the last four decades.
EARLY ADOPTERS
Surfing is by definition a nomadic existence where chasing the sun and the next wave - wherever in the world that might be is an integral part of its appeal. For this reason those involved in the sport were earlyadopters of both smartphones and social media that are now so central to sharing the unique surfing experience. As a result the social media activity undertaken by event organizers is under intense scrutiny as they work overtime during an event to keep fans constantly up-todate.
“I’M REALLY PLEASED TO HAVE A BIG, POWERFUL REEF BREAK BACK ON TOUR”
SOCIAL STRATEGY
Taking into account their finite resources the Surfing WA team have been quietly building their social media presence over the last two events. In what was a concerted push for 2013 that coincided with the event’s hard-won WCT status the decision was made to start getting serious about the @MargiesPro social presence in what is a three-year development cycle.
GROUNDWORK The first task for Surfing WA in developing a formal social media strategy for the @MargiesPro was to look long and hard at ‘social’ in a surfing context in order to better understand what made it tick. The social media footprints of other WCT status events were scrutinised with particular attention to the channels used as well as the frequency and type of content posted. This served to reinforce the unique nature of @MargiesPro as the only event of its type that wasn’t closely aligned to one of the major surf brands (Australian surf and street clothing brand Mambo is a sponsor of the Pro). Typically, the surf labels incorporated the events social media presence into their own brand pages. The advantage is that the events are exposed to a massive followings via these channels (each have Facebook followings in excess of one to two million). The question is whether the branded content drowns out the event specific content? Also of interest were the sports opinion leaders (male and female professional surfers) and how they interacted with social media. In most cases these surfers had a presence on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. What differed was the level of overall engagement and preferred platforms. By sifting through several years content activity a clear migratory trend began to emerge. Looking back two years or more a large percentage of sampled surfers had an established website presence that reflected their personal brand. Text based content
consisted primarily of conversational style blogs with regular status updates on what they were up to on and off the world tour supplemented by image and video galleries. With a focus on websites, the social media presence at the time was limited or lacking (start dates for all the major social media channels are easily determined by looking at the first post or the ‘created’ date. Posting frequency can also be assessed in the same way). In the last 12 to 18 months there was a clear shift in engagement away from personalized websites to Facebook. What’s really interesting is that this migratory pattern has continued to evolve. In the six months prior to the Margaret River Pro it was evident that Facebook was falling out of favour as the sports opinion leaders gravitated towards Instagram. Instagram it would seem is a natural fit for opinion leaders on the Pro tour and surfers in general. Easily managed via a smartphone, pictures from a favourite break are easily and ‘instantly’ loaded. The plethora of filters and effects that come with the platform mean that surfers can personalize their pic in what is a very visual, photo/video led sport that revolves around ‘capturing the moment’. It would seem that websites and Facebook were handy substitutes while the social media space caught up with what surfers and their fans really wanted….. Instagram.
WOMEN LEAD THE WAY
Unsurprisingly, another finding was that women on the tour were more engaged across all the social media channels than men by a factor of about three to one. Taking this one step further, the nature of the content was also quite different. Where women surfers were into lifestyle type content and status updates (often totally unrelated to surfing) men on the other hand were into sharing links – particularly for surf specific, action images and video.
LANGUAGE AUTHENTICITY
Each sport has its own sub-culture and language. Surfing is no different so in order to ensure the social media strategy connected with the surfing fraternity a substantial amount of ‘listening’ was undertaken via a variety of channels to ensure the conversation @MargiesPro struck the right tone. Even here caution was required as the gut reaction was to adopt ‘grommet-talk’ (young surfers up to 17 or 18) exclusively. In researching Facebook Insights, the demographic spread for both men and women actually peaked in the 25-34 year bracket with over 30% of the total audience 35 or older. This suggested that the language needed to reference ‘surf speak’ but still be understood and authentic to a broad cross-section of followers.
In summary, there were a couple of important takeaways for Surfing WA from the assessment of other WCT events and surfs opinion leaders. • By having a social media presence that was aligned to the event rather than a sponsor/surf brand the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro was actually operating in a fairly unique space. • The migratory movement from platform to platform in a relatively short period of time suggests that heading into the 2014 event another review of opinion leaders is required. In short, what worked this time around probably won’t work next year. While a new platform is not on the horizon that is likely to knock Instagram of its perch as the channel of choice (Pinterest might be a consideration, particularly with women surfers and fans while Snapchat could be another alternative?) the content mix may well need to change again depending on what Facebook or Twitter has in the development pipeline. • The demographics of a typical @MargiesPro follower needs to be constantly monitored with any changes reflected in the content ‘voice’. More female followers and a shift towards a younger or older audience will require a re-think of language used.
THIS WENT WITHOUT A HITCH EARLY IN FEBRUARY AND THE PUSH WAS THEN ON TO RE-BUILD THE FOLLOWING ON FACEBOOK AND CRANK UP TWITTER WHILE TAKING THE EVENT TO A NEW AUDIENCE VIA INSTAGRAM. RE-BOOT
Having adopted an evolutionary approach to social media for the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro in previous years the opportunity was taken in 2013 to formalize all channels and re-boot the event website and social media URL’s in order to ensure a consistent and uniform message. This required some careful consideration as to the best ‘handle’ to use across all the social media channels with the added complication of how to manage a transition from the existing Facebook page to a new URL.
HANDLES AND URL’S
After some debate it was decided that the social media ‘handle’ for the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro needed to meet the following criteria; • Available on all social media channels • Short as possible and, • Easy to remember This was easier said than done, with the stumbling block being that a ‘handle’ was available on one or several channels but not all. In the end, Surfing WA went with the already extensively used ‘MargiesPro’ as the crosschannel event ‘handle’. With this finalized, setting up the (new) Instagram account was straightforward as was switching the pre-existing Twitter ‘handle’ to @MargiesPro. This left Facebook and a set of terms and conditions that gave Surfing WA limited room for manoeuvring. The problem was that a Facebook brand page name can only be changed if the page has less than 200 likes with the 2011 version having over 2,500. It was also discovered that the URL ‘www.facebook.com/margaretriverpro’ was locked. With the clock ticking to the event-start (16th March) a new @MargiesPro account was set-up that aligned with the other social media channel handles (www.facebook. com/MargiesPro’ and page name ‘Margaret River Pro’). Next on the to-do list was deciding on a strategy for the ‘old’ event Facebook page and its 2,500 followers.
The initial plan was to merge the old page with the new one (a process that would mean the page with the least amount of likes would disappear, hence this could only be done when the new page had more likes). However, the more Surfing WA investigated a merger of pages the louder the alarm bells rang. Trawling various blogs and forums it was clear that the process didn’t always run smoothly. Issues included losing the old page, the new page, some or all of their followers across the two or both being (permanently) deleted. It seemed the safest thing to do was to retire the old page at a given point and switch all efforts to the new @MargiesPro page. Having made the call a plan was developed to regularly inform and update surfing fans across all the Margies Pro and Surfing WA platforms that the event was transitioning from one page to another on a given date, after which it would be lights-out for the old page. This went without a hitch early in February and the push was then on to re-build the following on Facebook and crank up Twitter while taking the event to a new audience via Instagram.
OPEN VS CLOSED
As the most mature of the three social media platforms there were some options with respect to how the event engaged with its audience through Facebook. While both Twitter and Instagram are genuine two-way communication channels, Facebook does have the option to choose whether fans can post to your brand page timeline and send private messages, making a one-way conversation an option. While these settings would have allowed @MargiesPro to dictate the communication with its audience, it was never seriously considered as an option. Surfing by definition demands authenticity and openness, so to cutoff followers from engaging and asking questions would go against the spirit of the sport. Therefore, all of the engagement settings were switched on and comments, messages and questions from fans were actively encouraged. With the Facebook page open for engagement, it was clear that moderation was going to be a key factor in ensuring the conversation was kept on-topic and appropriate. With the MargiesPro being a family-friendly event, it was important to share some commenting guidelines with the Facebook pages’ followers, so a policy was written up and shared on the information section of the page.
PRE-EVENT PLAN
Armed with a thorough understanding of the surfing social landscape and having re-booted the various social media channel ‘handles’ and URL’s, the focus shifted to putting the pre-event strategy into play. The aim was to firstly attract followers to all three accounts, and secondly to direct traffic back to the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro website where all the event information could be found. Since there wasn’t a great deal of news or @MargiesPro specific content available 100 days out from the event, the plan was to follow the top influencers (professional male and female surfers) who would be attending the event, and the top surfing websites to find news and posts that were relevant to the @MargiesPro audience. Contests and quizzes were used to engage the audience and create awareness and excitement around the upcoming event. As the event drew closer, all three channels became an important outlet for informing fans about event information including dates, ticket information and surfers who had signed-up.
THE CONTENT STRATEGY FOR EACH SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNEL DELIVERED A RANGE OF OUTCOMES. FACEBOOK
Facebook acted as the default social media network for the Pro. The majority of social content was posted through this channel as it was the most popular and had the most functionality. Importantly, it also provides the only real analytics via its Insights tool so posted content and the interaction with it could be tracked. With the Pro approaching its 30th birthday one initiative was to trawl through the record books and quiz the experts who had been involved for an extended period to develop a chronological history. This information was then sorted and slotted into the Facebook page timeline so it could be shared with all event fans. Trivia type questions were then developed off the back of this, with weekly quizzes held on Facebook as part of a ‘blast from the past’ promotion which worked well in driving engagement via the platform. With the limestone cliffs of Surfers Point dotted with telephoto lenses it was decided to let the website focus on action images. Meanwhile, the social media channels concentrated on ‘behind the scenes’ shots from around the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro site. One or two albums were posted to Facebook each day that featured reportage style shots including off-site visits to a variety of venues that hosted evening functions such as the Surfers and Sponsors dinner held at the Xanadu Winery and a soiree for the women competitors on the first Saturday night hosted at Surfers Point.
The social media surprise package for the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro was Instagram. Surfing WA had established their own account back in September of 2011 that steadily gained traction after a quiet launch to the extent that by the back-end of 2012 it had become the hottest platform in their armoury. This coupled with the demonstrated pro-surfer migration to Instagram in the previous 12 months meant having an @ MargiesPro account was a no-brainer. @MargiesPro on Instagram was established in January and started slowly, but it didn’t take long to find its groove. A couple of weeks out from the Pro a series of mini-comps were pushed through the platform to raise awareness and from there it really took off. Through the nine days of the event it proved to be hugely popular with the final count just short of 3,000. Quite impressive considering seven days prior to the event the follower count stood at a little over 300. Hashtags played an important role on Instagram, with #MargiesPro adopted as the official tag. Users were encouraged to share their own pictures relating to the event by using #MargiesPro with over 1,000 images tagged by the end of the event. A separate daily challenge hosted by Tourism WA where fans were asked to submit photos based on a particular theme also proved popular.
Of the three channels Twitter generated the least amount of followers and engagement. It also had the highest churn rate immediately after the event which is supported by experiences with other sports. The ‘visual’ nature of the sport doesn’t seem to translate well to Twitter which is perhaps why, pro surfers and their fans prefer Instagram. In interesting case in point was a sponsor who previously had been a heavy Twitter user before switching to Instagram. He remarked that he was hugely impressed with ‘visual Twitter’. This sums up nicely Instagram’s key selling points (smartphone based, image driven) and the way the event used the channel to provide half-hourly heat updates which came with an accompanying photo.
WEBSITE
It’s important to note that the primary purpose of the social media channels was to drive traffic to the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro website. They weren’t the focus of the digital strategy and were intended to play a supporting role to the Pro’s real communication hub..... its website.
CONTENT TAKEAWAYS
A website or social media channel is only ever going to be as engaging as the content that is posted to it. Remove this content and they are empty vessels with no real value or purpose. For this reason the type of content, frequency of posts and where it was posted was central to the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro social media strategy.
ACTIVITY DRIVEN
Surfing is quite unique in that the competition is entirely at the mercy of Mother Nature. If there’s no swell there’s no surf. While the location and the timing of the Pro has been carefully planned to maximise the possibility of a consistently strong swell, there is always the possibility that the big waves Surfers Point are famous for won’t make an appearance. For the 2013 Pro, there were in fact three and-a-half days where the swell just wasn’t up to scratch and as a result, lay-days were called. On these days, content still had to be sought and posted, so this generally consisted of recaps of the previous action, behind-the-scenes activity or a look at what the surfers were up to on their days off. On the days when the swell was up and the competition was on there was no shortage of text or image based content. The key question is what to do with it and where to ‘push’ it. While a written checklist was in place regarding the type of content and how/ where it would be posted, the social media team ensured each day remained fluid with the aim being to keep the content reasonably balanced across each channel. The temptation to dump posts constantly into the social machinery was resisted so that follower’s feeds weren’t overload or saturated. This required the treading of a fine line between being informative and annoying.
REMOTE CHALLENGES
For those unfamiliar with the location of the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro at Surfers Point, Prevelly it can only be described as remote, situated some 265 kilometres from WA’s capital city of Perth, which in itself is often described as the most remote major city in the world. At a site which for all but a few days of the year is a car park with the most basic of facilities it certainly makes for a challenging logistical exercise on all fronts. Faced with these circumstances, associated technical glitches are inevitable – what’s important is how you deal with them.
WEB STREAMING
The technical requirements to web stream the MargiesPro event around the world is demanding to say the least. In recent years, the ATP tours fanatical following have become accustomed to this service which is both a blessing and a curse. Pulling in millions of viewers the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro website acts as a fantastic ‘window’ into Western Australia and all it has to offer for viewers around the world. This interest puts huge demands on the streaming infrastructure with the odd ‘screen freeze’ or time-out an inevitable consequence. On the rare occasions this does happen disgruntled fans are quick to vent their frustrations on social media,
making for a sometimes highly charged and quiet lively communication platform. While managing this can be challenging it has also proven to be a valuable early warning system as was proven towards the latter stages of this years event in a fascinating example of just how powerful social media can be.
SPANISH ARMADA
On the final Friday it was noticed via the Facebook commenting on the website and the Facebook page that there were a number of posts about the web stream not working coming out of Spain in particular. Some quick investigation by the event’s webmaster uncovered an issue with undersea data cabling lines that had been either cut or damaged in the Mediterranean. Through further research it appeared that the fault was specific to Spain with the French and UK feeds unaffected. The @MargiesPro team were able to communicate this to its Spanish fans along with redirect support to other sites. Affected viewers then quickly informed the Pro they were all sorted via Facebook. From the time of first picking up an issue to it being resolved was a little over a half an hour. Impressive stuff.
THE ALTERNATIVE IS FAR WORSE
MODERATION
Having an open, accountable social media approach translates to a two-way conversation between @MargiesPro and its followers. Facebook in particular in the weeks leading up to the event was utilized extensively by fans to get information on a variety of topics including VIP ticketing, heat schedules, merchandise and the like. On-event, the level of two-way communication dramatically escalated which required moderation across the three channels in addition to the hybrid social media forum baked into the event website. For the Pro’s social manager this meant some long-days. Taking into account the global fan base, the average on-event moderation started before 6am and continued often well past 10pm. While the vast majority of the conversations were positive there will always be a very small percentage whose posts are inappropriate. As a family event followed by a large percentage of kids the
only option was to remove any offensive posts. Where issues were raised, they were dealt with quickly. This direct action won back disaffected fans as well as the support of the event’s wider social community at large who regularly chimed in with their own unique form of moderation. Despite the challenges of moderating multiple channels it was universally agreed that it is much better to manage conversations via a platform that you have some control over. People by nature will always find something to complain about, with the anonymity offered by social media emboldening many to say things they never would in real-life. The alternative is far worse – when the disaffected take their complaints off-site and you have no knowledge of what is being said let alone be able to manage and address it.
WHEN THE DISAFFECTED TAKE THEIR COMPLAINTS OFF-SITE AND YOU HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT IS BEING SAID LET ALONE BE ABLE TO MANAGE AND ADDRESS IT.
3,900 178+ 156,181 1,000 357,270 172 306,258 1MILLION+ 8,300
2,700 175 23,000
SOCIAL MEDIA SNAP-SHOT FACEBOOK • • •
•
Peak followers 3,900 (new URL for 2013) Total event posts 126 plus 50+ timeline posts (reply posts 178) Total reach or the number of people who have seen any content associated with the MargiesPro page (unique users). Peak daily count of 156,181 with a weekly count of 357,270. Total impressions are the number of impressions seen of any content associated with the Margies Pro page (unique users). Daily peak of 306,258 with a weekly count in excess of 1 million.
TWITTER • • •
Peak followers 1,000 (new handle for 2013) Total event posts 172 (reply posts 100) In a search of the most popular Twitter tags there were three clear winners; Margies Pro, Margaret River Pro and Drug Aware Pro with combined total mentions of 8,300.
INSTAGRAM • • •
Peak followers 2,700 (new for 2013) Total event posts 175 (reply posts 60) Total number of likes 23,000
WATCH THIS SPACE Re-booting the website and the social media handles a few months prior to the event impacted on the final follower count for @MargiesPro. Limited resources meant that organic growth had to be relied upon which required considerable creativity in terms of ratcheting up the follower count and engagement. Having made a solid start the task now is to build on the foundations that have been laid. An added benefit has been that lessons learned are being applied not just to @Margies Pro but across all communications and engagement that Surfing WA undertakes.
The challenge going forward is adapting to a critical media platform that is in constant ‘beta’ with respect to functionality and how the surfing community interacts with it. Despite this constantly shifting landscape the Surfing WA team are ideally positioned to deal with whatever is around the corner come the 2014 event.
www.margaretriverpro.com www.surfingaustralia.com/wa/
www.sportxchange.com.au www.imagexchange.com.au Social @MargiesPro is published by the SportXchange Project in partnership with Surfing WA, promoters of the Drug Aware Margaret River Pro. Written by Stu Williams and Jordan Slight. All images by ImageXchange and Relentless Sports. (June 2013)