Olan Scott

Strategic Use of Facebook to Build Brand Awareness: A Case Study of Two National Sport Organizations

Social media provides a strategic means for non-profit organizations to build and maintain strong relationships with consumers. The purpose of this study was to apply branding theory and frameworks to the use of Facebook by National Olympic Committees in two countries, Australia and Canada over specific time periods related to three Olympics Games. These Facebook pages were examined to determine the types of brand-related post content and communication style utilized as well as the consumer response to these posts. The two organizations generally used Facebook to broadcast product related brand attributes such as information about athletes and teams. There was also a significant difference in Facebook post use and focus by two organizations indicating some international differences in using Facebook for branding a sport organization. The results also provide practical implications for non-profit sport organizations using Facebook to build positive brand images, promote fan engagement and ultimately create brand ambassadors.

Using Self-Categorization Theory to Uncover the Framing of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Two National Newspapers

Research into the framing of the Olympic Games indicates that the media often exhibit bias in their coverage. Through discourse, the media attempt to create a situation where consumers are provided with multiple story lines or foci, to build and maintain audiences for the duration of an event. A content analysis was conducted to uncover and compare how two national broadsheet newspapers, one from Australia and one from Canada, pictorially depicted the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Results of this study found large differences in the use of home-nation content to capture, build, and maintain readers for the duration of the Olympic Games coverage. These findings are beneficial for sports managers and sports-media personnel to understand how two different nations pictorially framed the Olympic Games.

Framing the 2007 National Basketball Association finals: An analysis of commentator discourse

Television broadcasters often exhibit bias in the reporting of sport events. Through framed discourse, networks embed multiple storylines to build and maintain audiences over the duration of an event. Research has typically focused on mega-events occurring every four years. This study, through content analysis of American Broadcast Company’s announcer discourse of a smaller annual event, the 2007 National Basketball Association finals series, found that the framing function of the media continued to be employed. Findings also revealed significant associations existed for play-by-play and colour commentary on the two competing teams that would serve to reinforce viewer beliefs. Commentary on the winning team emphasized skill, speed and creativity, whereas star players became the focus of the losing team. Sport marketers can gain practical utility for use of framing in broadcasts by providing commentators with prepared frames that could support viewer beliefs or expectations.

For Better or for Worse: The Impact of Social Media on Chinese Sports Journalists:

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of social media in Chinese sports journalism. After distributing an online survey using a snowball sampling technique, a total of 133 Chinese sports journalists working in print media participated in this study. The results indicated that news gathering was reported as a primary motivation to use social media. Weibo and WeChat, two localized social networking tools, were the most commonly used tools among participants. Nearly half of participating sports journalists admitted that monitoring information on social media increased their pressure level and created workloads. The majority of sports journalists believed social media had weakened their gatekeeping role due to the increase in citizen journalists and the increase in channels and sources from which users obtain news and information. The study also found that the relationship between journalists and athletes has also been altered with the advent of social media.

Points of attachment on social media: exploring similarities and differences between Chinese and Western National Basketball Association fans

Abstract Given the availability and usage of Twitter, professional sport organizations attempt to embrace this emerging medium to engage with sports fans around the world. While many sports fans use Twitter globally, Chinese sports fans primarily embrace localized social media platforms, such as Weibo, to follow their favourite teams because many international mainstream social media services are banned in China. This study aimed to investigate the similarities and differences between Chinese National Basketball Association (NBA) fans and Western NBA fans in terms of their social media usage and points of attachment to a team with a global presence. The results revealed that Chinese digital NBA fans expressed higher dependence on using social media in their daily life compared to Western counterparts. In terms of sports fans’ points of attachment, Chinese NBA fans had higher associations with basketball, NBA players, and the NBA than Western counterparts, while Western fans perceived a higher attachment to the team.

Considering Ongoing Professionalization in Sport Organizations: A Case Study of the ACT Brumbies Super Rugby Club

ABSTRACT The increasing commercialism of sport has been accompanied by pressure for sport organizations to become (more) professional. The kitchen table or boardroom approaches that may be ingrained in accepted values within organizations are being challenged by contemporary business principles of sport organization governance. While considerable work has been conducted under the banner of the professionalization of sport, there has been limited research addressing the ongoing professionalization of organizations which have already moved away from being volunteer based and are operating in a business-like manner. This research provides a case study of the ACT Brumbies rugby union club in Australia addressing this issue with interviews conducted within three key stakeholder groups of this organization: Board members, operations staff, and players. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of twelve stakeholders. Results indicated that the ongoing professionalization process had differing impacts on operations for various employees.

Using self-categorization theory to uncover the framing of the 2015 Rugby World Cup: A cross-cultural comparison of three nations’ newspapers

Research into the framing of sporting events has been extensively studied to uncover newspaper bias in the coverage of global sporting events. Through discourse, the media attempt to capture, build, and maintain audiences for the duration of sporting events through the use of multiple narratives and/or storylines. Little research has looked at the ways in which the same event is reported across different nations, and media representations of the Rugby World Cup have rarely featured in discussions of the framing of sport events. The present study highlights the different ways in which rugby union is portrayed across the three leading Southern Hemisphere nations in the sport. It also shows the prominence of nationalistic discourse across those nations and importance of self-categorizations in newspaper narratives.

Tweeting the Lecture: How Social Media Can Increase Student Engagement in Higher Education

The higher education sector increasingly uses social media as an educational tool to develop a sense of community and foster student engagement, particularly as social networking sites have become an integral part of the lives of digital natives. The current study sought to explore whether the use of Twitter could foster student engagement in a sport marketing course, specifically by embedding Twitter through two assessments, online lectures and weekly tasks. Mean score comparisons indicated that over a 13-week semester, students (N = 68) felt more engaged and included in the course because it had Twitter, found Twitter to be relatively easy to use, and the use of social media aligned with course objectives. The results of the current study have salience in sport management education, because the effective use of Twitter within a higher education context demonstrates how the use of social media can foster engagement with course materials.

Twitter and Olympics: Exploring factors which impact fans following American Olympic Governing Bodies

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Olympic audiences utilized Twitter to follow American National Governing Bodies (NGBs) during the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.,Guided by economic demand theory, the researchers sought to explore whether factors such as the content of social media messages, athlete’s performance, event presentation, scheduling, and TV broadcasting contribute to enhancing fans’ interests in following NGBs on Twitter during the Olympic Games. In total, 33 American NGB Twitter accounts formed the data set for this study. Each of NGBs’ Twitter data was collected every night at midnight from August 7 to 23, 2016. Data collected from each NGB account included number of followers, number of accounts followed, number of tweets, and number of “likes.”,Results of this study revealed that team’s performance and the number of tweets had direct and positive relationships with increasing the number of NGB’s Twitter followers on each competition day. The number of “likes,” however, had a significant negative relationship with fans’ interests in following NGBs’ Twitter.,The results of the study are expected to help Governing Bodies in the Olympic sports have a better understanding of fans’ social media usage.

Relaying Rio Through an Australian Gaze: Australian Nationalistic Broadcast Focus in the 2016 Summer Olympic Games

This study explored how potential national biases unfolded within the Australian broadcast of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics. Applying social identity theory and self-categorization theory, this study content analyzed a total of 45 prime time broadcast hours of Australia’s Seven Network’s coverage of the Rio Games. Although the majority of top 20 most-mentioned athletes were Australian, non-Australian athletes were mentioned more frequently regarding total name mentions. Moreover, Australian athletes and non-Australian athletes were described in significantly different manners when ascribing reasons for athletic success and failure. This study contributed to the literature by uncovering how in-group members were portrayed in the Australian sports context while also providing insight into how consumers’ media consumption could potentially affect how the network broadcast the Olympics from a nationally partisan perspective.