Peer Blogs--Part 3

For this weeks blog, we are commenting on our classmates blogs.  This week, I came across Jess' Blog that focused on surveys with the Chicago Cubs baseball team.  She said that she received an e-mail from MLB.com asking her to take a survey for the organization.  The e-mail re-directed her to the Cubs' website where she could take the survey.  I thought that this method of direct communication with the organization was good because, as Jess said in her blog, it allows the organization to reach other fan besides the ones who attend the sporting event.  I also liked how she noted that instead of needing to build a new stadium to please fans, the Cubs would enhance the experience at Wrigley Field and make it more enjoyable to fans and spectators.

Another blog that I read was Ashley's Blog, which focuses on crisis management and communication.  In one of her posts, she talks about an article on crisis communication and 5 steps to managing a crisis.  This post caught my eye because in one of my marketing classes this week, we were learning about PR and crisis management/damage control.  My book offered some interesting points on what needs to be done, but I feel that this article offers a different perspective then what we are always taught.  I was always taught that in a crisis, you should come out and confront the situation at hand and take hold of it.  A few things that I found interesting from the article was, and Ashley touched upon them as well, is the fact that an organization should be transparent and just how fast a crisis can spread on the internet.  Organizations should offer inside information about how a product is made or where it comes from; it allows the consumer to be more trusting of the organization.  Also, a crisis can spread so easily on the internet because bloggers copy and paste information into blogs, people read them, and the cycle begins again.  This article could be eye opening for practitioners because it involves having to act fast and bring publics beneath the surface of the organization.

It's Just An Experiment

After rifling through search engine after search engine, I came to the conclusion that experiments in sports public relations are no where to be found on the internet.  So, I decided to attempt to design my own, along with the assistance of a blog that discusses the "never look down" idea at a sporting event.  This idea implements enough entertainment and socialization at a sporting even that spectators will not want to look down to check the time, their e-mail or their text messages.

This week in class, we learned about the ideal experimental design for conducting an experiment in public relations.  It reads the following:
1. R___PRE___E___POST
2. R___PRE_______POST
3. R_________E____POST
4. R______________POST

where the R stands for needing the sample to be chosen at random, PRE stands for the pretest participants will take, E stands for the experimental variable being implemented, and POST stands for the post test participants will take.

For my experiment, I want to test the impact that in-game entertainment has on a fan's experience at a sporting event.  The control group would consist of attendees at a game that does not have excessive in-game entertainment.  It would have the basic elements of a sporting event: some chants, few on screen videos and a set musical playlist.  The experimental group would contain attendees of a game that promoted more in-game entertainment such as prizes and give aways, crowd leader to hype the crowd up and engage them in interaction, music suited for the perceived attitude of the crowd and entertaining videos during time-outs and commercial breaks (and whatever else could be thought of).

Before each event (entertaining vs relatively non-entertaining), seat numbers would be randomly pulled and those attendees would be chosen as participants for the experiment.  Part of the attendees would take a pretest and all of the participants would take the post test at the end of the event.

The independent variable in this experiment would be the experiences of the individuals and the dependent variable would be the entertainment in the game.

This experiment would be beneficial to sports PR professionals because they can see if their efforts of involving the community in the event help to boost satisfaction among their publics and therefore spread positive word of mouth about the event.

Survey Says...

Earlier this year, ESPN conducted its annual NHL Players survey and some of the results were pretty entertaining.   Fifty NHL players were selected at random to take the survey.  The survey consisted of 30 questions that ranged from favorite players to favorite refs to favorite groupies.

I found a blog that mentioned the survey but published the ten questions that seemed to have been overlooked when bloggers reported the results.  Some of these questions included:  “The players are currently hiring a new head for the player's association. What is the most important qualification that your ideal candidate would have?” “Which team would you least like to be playing for?” and “What's the single most important thing a hockey player can accomplish during their career?”

For the first question mentioned above, 68% of respondents didn’t know that they had a players association.  For the next question, 59% of respondents said they did not want to play for the team that had to play the Red Wings in the first round of the playoffs, and for the last question, 38% of respondents said that the single most important thing a player can accomplish is being traded out of Edmonton.  The next popular answer was to win a Stanley Cup Championship, with 23% of respondents saying that.

I also found a blog from Yahoo! Sports that mentions results from some of the questions that were originally reported.  Some of the results that I found interesting (and hysterical) were: the city with best groupies, who had the hottest spouse and have you been approached to fix the outcome of the game.  The players voted Montreal as the city with the best groupies with a 42% of responses, followed by Vancouver.  Almost half of those surveyed responded with “no comment” to who had the hottest wife and when asked about being approached to fix the outcome of a game, three players responded with “no comment.”  (Could this possibly be interpreted as yes?  I’m thinking it’s a high possibility).

While the results of this survey provided comic relief to fans, it also helps to provide insight to the NHL.  The results allowed the NHL to see the opinions of players without having to conduct their own research.  Even though some of the answers were meant to be comedic, some brought up issues that perhaps the NHL should look at, such as 68% of those players surveyed didn’t realize they had a player’s association.  This could be interpreted literally or more so to mean that they association doesn’t do enough for players to realize their dominant presence.  The survey also provided a free mention of the specific players, teams, and referees mentioned in responses.

Social Media for the Win

After reading through numerous blogs from my classmates this week, I noticed a common trend: social media being used for qualitative research.  I found this interesting because I clicked through blogs at random and many of them had to do with conducting qualitative research using social media sites such as Facebook.

Katerina's Blog talked about her favorite show, Glee!, the positive response from fans of one of the main characters.  Katerina said that she had heard things about this actresses personality and wanted to see what her fans thought of her.  She conducted qualitative research by going to the fan page of this actress and reading the
comments about her and found the rumors she heard to be false.  Katerina also made a good point in saying that people may feel more free writing their feelings and opinions on social media sites because its the world wide web.  Everyone expresses their feelings on the internet so it is a prime oppurtunity for organizations to see what is truly being said about their brand.

Laura's Blog also dealt with qualitative research and social media.  What I liked about Laura's blog was the link that she posted.  It provided the reader with message boards about celebrities and people and go and post thoughts and opinions about celebrities on their specific message board.  I never knew such a site existed.  This can be extremely useful for publicists to see what is being said about their clients, good or bad.

The reason that I find it so interesting to use social media as qualitative research is the fact that I did not even think of it.  I always saw qualitative as a formal word and therefore expected formal research studies such as focus groups and interviews.  While writing last weeks blog I was trying to think of creative ways to conduct qualitative research and while using social media may not be considered creative among some, it is an over-looked media outlet and for that reason, and I feel organizations that choose to use it are creative.

Qualitative Research

This week's blog focuses on qualitative research in sports public relations.  Qualitative research is research that is used to gain further insight on behavior and reasons leading to such behaviors.  Examples of qualitative research include focus groups, observations and in-depth interviews with an organization's publics.

In sports public relations, research is very important.  It helps an organizations keep in touch with its publics and learn their feelings and behaviors about the organization.  I found a student paper from Nova Southern University about research between an sports organization and its publics.  In this he states that qualitative research in sports public relations is hard to base information off of because a focus group of 12-15 fans cannot represent the attitudes and behaviors of the hundreds of thousands of fans an organization has.  I agree with this argument because of exactly what was said: you cannot base attitudes and feelings of thousands of people off of 15 people.  I do believe that triangulation (the use of qualitative and quantitative research) is a better way to conduct sports public relations, as in any field of public relations.  For sports public relations, qualitative research can help sports PR professionals by giving them a platform to build research off of.  Through an interview or focus group, PR people are able to see how its publics react to a certain item or idea or their current feelings about an event or story that has occurred.  With this, they can continue to use quantitative research to see if these attitudes and feelings from the focus groups are present in a larger sample.

An example of qualitative research in sports can be seen in a video from an organization “EastLondonLives2012.”  The series of videos on YouTube are focus groups from different sets of publics that will be affected by the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, England.  These focus groups help researchers to gain insight on the excitement, hesitation, and potential fearfulness of the participants in the focus groups.  Although there were many focus groups conducted, the number of participants cannot compare to London’s population, which is just over 7 million people.

Qualitative research can be used for research in sports public relations, but its cannot be the sole form of research for an organization.  Where sports organizations have such a large fan base, the thoughts and feelings of those who were interviewed, observed, or participated in focus groups cannot create a generalized consensus of feelings and affects of the rest of the organizations publics.

Peer Blogs--Part 2

Unobtrusive research can be conducted many ways.  Last week, I focused on secondary research and social forums and how they can be used for research in the field of sports public relations.  This week, our assignment was to read classmates’ blogs and comment on the content in them.  I just realized that I am conducting unobtrusive research because I’m reading what they wrote, writing about it in this blog, and they won’t know about it until after it published onto the site. Interesting.

After reviewing the blogs, I came across Jenn's Blog which interested me because it was about my hometown football team, the New England Patriots.  Year ago the Patriots could've been considered a dynasty.  Some may have wondered how it was all possible and, as Jenn pointed out in her blog, the Patriots were accused, and found guilty, of cheating.  The team had video tapped the defensive calls of the New York Jets.  The example that Jenn presented for unobtrusive research was the fact that the Patriots were tapping the Jets without a form on consent.  I knew that hidden cameras could be used for unobtrusive research and usually a scenario, like a game show, requires consent to use the footage.  I like how she was able to tie the tapping situation involving the Patriots and the Jets to ethics as well.  The Patriots cheated using unobtrusive research and that could be seen as one of the drawbacks of the method, using it as an unfair advantage to get oneself ahead.

I also enjoyed Steph's Blog because she was able to find an example of unobtrusive research that happened right on campus.  Her example came from the school newspaper and the article discussed how someone's wardrobe is a possible indicator of where they're from.  The author walked from one end of campus and back and sat in the dining hall to people watch.  The findings were consistent with what was worn and where people were from.  I thought that this was interesting because of the fact that this could be happening everyday and no one would notice.

Unobtrusive research can be conducted in many ways and tied to many situations.  However, research ethics should be followed at all times and the results should not be used to put someone at an unfair advantage over competition.

Unobtrusive Research--Phillies vs. Reds

Conducting unobtrusive research can be as simple as typing a desired subject into Google and viewing the content of the results given to you.  It’s done almost every day for any subject type whether it’s done for a specific reason or just to find answers for our own satisfaction.  Sports public relations professionals use unobtrusive research everyday to find out how their organization is being talked about among professionals and its publics.

This morning I was browsing Yahoo! Sports in search of some insight on this year’s Major League Baseball Playoffs (considering I haven’t had a lot of time to keep up with the end of the season) and I came across an Associated Press article about Roy Halladay.  The article was titled “Roy Halladay finally gets to make postseason debut.”  This title caught me off guard at first for the small fact that I didn’t realize that in his 13-year-career Halladay has yet to pitch in the post season.  (I’m only twenty so the first few year of his career were somewhat irrelevant to me)  The article, I felt, described Halladay’s integrity and passion for the game.  Phillies’ Manager, Charlie Manuel, was quoted saying, “…he’s very intense, he wants to win, he definitely wants a ring.”  I found this topic very interesting so I decided to conduct further research on Halladay and the Phillies’ upcoming series against the Cincinnati Reds.

I went to Google and searched for blogs about Halladay.  I came across this blog from, again, Yahoo! Sports that describes ten important numbers to the Phillies/Reds upcoming series.  The blog’s main focus is comparing numbers between the two teams and even more so, the playoff experience of the two teams.  Philly has had playoff experience in the past few years from winning the pennant two years ago to being runner’s up last year, but the Reds have not seen playoff action since 1995.

This article and blog are only two of the many beyond many articles and blogs that have been created since the playoff match-ups were announced.  These articles and blogs are important to sports PR practitioners because they offer views and opinions of the teams but they also give fans (or strong non-fans) something to converse about on social forums.  After the first article, there was a comments section for readers to express their opinions on the subject matter.  As of this morning, there were over 50 comments from readers.  Some discussing their praise for the Phillies organization, some discussing their praise for the Reds, and even some Yankee fans trying to get the last word in (as always).  Team organizations can look at these social forums and see the types of topics that are being discussed among their publics.  Even for Yankees, who are basically getting free word of mouth by having their name stamped on a story that has to do with two completely different organizations.

Blogs and articles can help sports PR practitioners view what is being written about their team, players, name, game, event, etc..  Having these tools at their fingertips allows them to take necessary actions about bad press if necessary and keep operations under control.

This article was written using data found through unobtrusive research.  The lives/environment of the subjects were not intruded upon while conducting the research.  That is the purpose of unobtrusive research.

Peer Blogs

After looking through the blog’s of my classmates this week, I found many that I enjoyed reading but today I chose to focus on two.  Caryn’s blog focuses on technology and PR and this post specifically focused on social media and how it’s changing the field of PR.  I felt that this topic was relevant to my blog because in today’s sports society many sports organizations rely on social media in order to get the message out.  For example, on Twitter, I follow the NHL and the Boston Bruins hockey team.  Every time I log on to my Twitter account, I see numerous posts from each organization daily.  The posts vary from updates to the roster to drawing attention to popular teams at the time to photos from team practices and press conferences.  In particular, the Bruins do a great job at keeping their Twitter and Facebook pages updated as to the latest scores, stats, contest and news.  This new method of communication to publics helps sports teams engage their fans in events and keeps them in tuned of what is going on.

Another post that I found interesting was Whitney’s post about deceptive advertising among pharmaceutical companies.  One fact from her blog that struck me was that the Food and Drug Administration does not have to approve ads for pharmaceuticals.  That means that deceptive advertising can make its way into the market and wrongfully lead a consumer into purchasing the drug.  The fact that there is not a more intense regulation for these ads surprised me very much.

MLB Message Board Usage

Sports public relations practitioners are now able to focus on a more interactive form of social media: message boards.  Through these message boards, Sports PR people are able to easily and efficiently survey the wants and needs of their publics in an organized environment.  The message boards also help to get the message from a PR person across to its publics.  I feel that this form of two way communication between a sports organization and its fans should be utilized through more often.

For this week’s blog, I came across a study that was conducted in 2006 by Chang Wan Woo, Seon-Kyoung An, and Seung Ho Cho about the usage of message boards on eight Major League Baseball Sites.  The study focused on what motivates internet users to write on the team message boards, the topics that are brought up, and the amount of topics for high winning teams and low winning teams.  The data from the research can help sports public relations practitioners connect with their publics and adopt a two-way communications system with message board users.

The results of the study showed that the amount of posts on a message board positively correlated with how well the team was doing, and that the frequent reason for using this medium was for cognitive reasons (furthering ones understanding and knowledge of a team).  This information can help sports PR people because those teams that are doing well relative to other in the league can direct organization information with their publics through message boards.  Also, they can expect heavier traffic (comments, concerns, complaints) on their message boards and will have to address controversial situations if they are brought up.

Messages boards could be considered a growing social medium and with the help of its publics, sports organizations can strengthen their community relations with such a medium.

Click Here to view a write up of the study.

Ethics in Sports Public Relations

Ethics can be defined as a system of moral principles shared among a common group.  These ethics, or rules, should be followed on a day to day basis in order to uphold the integrity and standards of said group.  In today’s society of modern sports, a popular ethical topic is cheating.  Cheating can be seen as breaking the rules in a game, using others to get ahead and even something as simple as steroid use.  One athlete recently found himself tied up in a web of lies and accusations that he found hard to defend and the athlete, as well as a distinguished college football program, found themselves on the edge of such an ethical issue.

On July 22, 2010, ESPN Los Angeles wrote a story about the Heisman Trophy Trust’s consideration of stripping Reggie Bush of his 2005 Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious honor in college football.  This article discusses the possible repercussions the University of Southern California, where Bush played, would face if it was found that Bush was ineligible to win the award in 2005.  It was reported that Bush was ineligible for the Heisman trophy because he left his career at USC for the NFL before 2005.  Bush has repeatedly said that he and his family did not receive any lavish gifts while he was at USC.  Newsydotcom posted a video on YouTube regarding the facts surrounding the case and that is where I found out that Bush actually forfeited his 2005 Heisman Trophy to the Heisman Trophy Trust.  After the pressure from a number of dignitaries, the media and the denial of any wrong doing, the trophy was given back.

However, I think that some of the social pressure that was placed on Bush came from the fact that USC pretty much seemed to throw him under the bus and made the issue seem as if Bush was the only party at fault.  USC’s president, C.L. Nikias, ordered the school’s athletic department to return their copy of Bush’s Heisman Trophy to the Heisman Trophy Trust.  He also ordered the school to remove all references of the Super Bowl Champion and disassociate the school with the athlete.

According to the College Sports Information Directors of America Code of Ethics, an ethical issue that could have played a factor in this event was the role of the public relations person in keeping his loyalty to the program.  It is an ethical principle to hold loyalties to the program and its athletes.  As much as it was not a hard position to back USC and its program, it was probably hard for the PR person to see that the right thing to do was put Bush under the bus in the situation and not handle the situation in a crisis management manner.  Bush was considered a member of the USC community and was one of their star athletes while playing there but when it came to upholding their own brand image, they let go of all they wanted and went for what they thought was an easy way out.

Blog Focus

Growing up, I was always involved with sports. Not only did I play numerous sports for the first 17 years of my life but I was also an avid viewer and attendee. I would watch classic Red Sox games with my grandfather, football games with my dad and attend Bruins games with my uncle. As I got older, I developed a liking for not only professional sports, but college sports as well. My friends never understood why I liked sports so much. Now that I look back, I realized that I loved them because they created lasting memories along with entertainment. The fast-paced lifestyle and never knowing what would happen next in the game was so thrilling to me. That is why I want to join and follow the world of sports public relations.


The individuals who are in the sports PR profession work almost seven days a week during season. They are responsible for setting up press conferences, answering the media’s and other’s requests, managing public crises with individual players or teams, making a team name known and bringing spectators in and keeping them hooked. There never seems to be a dull moment in this field of public relations and to me that is one of the most exciting aspects to me.