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.