Long ago, way back before most of you started seeing David Stern and Adam Silver as Statler and Waldorf, the NBA was a league that fully embraced social media as a part of its marketing plan. As clips were amiably put up on YouTube, Twitter accounts were created and Facebook fan pages were managed and encouraged, the NBA cleverly cornered their target demographic while capitalizing on an increasingly compelling product on the court.
While the NBA lockout is going on, it may be easy to forget this obvious fact: the NBA is good at using social media marketing. The threats of over-zealous punishment for mention of athletes may seem anything but cutting edge but after the two sides are finished the Association will be back on the horse of social media marketing. More than ever, they’re going to need it.
On Thursday Facebook held their annual f8 conference, where they announced new changes and a new direction for Facebook. The biggest change to the platform is the new Timeline function, which stands not just as a new feature and layout change but a fundamental change to the idea of social media and Facebook. The Timeline function will allow users to add in every detail of their life, essentially creating a living online scrapbook.
The idea is much different than what we’ve imagined in social media before, where items you chose to share were carefully crafted to create an online version of yourself that may or may not be entirely truthful. Now, with a new “frictionless” interface — essentially where anything you do online can be automatically set to post to your Facebook wall — it’s a more in-depth experience. And often, a weird one.
How and if companies will be able to use Timeline on their pages isn’t yet clear, but there will most certainly be some kind of integration or feature that mimics the timeline for companies. For the NBA, the Timeline could be an incredibly powerful tool. Not only can items from the past be added to your timeline — we’re talking Naismith and peaches here — but running dialogues can be recorded, especially important photos and videos can be recorded by historians and added to the NBA timeline. Really, if an entity could benefit from using the Timeline function, who better to use it than the NBA? (That and Nike/Apple I guess)
By the time the NBA allows itself to again utter unto themselves the surnames of their players a feature set for Facebook pages and Timeline will have been resolved. If they’re smart, they’ll start organizing with new media directors and historians (ahem) in order to gameplan for what would go on a prospective NBA timeline. Think The Book of Basketball except without the smarmy Bostonian asides. Stern, Silver and the rest of the crew in the NBA offices have a lot on their plate but I hope they’ve got something brewing for events like this because the marketing push come the end of lockout time is going to have to be drastic and swift.
Dane Carbaugh is a published research author and can be found writing about the NBA all over the Internet. He can be found on Twitter at @DaneCarbaugh
