Need it Here, Now, Today!

I was guzzling down a pint of beer on Friday evening and engaged in a casual conversation on football, cricket and rugby with my boss. He's been having a great few months with England thrashing India in the recent Test and one day series, Wales faring well in the ongoing rugby World Cup while also taking pleasure in reminding me (maybe once too often) of the not-so-pretty performances of the Indian team and of course Arsenal. We've never got to the point of aiming blows at each other, so it was all in good spirit. We wound up the discussion quickly and soon I was on the train, heading home and all I could keep thinking of was about the way the world of sports has been transformed in the past decade or so. What I'm referring to could have happened earlier, but of course I'm speaking from personal observations and whether I'm right or wrong, I think you'll agree with me on some level.

Defence of the Arsenal Defence

In case you missed the CL qualifier, I just want to start off by saying that Arsenal actually won the match against a relatively fancied Italian opponent, clean sheet intact and all that, although some newspapers might have you believe that winning nowadays is not the point. The media have been banging about on how Arsenal just escaped, how SZCZ's saves barely rescued us from embarrassment, how frail the team was and so on. It seems to me that most of these nut-cases who wrote these reports had started with an already planned agenda before even watching the game. Now, while I acknowledge the fact that there is frustration in Gooner world around Arsene Wenger's reluctance to splash the cash in the transfer market, those wearing the Red and White on the pitch did a lot to lift our spirits and gave us a win. 

It's IPL time again.... Yawn

The latest installment of the IPL is a week old as I write this, and we Indians haven't even had the time to gloat over a famous World Cup win. I have yet to watch a full game and the credit (of course I'm being sarcastic) goes to some of our favorite commentators, all back after being rested for the World Cup. Laxman Sivaramakrishnan says, "Oh yes! Happy to be back. Had to keep myself fit for this one. That's why I opted out of the World Cup sponsored by Money Gram International, Reliance Communications, Castrol, ESPN Star ....... ",  all this hoping that at least a few of the brands would pay him a few Rupees for mentioning their names on live television. It's hard enough for cricket fans, having to many times miss the first and last ball of an over because of a commercial break and now we have these dimwits at the mercy of advertisers playing out the audio versions of the commercials almost every alternate ball. LS can be excused because that's probably as close as he'll get to featuring in a TV commercial.

I say, “KOP-y this”!

Now that all the hype over Fernando Torres' move to London has died down it's time to shift focus to another interesting development concerning one of English football's biggest clubs. Liverpool FC now has an online version of ‘The Kop’, which is a development in the social media sphere cannot be ignored, especially from a sports marketing angle. It is a proper social media hub developed by a football club just for their fans and it is the first of its kind that I've known of. It is interesting from a marketing perspective, for the club and other football and/or sports clubs and organizations and also for the fans.

Looking at it from an internal marketing point of view, creating their own branded closed space for fans and bringing them together as a community, gives Liverpool FC a chance to capture information about their fans and get to know them better, therefore giving them direct access to their fans without depending on a third party network. This will also let them easily shape conversations around Liverpool FC. Most of the top Premier League clubs now have a presence on Facebook, Twitter or both, and this has allowed them to get closer to their fans and also gave clubs an idea of how many people were actively following them online. Also, since the Premier League’s popularity has become global, a social media presence allowed clubs to get a rough idea of their following outside the UK and actively monitor what was being said about them. Even after these advancements, there are certain areas that are lacking. It is common now to see fans commenting on clubs’ Facebook posts, but the level of interactivity between fans is minimal if not non-existent,

Lessons for Mainstream Brands from Two Sports Celebrities

I am not going to use superlatives to describe two individuals who I greatly admire, as no amount of it will be enough to express their greatness. It will also definitely not make sense to compare the exploits of Roger Federer and Sachin Tendulkar on the field of play either as they both are masters at sports which are as comparable as chalk and cheese. This article just aims to point out a couple of simple points on their social media presences, which are useful for businesses.

Both Federer and Tendulkar  have an enormous fan following (Sachin, probably to a lesser excellent due to the not-so-global reach of cricket) across the globe. They both handle the celebrity status with the utmost humility and they're both wonderful human beings who set excellent examples for those who look up to them. Being a fan of both Sachin and Federer, I follow them on Facebook and therefore I check for updates from these pages. Tendulkar has a Twitter account too, which I follow. When it comes down to how they fare on Facebook, I think Federer has an edge over the little master. I'm not saying that this will cause Tendulkar any distress, as he and also Federer for that matter, have better ways of getting people to talk about them. Federer has 5.7 million 'Likes' compared to Tendulkar's 1.9 million, but these statistics hardly mean anything and cannot give a more inaccurate reading of the number of admirers they have. 

Graeme Smith Reveals Retirement Plans

Graeme Smith, at a press conference after the first day of the deciding Test match between India and South Africa, has announced that he will be retiring. There was a twist though in store for everyone. As we all know some players have in the past retired from one form of the game or other as they wanted to devote more time and effort to their preferred format be it ODIs, Test matches or more recently T20 cricket. Smith though went one step ahead when he announced, "Well ya, I have decided to quit from all matches which will feature Zaheer Khan in the opposing team. Ya, this will help me focus on bowlers who I am more comfortable against" after having being dismissed by Zaheer for the 11th time in his career.

Saurav Ganguly when told about this development gave his customary look of disbelief by batting his eyelids at the rate of three times per second. "If I had retired from matches played in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and West Indies, my average would have been much higher. This is not right. Soon you might have people retiring from short pitched bowling" he said, suggesting that he might have considered various kinds of retirement plans to suit his batting average.

Lipstick on a Pig

For those of you who aren't familiar with this phrase, 'lipstick on a pig' is a "rhetorical expression, used to convey the message that making superficial or cosmetic changes is a futile attempt to disguise the true nature of a product" (courtesy Wikipedia). The comparison I want to make is to the recent Commonwealth Games which in the end turned out to be a success although it was anything but a reflection of the state of Indian sport (cricket is of course excluded). I have reservations using adjectives such as resounding, amazing or similar synonyms before the word success. I have my reasons.