College Basketball: Digital Pac-10 Preview, #2 Oregon

Welcome back to our journey through the Pac-10, from a digital point of view.

So far our journey through the conference has shown us #10 USC , #9 Arizona State, and #8 Arizona, #7 Oregon State, #6 Washington State, #5 UCLA, #4 California, and #3 Washington.

It's down to two....

Here we go.

#2 Oregon

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Great URL in GoDucks.com. Nice visuals. Good social media icons, and the Ducks TV is killer.

Weaknesses: Limited basketball-specific content, or ways to learn about Coach Kent. Basketball twitter site not connected to athletics site.

Full Scouting Report:
Clicking into the UO site, GoDucks.com (link here), and you get a pretty big (and nice) brand impression.


Oregon has a lot going for it, but what I was drawn to first was the Recruiting Tab, called "Be A Duck." That's brilliant. It has attitude, aspiration, and substance. It's MUCH better than simply saying "Recruits." It plants a seed. And I really like this.


That attitude or tone doesn't extend into the content beneath (shown here). You are hit with the standard campus info we've seen just about everywhere that has a section like this.


Next, I'll move to the Multimedia tab, and we get shown a plethora of options to dive into!


First, what's this Basketball on the O-Zone? Clicking in, you see it's a sign up to view live events area. Sounds like you pay for it, though I didn't stick around long enough to see.


But I did see a callout from this page for Oregon Ducks TV (not highlighted in the Multimedia tab) and we get this! It's a pretty sweet video area with athlete features, coach interviews, and a Ducks Sports show. This is great! (Click here to check it out for yourself - it is really cool.)



Oddly enough, on that Multimedia tab there was a call out for their MySpace media player (is anyone using that anymore?) From the image below it was put out there about 3 years ago, and should probably just get taken down. Come on, promote Ducks TV a bit more!



You also see a callout for Blogs on this Multimedia drop down menu. Clicking in takes you here, to a blog directory.



From which you can navigate directly to the Hoops Blog, "On the Sideline", shown below or by clicking here.


Finally, there is a callout for the athletics department Twitter page, link is here, which is updated regularly but is extremely haphazard in who they follow (unless you think a follow to the Carolina Panthers is natural).


Back to the UO homepage, you see the icons in the upper right hand corner. We've covered most of them by now, but I wanted to point out the Facebook site as well. Shown below or links from here, they do a nice job of driving news and updates through this channel.



Finally, I am hitting the UO Basketball page. The branding and icons stay consistent. The icons (as we saw in Washington previously) stay consistent, not taking you into a basketball-specific layer. I wish there was an icon for TV, but I digress...

The hoops blog (profiled above) is elevated on the right hand side. Nice.


You wouldn't know it from the site (which might explain the low following thus far), but there's also a UO Men's Hoops Twitter site (link here). It seems to be updated recently and used to alert on new blog posts, so this will be one to watch. I just hope they promote it in the Hoops section...


Finally, the last thing I wanted to point out here is an interesting use of the Coaching section. Here's a shot of Coach Kent's bio. You'll notice in the right hand side, they have elevated interviews and related interactive content of Coach Kent here, on his bio page. That's really sharp, and impressive.


That's a wrap. In sum, we have a great site with good branding and a great infrastructure -- if they could create basketball specific channels for the Hoops section, we'd be on fire.

Tune in tomorrow as we close out the Pac-10 with our best in class. I wonder who that could be?

Andy