College Basketball: Digital Pac-10 Preview, #9 Arizona State

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

The internet levels the playing field. All schools have an opportunity for their coaches and teams to share what it means to be a part of the program. To get you fired up. And to connect with other fans. There is no window of time that coaches can't connect to prospective players (or their families) online. And it's even better, since the control is fully in the hands of the prospective athlete. They reach out to connect whenever they want (or don't want).

So far our journey through the conference has shown us #10 USC. Let's keep moving...

#9 Arizona State

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Coach Sendek is doing a nice job Twitter, and his posts are connected into the ASU digital experience. They have a good vision for an active fan community online.

Weaknesses: The content to excite their fan community is pretty empty. Very limited ways to keep in touch with (or experience) the program at all.

Full Scouting Report:
Clicking into the ASU athletics site, here, gives you a heavy dose of Sun Devil branding, but honestly not much more. The experience from the home page doesn't invite a lot of basketball (or other sport) interaction. But I'm going to plug through this and see if I can find some good ways to follow the Sun Devils...

Clicking into Multimedia gave me a chance to sign up to buy CBS All Access (I didn't, sorry CBS fans). I also could not find any references to Twitter or Facebook from this view (more on that later)...

Continuing the search for good stuff, I clicked on Sun Devil Central, which from what I can tell is a pretty good vision for creating a community around the program. But from driving around this area (or taking a look at the next couple of images), you will see they just don't have the content to make this community dynamic. It definitely made me think that they could get much more community by building their story in Facebook and on Twitter, rather than trying to create a new place for fans to go here.

While inside Sun Devil Central, I clicked into the Interactive Zone, then on the Blogs tab (with me still?), and got the image below. I wanted to highlight this because while I hope they one day get the Sun Devil blog going, it seems like something that should be elevated to the front of their website, not buried deep in the site. Make it easy to follow the squad!



The content that was available was very hard to locate. Here are the Podcasts that are found under Sun Devil Central, Fan Zone, Pod Casts (hope you are with me still -- it is pretty deep in the site!) You'll see the image below -- if you were to scroll down for a bit, you'd come to podcasts of Herb Sendek and the Men's Basketball program. Super cool, just super time consuming to find... I'd love to see this content re-organized, elevated, and also presented in a way that gets me excited about subscribing!

Now I clicked into the Men's Basketball section. And I expected more. ASU has a solid program. According to Wikipedia, they have turned out 36 NBA players, including Byron Scott and Fat Lever. Last year they turned out the #3 overall pick, James Harden, and a high second rounder in Jeff Pendergraph. They've been to the dance 12 times, including last year when they took out Temple in the first round as a 6-seed. So the program has history. And they play a pretty active D. As you can see, there is an image at the bottom of the screen of Harden and Pendergraph, but that links to the NBA's site. There is no storytelling. And we come here for a story.



Now it was in one of the most surprising (yet smart and simple) places that ASU came through in a big way. If you click on Coach Sendek's bio, you are shown the page below... which includes a link to follow him on Twitter. Smart. People who click this deeply into the site are looking for a connection with Coach. To learn more. And this is great!


Here's coach Sendek's Twitter link. He does a solid job of updating and being pretty interesting, which will surely let him ramp up the 112 followers he has as of now...




There are to my knowledge no other ASU basketball Twitter sites beyond Coach Sendek. I did find the athletic department Twitter site, Sparky, shown below (or by clicking here). They update pretty often, and have roughly 1,400 followers.


I will make one final call out. Take a look at the little picture boxes in the lower right hand corner of the image above. As you can see, ASU is following a LOT of people. Here's my thought. If you make the assumption that a prospective recruit may be checking out your Twitter page, why would you follow your rival? (See the UCLA icon). To me, it would be like allowing UCLA to post a banner on the ASU athletics website. The nature of Twitter is to allow people to explore and find others to follow and build their network. It's very organic. And I don't think you'd ever see, for example, Adidas follow Nike on Twitter. Just something to ponder...

That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for tomorrow as we break down #8...

Thanks for reading!

Andy