Big 12 College Basketball Marketing: #4 Oklahoma

Let's continue our analysis of the Big 12 Conference -- breaking down how programs communicate with young athletes from a digital point of view.

Websites and digital marketing create an opportunity for coaches and programs to share what they stand for. The internet is always there, and always on. And, as they do on the court, the best programs take advantage of opportunities.

So let's keep moving. Thus far our Big 12 journey has shown us #12 Texas Tech, #11 Colorado, #10 Texas, #9 Kansas, #8 Oklahoma State, #7 Missouri, #6 Iowa State, and #5 Kansas State.

#4: Oklahoma

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Great blog. Great Icons. Great job by Coach Capel on Twitter.

Weaknesses: Insane video depth is not leveraged in basketball section or YouTube.

Full Scouting Report:

The Oklahoma home page has a distinctly different feel to it, from any other site we've come across. Very clean, very simple. I actually really like this.

Scrolling down the page and you'll get to a surprising sea of videos. I am a fan -- it's a lot of video, but somehow still has a clean feel to it. I only wish there was a way to elevate some of this a little higher on the page. Maybe the top video of the week?




When you click in, to view all videos, you have the ability to sort by sport. Then you can see the world that is OU Basketball video content. And the clean, well it kind of goes away for now... There is no shortage of content, I just wish there was more focus on getting these to you. Seems like you have the content to elevate a video every day. To allow people to subscribe. But give them an "A" for content depth.

Back to the home page, we'll focus in on the Multimedia Menu. As you can see below, this will give us access to OU on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Cool. I hope you found them though, as this is another very long menu.

The OU Facebook page is kept very fresh, with lots of updates posted by the Athletics Department - a big part of how they've grown a pretty active home for 64,000 fans. As you would expect, this is for all sports.

The Sooners YouTube channel is shown below (or here). The channel is well designed, and pretty popular with 110o subscribers. They posted a pretty solid Year-in-Review video here - a sign that they do a nice job of posting original content. The only thing I'd hope to see is that ability to filter by basketball (or by sport I mean)...

The OU Twitter page is here. They are at around 6000 followers, and post very actively across all sports. I'd call this more of an observational style than I would an insight style, if that makes sense. It is well done, just would love to feel like there's more original content. As you can see in the bottom right, OU also does follow a lot of other programs including Georgia and Northern Iowa. That's pretty weird to me, and a little distracting.

Like Kansas and Missouri, OU has the Sooner Sports iPhone application available (must be a Big 12 thing?) Same layout, same style, same $4.99 price, but still pretty cool when you have an engine producing original videos like OU does. Nice.

The basketball home page is pretty powerful. At first glance, you'll note a nice system of icons to follow the Sooners. Just to the right of the main window are grayed out logos for Twitter (the one I'm mousing over here), Facebook, YouTube, mobile alerts, and email updates. Very clean, very easy, very solid.



Scroll down the page and it really comes to life. Wow. I almost wish this image was higher up on the page. This is just powerful stuff!




My favorite part of this area is the OU Men's Basketball blog, which you can bookmark from here. This blog is really outstanding - providing updates from practice, even posting practice video clips to go along with the general team updates. It's the style that makes this blog great - check this example,

"Jeff Capel has mentioned on numerous occasions over the past couple of weeks that rebounding is his biggest concern entering the 2009-10 season. Considering the Sooners lost the country's best rebounder (Blake Griffin averaged 14.4 in 2008-09) and return just 29 percent of their rebounding from last year, it's an understandable worry. So how does Capel approach finding a solution? The answer is the Bubble Drill -- a practice exercise where the squad splits up into three four-man teams, battling for missed shots that carom off the plastic lid placed on the basket. It's no holds barred and it's physical. When it's over, the winning team watches the two losing teams run." NICE.

This area also gives access to the OU Hoops Media Guide, available as a series of PDFs. Not the best experience, but at least the info is presented.

The one thing that isn't included on the site from what I could tell is that Coach Capel is up and fairly active on Twitter. Here's the link. He's got over 4700 followers and shares content about his team and former players (lots of Blake Griffin here, as there should be). Nice.



As you can tell, OU does a pretty good job. Good content, pretty good branding... bringing us to our final 3 squads. Tune in tomorrow as we take this one step closer.

Thanks for reading,

Andy