SEC College Basketball Marketing: #8 Vanderbilt

Let's continue our journey, looking at how programs are communicating to young athletes (or fans) from a digital point of view. Websites and digital marketing are the great equalizer -- a place where every program can 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.
Let's keep moving.

Thus far we've seen #12 Alabama, #11 Mississippi State, #10 Auburn, and #9 LSU.

#8 Vanderbilt

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Great Twitter integration into the basketball section + a nice athletics blog.

Weaknesses: I'd love more of a statement from Coach Stallings - more definition on what his program stands for.

Full Scouting Report:

Hitting the Vanderbilt Athletics home page,




Note the icons



The Vanderbilt Facebook page has 3300 fans. They are really active, posting for all sports but they share videos, game updates, blog posts, and do a nice job of engaging the fan base.

Vanderbilt took their Blog posts and built them into a separate Facebook tab. Smart.

The Commodores YouTube channel is really deep. Incredibly active, and lots of game highlights posted here. This is one of the better YouTube channels I've come across - my only challenge is to enable subscribing by sport. Overall though, very solid.

Clicking on Twitter takes you to this directory.

From here, you can access the Athletics Twitter or filter down to the Basketball Twitter. The Athletics Twitter has 675 followers, and covers all sports in a factual style.

Meanwhile the Basketball Twitter has 380 followers - largely a collection of live game mini-updates. The updates are good, but factual/observational and not the insight I'd love to see. So all-in-all it's an ok site, just needing more emotion and connection that'll come from that.

Lastly, clicking on the Blogs gets you right into the VU Commodores Blog, here. They post updates on all programs, with a little flavor (even sharing "Word Up" by Cameo in response to the squad getting ranked in the Top 25). It's a well done blog.

The Multimedia Menu gets you access to all of this content, along with Podcasts.



These Podcasts are across all sports, giving you ability to check out the Kevin Stallings show on iTunes... but you need to take everything else with it if you want to subscribe.

I was excited to see a "For Recruits" Menu, but as you'll see below it contains mostly what I'd call paperwork.

Clicking on to the Men's Basketball home page, you'll see a main image in the window and the Basketball Twitter feed pumped into the site.

I'll zoom in on this, first. This is really solid, and when you add this placement of Twitter, with the fact that they update it in real time during games, you get an incredible basketball site on game days... Now the question becomes how to make this site more of a destination during games?

Elsewhere on the basketball site, Vanderbilt gives you access to a lot of in-game photography.

Each game is packed with great imagery. Solid.

And, finally, you can download or browse the Commodores Basketball Media Guides online.

In the end, Vanderbilt gives us a great foundation for a program in the future. The pieces are here: Twitter, Photography, Blog. They just need more personality and emotion and we're rolling.

Tune in tomorrow as we keep moving.

Andy