The America East Blog Extends to Social Media

Let's return again to the blog of the America East Conference, AExtra, linked here and shown below. As you know by now, I'm a big fan of the blog's style and make up. But today I want to go a layer deeper, into how the conference leverages Social Media to extend the footprint of this blog.

Let's dive into the "Why Social Media?" question. If you have a great blog, won't people just bookmark it and come back each day? Maybe. But in my opinion, the goal isn't to have people visit AExtra each day (or your website, for that matter). The goal should be to engage with your content each day, wherever you can make that connection.

As you will note in the image below, the America East Conference does a fantastic job of leveraging Twitter to spread the word of this blog and YouTube to host an archive of the video pieces. (In a very simple to digest style on the right hand side of the page!) In fact, I am not sure I've ever seen as simple a YouTube widget on an NCAA Blog -- nice work here!

How could things be better? As you'll note on the America East Facebook page (linked here), the conference is currently missing an opportunity to start a daily conversation with each of the fan bases around their messages. When you take into account that the blog is co-written by 9 students (who are likely up on Facebook), you can sense the magnitude of opportunity in front of us. It's not merely an opportunity to tell a story in Facebook, but rather an opportunity to have 9 people helping you curate a social conversation. Can you feel the power?

America East week continues tomorrow. We'll wrap the week up with 3 peaks into things I found fantastic across the 9-team conference landscape.

Don't forget, you can follow along via the Digital Hoops Blast Facebook page (linked here) or on Twitter -- I'm @pawlow34.

Andy