NBA Best Practices: Sacramento Kings Identify their Twitter Influencers

What if you knew who the most influential people in the world of digital around your team were? Would you do anything different? Would you do everything different? Big questions that the Sacramento Kings are out to answer.

Let's dive in. Hit the Sacramento Kings website and look down the page...

You'll come across this window, for both Facebook Fans and Klout Twitter influencers. What's this all about? Let's zoom in...

As you'll will see on the box below, the Kings are elevating individual Twitter followers, by Twitter handle and Klout score.

Clicking in reveals a little more information about this program. Check the box below:

Interesting. So the Kings are working with an expert group, Klout, to rank their fans from most to least most in Twitter. Higher scores indicate these are fans with more influence on others socially. Or, to put it more direct, the higher the score, the more likely what they say is to be noticed and/or acted upon. (their influence score) The leaderboard visually rewards fans with prestige. If you're a big Kings fan, having the kind of exposure shown below is a big deal.

So what does this all mean? As you'll see on the Kings Facebook page, here, the Kings are after creating an experience for their most influential fans. I'm not sure exactly what the details are, but from the gallery, the Kings are creating exclusive events for their most influential and they hype it for all to see. As an added bonus, doing this creates a reason for Klout influencers to come to their Facebook page.

How could this be better? Love the idea, and it's easy to say "more, more, more." But I'd like to see 2 things: 1) publicize a list of exclusive access or events that those in the Influencer set will get -- thus making this club feel even more aspirational and 2) tag the individuals in the Facebook galleries -- thus getting more exposure in their social stream.

Great learnings here -- I'm fired up!

Come back tomorrow as we check out another best practice from the NBA. And as always, you can follow me on Twitter (I'm @pawlow34) or on Facebook (Digital Hoops Blast).

Thanks!

Andy