Unplugged: The Impact of Thanking Fans

Thanking your fans.

It's a simple thing that really doesn't happen that often. But it is also something that's now taking on a new meaning as we hit this world of social media-driven information. That all came together for me last week as I checked out more NCAA sites.

I hit the Nebraska Athletics page, here, and saw the image below...

As you can note, there's a home page main story about the Huskers AD offering praise to their fans.

Cool!

It's probably because I'm a digital/social geek, but my first reaction was to check out the hub of all Nebraska Fans, Facebook, to see if there was something more here. (OK, not probably, it's definitely because I'm a digital/social geek.)

Naturally, I went on to the Nebraska Facebook Wall - shown below, or here. As you'll note, there is no mention of AD Osborne's praise here, the recap of the game is a link to access the highlights that led to the huge Huskers comeback win.

So, then I went back to Huskers.com and clicked on the home page story, which takes me to the page shown below (or here)... I'm going to paste part of his quote below the image, so you can take in the impact of where things are going...

"We have great fans and we need to acknowledge that and commend them for their loyalty... there's a lot to play for and we're going to need all their support." -- AD Tom Osborne.

Wow.

The soundbyte is big -- an AD takes to the stage to share his love and appreciation for the fans. But the question is what stage has the most impact?

The opportunity in front of us is to deliver said message into the place where fans are, the Facebook Fan page, and not simply to the home page of Huskers.com. That creates quite an impact, and in a cool way, makes the Huskers on Facebook a destination to follow.

Now the point of this article is not to say that Nebraska isn't doing things the right way. They took a soundbyte from their AD and brought it to the home page of their Athletics site. That's a good thing. It's simply a reminder to all of us that we have this monstrous opportunity in front of us to thank those fans who have signaled themselves out as fans of our team/brand. Imagine the impact if Osborne had gone to Facebook to thank fans and then this was reported on Huskers.com?

Scary opportunity!

And this opportunity didn't exist until recently.

Hope you're digging this. Come back Monday as I break down more Digital Best Practices. You can also follow along on Twitter (I'm @andypawlowski, here) and on Facebook,here.

Andy