West Coast Conference Does a YouTube Day for Men's Basketball

Media Days are great when the Media is the local newspaper and TV station. But when, as we all know, social media made everyone the media, the idea of a Media Day that brought in only a small percentage of people makes less sense.

In this age, what can we do to innovate this idea?

I was ecstatic to see the steps taken by the West Coast Conference this past week. On Thursday, they set up shop at YouTube and put together a schedule that put every coach live, to the world, on YouTube. This was to take place on YouTube's new Live channel, here.

The question to start with is, how do you learn about this live stream?

When you hit the WCC Website, here, you could see that the conference was holding a Men's Basketball tip off event at YouTube. I'm intrigued, but I think the conference could have hyped this even further. (Be proud of this, it's really innovative!)

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The experience itself, shown in the next couple screen grabs shows coaches sitting down fielding questions from a moderator. You'll also note the hashtag, #WCChoops, in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Nice.

If you do a search, you'll see quite a bit of use of this hashtag. And I love the integration of the hashtag into the video.

Finally, head over to the WCC on Facebook (here). I loved seeing what you see below -- the schools in the conference were posting on the WCC's wall during the chat. While they posted in hopes of getting more questions for their coach, doing so made them a LOT more personal.

Instead of using the same model for Basketball Media Day, the WCC took their coaches to YouTube's offices and put them Live on the internet to field coaches from fans. They hyped it through a custom hashtag and prime time space on their website and Facebook pages. Huge step for defining the WCC as an Innovator! If you want to watch the full 2 hours, simply click in below.

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

Andy