NBA Digital Disciple Series: 5 Learnings from the Sacramento Kings

30 teams. 7 weeks. 2 bloggers. 1 mission: to share our learnings of how NBA teams uniquely leverage digital tools to build fan community.

As students, or disciples of the game, we'll supply you with the doctrine - 5 takeaways per team - and then raise you one enhancement suggestion for each learning that's highlighted. (One way to make the great even greater)

Then, we'll wrap it up, pick a winner, and send you on your merry way to spread the gospel.

Cool?

Thus far, we've covered the Nets, Timberwolves, and Wizards. Our full schedule is available here.

Let's move.

Let's take a look at the digital connections made by the Sacramento Kings (link here, image above). Here's 5 things to inspire you, along with a Plus One to make each better.

1. Celebrate what you have.

Not everyone does this, but the Kings definitely did. Hit their home page and you get stopped with a message of success. There's a splash page (shown above and you can find it here) for Tyreke Evans and his 20/5/5 rookie season... side note, wow.

This features a 4 minute highlight reel, that lets you feel the excitement the Kings have for the future. Doing this not only paints the team around success, but also shows the team that they will elevate the successes!

Plus One: Could they connect fans to this experience? Perhaps it's as simple as asking others to voice a word of congrats for Tyreke? The Kings have elevated him, but could let fans join in on the fun.

2. Full Court Press Blog

The Kings deliver a blog that features a network of 9 people close to the squad: 3 Dance Squad members, 2 team reporters, a strength coach, a VP of Basketball Operations, and 2 players into one feed. Smart, as taking 9 contributors and bringing them together makes you feel like the site is alive.

Naturally, the star of this show is rookie Tyreke Evans (shown below)...

This likely worked out even better than anticipated. The Kings signed up rookie Tyreke Evans to give insight into his season on their site. This has been an ongoing feature that you can see here. And, as his season grew, the significance of his role on the site definitely rose!

Plus One: I like this strategy a lot. Where I think this could go is for someone to moderate this conversation -- to keep all 9 of the contributors on the same topic. Rather than feeling like a feed of 9 experts, can you imagine the power if it felt like these 9 were all weighing in with different perspectives on the same topic?

3. The Kings Photo Blog

I am a big fan of photos. And I've never seen anything like this one! The Kings created a photo blog, which publishes new photos every Thursday. See this here. You can then click in and share any photo you want, as you can see below.

Plus One: The description of this blog includes this line, "Most of the images come from the Kings New Media Team, local photo bloggers, Rocky Widner and Getty Images, who license them to the Sacramento Kings for our use." So essentially, these pictures are licensed for the Kings from many sources. But how could we get fans to participate? Could we create a weekly contest, where the top fan images get posted alongside these? Seems simple but uniting!

4. The Dance Team's on Facebook

As you can see here, the Sacramento Kings Dance Team (SKDT) is on Facebook. This is pretty smart. The opportunity of jumping into the conversation with males and young girls by elevating a dance squad is big. And Facebook is a great forum to do just this. It's a different way of getting the Kings to the top of the conversation.

To top this off, they are pretty active. They treat their 1,200 fans to a deep YouTube video collection and photo galleries (see below).

Plus One: Pictures. Can the SKDT create an opportunity for fans to get their pictures taken with their favorite dancer and then grab it from Facebook? I think there is quite a bit of buzz for having yourself tagged inside an SKDT album. And buzz = more eyeballs.

5. Kings Facebook Live.

The Kings Facebook page has over 27,000 fans (link here). And they have set up Facebook to become a point of uniting the fans around topics. While there are no events scheduled now, you can see just how easy they make it. Come to the Facebook page, click on "Live", and join in the chatter.

Plus One: Schedules. I'm guessing there'll be a live event around the NBA Draft in June. There should always be updates on when to come back. If the Kings can take this foundation and build upon it with a plan for the upcoming season.... Wow.

Hope you enjoyed this. Tune in tomorrow (here) as Peter Robert Casey breaks down the 76ers. And click here to follow me on Twitter.

Andy