Mountain West Conference Best Practices: Utah's Social Media Takeover

This blog is all about inspiration. Today's the final day of 3 days elevating best practices from the squads that make up the MWC. You can tune in on this blog, or you can follow along on Facebook (linked here) or on Twitter -- I'm @pawlow34.

What makes something a best practice? This isn't about the most intricate experience. It's about looking at the world from your consumer's point of view and delivering something that hits it right smack on the head. In the case of colleges, I'm treating the primary consumer as that prospective student athlete.

Thus far, we've seen how New Mexico gives us the inside look on their legendary gym (here),and how TCU gives us powerful recruiting consistency (here).

Let's finish up...

Hit the Utah Athletics home page and be ready to have your mind blown. I've always advocated making it easy for your fans (or prospective recruits) to keep in touch. And I don't think I've come across anyone who made it easier to do just this than Utah. Check the image below...

You'll see the Social Networks callout in the main navigation. I love this. All too often these are buried under the best available header... something like "Multimedia" or "Fan Zone". Not at Utah. And, when you hover over Social Networks, you get the glorious image below!

Wow. Now you might not have noticed it but the lower part of the home page also calls out Social Networks. As you can see in the image below, clicking in allows Utah to easily lay out for you the means you have to stay in touch with the program of your choosing. Nice!

It's probably no accident the Utah Athletics Facebook page has almost 35,000 fans (shown below).

How could this be better? I love the home page near takeover and all the attention to social networks. But I'd love to see these networks work together. That might happen by building them into the main storylines on the site (like we saw earlier this week with the MWC). Or it might be by giving us one page that we can actually understand what these options are, without having to explore them all, one-by-one. But wow, what a visual statement!

That's it for MWC Week!

Come back next week as we take on another league... And, don't forget, you can follow along on Facebook (here) or on Twitter: I'm @pawlow34.

Andy