NBA Best Practices: Charlotte Bobcats Produce Nightly Facebook Photo Albums

The best things in marketing start when you use real behavior and build upon it or encourage it. Take what we're already doing and make it better or easier or mean more than if we did it on our own.

The Charlotte Bobcats do this with photography, and they do it in Facebook.

Let's start our journey on the Charlotte Bobcats home page....

Hovering over News, we'll choose Game Recaps. Clicking in takes you here, to a pretty thorough home of all things around each game. It's almost overwhelming -- and, trapped amongst the Game Blog, Lady Cats Galleries, Player videos, and Q&A is "Facebook Fan Gallery" for each day...

Intrigued, I clicked in. As you'll see below (or here), each game is packed with a DEEP collection of photos from the night.

So what the Bobcats are doing is taking what fans already do (posting pictures of themselves on Facebook) and making it better. They are putting these photos into the official team album (so the fans are in effect official/legit). They are also packaging the album inside the official log of the night, with their team videos and recaps. In fact, this is called out as "News".

But I challenge that this is only scratching the surface of value for the Bobcats (or your team)...

The question is, how can we make this better?

First, this is packaged inside news but it isn't elevated to its potential. What if we could see these photos alongside the game action? (So the fans were in effect part of the story of the game, rather than just a link inside this?) The other opportunity here is for fans to tag themselves. If they identify themselves they both get more street cred (the fan is now tagged in the album of the team) and they announce this cred to their friends. And, hopefully, this will encourage more growth of the Bobcats Facebook base. Right now it isn't as easy to find yourself inside the album, but the potential is extreme...

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