By Vinayak Yannam
In a more traditional sense, fan engagement is two-way communication between the team/club and the fans that support them’. It essentially boils down to tweets, likes, shares and comments. Teams and clubs today are using traditional social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Some have even made the move to short video format social networking apps like Chingari etc. A few ISL clubs have launched their apps to stay connected with their fans
Content across all the traditional social media platforms are focused on matchday updates, team news, behind the scenes (BTS) and certain teams are also happy to venture into meme culture and trolling using memes. What has been consistently visible is there are very negligible avenues for fans to engage in a meaningful way where they can influence certain decisions of the team itself. Very recently, the new IPL franchises were able to incorporate fan feedback in terms of deciding their respective team names. Although this was a success, the limitations related to traditional social media platforms will perhaps prevent them to repeat similar fan engagement content in the future.
With the ongoing pandemic, the return of fans to stadiums and venues remains uncertain. This impacts ticketing revenues for a lot of teams, but lack of meaningful engagement may start to impact other revenue sources such as merchandising. Teams and their respective social media teams are following templatised engagement models for matchday updates. There have been instances where some of the biggest football clubs such as Manchester United struggle to develop content without repeatedly creating posts around the marquee summer signing of Cristiano Ronaldo. Off-season engagement is an uphill task for most teams, especially those who do not have a year-long schedule such as Kabaddi or ISL.
Sports tech platforms, especially those which have technologies such as blockchain, AR/VR, gamification embedded in them, will be driving an elevated fan engagement and experience.
Let’s start with blockchain technology, this can help teams create tokenized memberships or as it’s popularly known as ‘fan tokens’ to transition their ‘passive fans’ to ‘invested fans’. The fan token model is an established fan engagement model in Europe and is expected to be adopted rapidly through Asia. The fan tokens enable both the teams and the fans to help influence various levels of team decisions. For example, it can be something as simple as deciding the entrance music when the team enters the arena or something more strategic such as voting the design of next season’s jersey. Both can elevate fan engagement. A similar poll on Twitter can easily be sabotaged and as a matter of fact, the team itself may decide not to implement the result.
Binding and non-binding polls powered by blockchain smart contracts enable full transparency on the results as well as ensure only the ‘invested fans’ are involved in the decision making.
Player auctions and transfer windows, a period where both teams and fans are heavily invested in the developments can be utilized to drive engagement and fan opinions right before the start of the window itself. Fans can structure their potential starting teams for the upcoming season and through the fan token mechanism win rewards at the end of the window in the form of reward points that can be converted to fan tokens. Currently, no reward mechanisms exist for fans to correctly predict the starting line-up of their future team.
Further, AR/VR related content, such as location-based treasure hunts can be incorporated for the team to unlock deals and fan token related rewards. For example, the teams can reward their invested fans that visit certain parts of their stadium to unlock reward points by simply purchasing a brand partner product, let’s say a coffee and posting a selfie with the product.
Gamification is an engagement avenue that is currently unavailable on traditional social media platforms is going to be key for year-round engagement. Play to earn and move to earn games on blockchain technology offer great avenues for fans to be engaged during the offseason. Again, the rewards for this type of engagement can be in the form of fan tokens that can be redeemed for merchandise or financial gain.
Some of the other fan engagement elements that can be incorporated into a single tech platform include fantasy leagues, exclusive match day/guest box access, NFT drops, exclusive player signing reveals, podcast integration, among others. To conclude, sports tech solutions will become an integral and potentially one-stop-shop solution for teams when it comes to engaging their fans in a meaningful and rewarding manner.
(The author is co-founder and chief business officer, SportZchain. Views expressed are personal.)