How To Score A Winning Social Media Touchdown

It’s that time of the year again, no longer can one spend 10 hours on Sunday just sitting in front of the TV flipping through NFL games. The Lions are at halftime? Just switch over the Seahawks. Are they arguing a call? Well, let’s just see how the Bengals are doing. So now with only four games to watch this weekend, and just two the following week, all leading up to the The Super Bowl, what will sports fans do with all this extra free time?

In the scope of just this one week, there is only a mere four hours of pro football to watch. But don’t think the media won’t try to capitalize on our obsession with this sport. There will be pre- and post-game talks dissecting everything from former match ups, offenses, defenses, injuries, quarterback ratings, coaching match ups, weather, celebration dances, the type of music they practice to two days before the game… (you see how irrelevant this is getting, right?) But that’s the thing, it doesn’t matter how loosely related the subject seems to get — they’ve lured us in with the promise of more and more insider information before the big game. But how in the world did they get us to care so much about which color combination uniforms they will be wearing on Sunday?

The key to really building buzz is to create a story!

Major media is notorious for doing this in the sports world. The Colts v. Broncos game this year became “The Return of Peyton Manning to his Motherland,” spinning it as a new talent versus old, complete with a Peyton tribute at halftime. Nevermind the 21 other guys on the field. Last year’s Super Bowl became “The Harbaugh Bowl” spun from the competing head coaches being brothers. The same thing happens anytime Peyton and Eli Manning match up.

Last weekend’s Saints v. Eagles game featured quarterbacks who played football at the same high school 10 years apart, so the media was poised to ask: How are these Westlake High grads going to stack up given Nick Foles broke all of Drew Brees’s QB records while playing there? (Because of course how they played decades ago will probably play a huge part in their current careers.)

If people judged my design capabilities by what I was doing back in high school, they’d just have to assume my best work boils down to a poorly drawn horse, a cartoon of my 10th grade English teacher, and a heart with the name of my crush elegantly scribbled inside, all in the margins of my 30 cent spiral notebook next to some notes on the Civil War. Are we catching on to the irrelevancy yet? Yet, marketers know that these hooks work. In an effort to garner larger audiences and build awareness, this is the fodder that will get tweeted and posted to Facebook.

So I guess we don’t really have all that free time we thought we did. The media isn’t going to just let us off that easy when they know we’re just craving that new story to hold us over until next Sunday. So next time you’re posed with a marketing conundrum, just take it from the NFL: Use an interesting spin on something small to create a story and build awareness.