Return of the Twitterz?: Twitter handle painted on M Baseball field
not the Big House.
Ditto
How exactly does the athletic department benefit off of twitter?
well, based on my 15mins of watching Nashville, twitter follows & #hashtags and facebook likes & followers are one way for souless marketing people to measure the worth of a brand.
2. Twitter keeps them informed of upcoming events
3. Fans but tickets to said events
4. Profit.
How exactly does the athletic department benefit off of MGoBlue.com?
The twitter handle links to MGoBlue.com quite often. I tend to think of all of the UM Athletic Twitter handles as an extension of that website. They drive more clicks to the website and all that fancy internet click/impression/pageview mumbojumbo allows the AD to make those millions.
Shouldn't take a marketing degree to figure out the answer.
Disagree. The people who go to Michigan baseball games are very aware that there is a baseball team. The games, like the revolution, are not televised, so there isn't a wider audience drawn to Michigan baseball through spending a little time and a little money to have the handle drawn on the field.
My personal view is that Twitter and Facebook campaigns are usually hyper lazy marketing platforms with little or no return on the time/money invested. Perhaps I'm wrong, but the Twitter and Facebook analytics are designed by Twitter and Facebook to make you believe that all sorts of people who already use a product/service are in fact new, unique customers that will result in significant growth in profits.
Of course, this isn't always the case, but think about it this way. The Athletic Department just tried to draw awareness to a product people were already using. The equivalent would be advertising Michigan football on MGoBlog and hoping for a bump in ticket sales. MGoBlog draws eyeballs that are already very interested in Michigan football, so the gesture is probably not worthwhile, even though the link might gets lots of clicks.
Michigan Stadium, due to television, draws a lot of eyeballs that aren't closely associated with Michigan football, making it a more ideal place to advertise a Twitter handle (please don't read this AD). I don't care that they put the handle on the field, but it's a wasted effort, in my opinion.
I never said it works. The principle behind it is still pretty obvious, though.
I disagree with you here. First of all, it isn't a whole lot of time and money invested. Setting up a Twitter account - quick and free. Drawing the handle on the field - quick and cheap. Having some student tweet out updates during games and relevant news outside of games - relatively cheap, only a minor distraction from other duties. So it is very little time and money invested.
The return could be great though. As you mentioned, not many people away from the game will see the handle. However, the people at the game will, and will be much more likely to tweet about the game because of it. That should lead to people away from the game hearing about it from those at the game. How many of those people will be more likely to go once they hear people they know tweeting about it? Who knows, but it's certainly more than if no one was tweeting about it.
For an operation as small as Michigan Baseball advertising, this is a can't miss opportunity. Very cheap investment, fans not on the payroll do most of the work, and traditional methods of advertising with the same reach cost orders of magnitude more. What's to lose?
Thanks for the kind words.
Not at Michigan Stadium, but I don't see the harm in doing it at any of the other venues.
In todays society everythings about "brand name", it is DBs job to grow the brand.
I think Twitter is great for fans. I won't watch M Softball on GameTracker 99% of the time, but I like their in-game tweets. Say what you want about the marketing aspect, but this will likely help M Baseball fans connect with the program, or at least some of them.
Probably superfluous in a 115k seat stadium (and I agree it doesn't keep with the aesthetic M has) or maybe even for basketball and hockey, but if this gets people to follow on Twitter and get that connection/information, what's the harm?
Our program adapting to the times...weird.
As long as we are winning who cares..
...useless outrage.
For a lower-profile/non-revenue sport like baseball, anything they can do to bump up their group of core followers up is good idea. It's probably a low-return sort of thing, but it's pretty much free, so why not.
I see a big difference between this and a Michigan football hashtag. Michigan baseball can slide under the radar, whereas Michigan football is... yeah.