Fostering Communication: Interactivity as a two-way street; The Canes don’t get it yet
Posted by gercohen on December 7, 2006
Assignment: Take one of the theories discussed during the course and apply it to writing for your organization or publication.
Theory: Communication can occur in three basic ways: interpersonal or face-to-face, mediated and mass mediated. Because our audience determines our success, we want feedback, interaction, dialogue, a conversation with our users or readers.
Hypothesis: A sports team official website needs to promote interactivity in order to drive readership and buy-in.
A sports team website such as CarolinaHurricanes.com should exist to provide opportunity for fans to:
- find out game schedules
- purchase tickets
- find out about the team
- purchase merchandise
- find the arena
- interact with team personnel and make suggestions
- interact with each other
The first five items on the list do not require any two-way interactivity, but CarolinaHurricanes.com does provide a link to purchase tickets and to the NHL shop section for Hurricanes merchandise. The last two items on the list above require an effective means of two-way interactivity. Item six can be handled either through a one-way comment process, or through a message board or blog that accepts comments. Item seven can best be handled best with a message board.
Blogs and Message Boards
The Carolina Hurricanes maintain both blogs and a message board, but as I have noted, Canes blog central has blogs from Mike Commodore, TV play-by-play analyst John Forslund, Youth and Amateur coordinator Paul Strand, and Canes Media Relations Director Mike Sundheim. There have only been two or three posts on each of these sites during the season that began over two months ago. The blogs do have a “comments for” feaure that allows a submission, but these submissions either do not post to the blog (either with or without moderation) or no one has submitted any comments. Commodore’s blog has a response form that says “Have a question for Mike? You may send fan mail to Hurricanes defenseman Mike Commodore (or any other Hurricanes player, coach or staff member) at the following address: c/o Community Relations Department, 1400 Edwards Mill Road, Raleigh, N.C. 27607. Or you may submit fan mail electronically via the email form below. It will be forwarded to the appropriate person.” Forslund’s says “Have a question or comment about something John has written? Fill out the form below, and tell him what you think.” Strand’s blog invites “Paul welcomes questions or comments by email – just click here,” while Mike Sundheim’s has a form submit feature at the bottom that says “comments for Mike”. Assuming the recipient of the comment or message responds, there is two way interactivity, but not in the way most people think of blogs. The comment mechanisms are not even standardized between blogs. The Canes blogs are more like commentaries or diaries, the online predecessor of the modern blog. The fact the blogs are updated so infrequently and do not post comments both limits their usefullness to meet the theory of interactivity.
Message Board
The Canes maintain an official message board, “Caniac Corner“. In existence several years, the board went down during the 2006 Stanley Cup Finals, was replaced for a time by a link to an outside board, and was finally put back online October 31, 2006, but with all old messages purged. A Canes official told me in September that the board was taken down during the finals because it had too much traffic. The forum has already registered 570 users since its reinstatement, and has 15,908 posts. There seems to be an unwillingness to commit sufficient resources to this project. For the board to go down for months beginning during the team’s Stanley Cup finals run when the traffic would be most beneficial to the team during the push for merchandise sales after a successful cup run and for season ticket sales for the next year seems pennywise and pound foolish. I have been told that the team has only used free software for its board hosting. The former volunteer admin of the site told me this week that the cheap software does not even allow them to ban users, and this week one character dropped 1200 spam comments on the site, causing them to lock all threads (very useful to the fanbase)
Conclusion
CarolinaHurricanes.com should have as one of its goals the promotion of interactivity between management and the team’s fans. The current level of interactivity is inadequate to meet that goal. Management should:
- seek more frequent blog posting from blog writers.
- allow moderated comments on the blogs.
- use a level of message board hardware and software that will both stand the test of heavy usage during successful years and also allow a level of moderation and supervision to make the board useful and its participants comforatble that they will be insulated from abuse.
