If you followed the thirteen letter scoreboard experiment where scores from MLB, NHL and WHL were posted live after the conclusion of games you will understand the love of sports that permeates from this office.
During the course of the scoreboard experiment the sports featured on the thirteen letter scoreboard were constantly reviewed to insure that what was presented was of the same quality. Compared to last season the WHL has grown leaps and bounds for their presentation of video on social media. This could be aided by the fact that the teams in the East are in a hub where the video delivered to their social media teams is consistent. Having a consistent source of quality video from the team at IKS who is delivering the video for online and broadcast aids the teams. It removes any excuses their social media teams might have in terms of presentation of game posts. Having all of these social media teams in the same rink can only lead to secrets being traded and a challenge to out-perform the other social media teams being front and centre every single day.
A disappointing delivery of video is from the NHL offices this season. Calling it disappointing is justified as the goal review offices are based in a central location for the NHL and rely on multiple angles fed in to their offices for review. What you are seeing from the NHL social media team is hijacked video clips from the teams. Why is this disappointing? Well the NHL has an opportunity to present a different angle, they have a chance to support league sponsors by having their branding on clips and it allows high format clips to be used that teams might not have access to.
There is great room for improvement on the video front and there maybe some challenges that are not known. Social media for the NHL might be located in different offices than the video replay people. On a busy night there can up to twelve games occurring at one time so tracking that many games could be a handful for the social media team.
One nice development this season from the NHL social media team was the score recap on Instagram. In one post they can recap all of the scores with a one sentence recap of the game with a photo and score from every game.
This is a great post to wake up to unless of course your team lost the night before. One challenge the league faces with these is when teams like this meet.
As you can see with Pittsburgh facing Boston they have nearly identical colour schemes and picking your team out quickly can be a challenge.
So why not mix it up a little add more of the teams colour schemes? After all these would be templates that can be made in Photoshop, InDesign, or even Premiere Pro the morning of the match ups where the only thing that needs to be added is the final score and the one sentence recap. So when you have these two teams face each other it can look like this.
This uses the primary colours of the teams and their branding and gives the teams their own identity which when considered for sales of merchandise and sponsorship is quite important.
This scoreboard could even take it a step further and add video using the same branding and include when a team wears its alternate or reverse retro jerseys.
As you can see in the clip that was created, and excuse the poor video quality the division branding which is a league sponsor is larger and there is room for more sponsors to be added in this. Sadly the recap sentence does not match the goal scorer but is a bit more exciting and shows the speed of the game. Something that might intrigue someone who discovers the league’s post for the first time. As much as these posts are to service existing fans they should also be used to capture new fans. Hockey players have a skill set unmatched by other sports and showing this to people can help grow the game better than photos.
This is a great scoreboard that can be made even better but again the social media professionals. It is easy for someone not creating this content to add feedback and add criticism.
Never be afraid to ask for another set of eyes to review your content. Ideas can be generated like you see above that may never have been considered. Ideas might also be presented that are beyond current resources, a fresh set of eyes never hurts and can only lead to better ideas. Content is created daily and the challenge should be always to improve it!
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