I often wish there was a new media version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to help you navigate through the digital space. Would be quite fun and handy – and invaluable if it came with the words DON’T PANIC on the cover. (They could probably work in some auto-voiced javascript pop-up).
That would be a reassuring reference point for all those times, occurring more and more often, where you feel the pressure mounting, the blood-pressure rising, on news of release of yet another ‘something’ that you may have to build, so that your brand doesn’t become a galactic backwater, and ultimately obliterated like Earth in HHGTTG.
So it is that your ten minutes scheduled relaxation time is disturbed by news on your Twitter feed of yet another ‘something’ to worry about. It’s a football club launching on Pinterest, a magnificent new form of geo-location integration, yet another upgrade of yet another browser that will mess with your javascript pop-ups… maybe it’s just me, but that seems to be happening with increasing regularity?
Well, DON’T PANIC. Just remind yourself you can’t do everything, and a lot of things really aren’t the right things for your business/club/sport in any case.
Resources are the most natural brake on platform proliferation: you can’t afford it; and even if you could, you can’t afford to maintain it afterwards either money-wise or people-wise or both.
The key is having confidence in your own convictions, understanding your audience as well as you can, and picking the right moment to jump on board. Those simple days of just having a website seem a sepia-tinted yesteryear already. And thank heavens for that. The stress levels may have mounted, but so have the interest levels and the opportunities to speak to your fans.
The classic point of lift-off for us at ECB was the Ashes summer of 2009. The iPhone was out there, the audience had massed, we had a major sporting point of focus, the time was ripe to plunge into the app pool. In the interim we’ve taken similar judgements and expanded across Android, Nokia and BlackBerry, lots of social media and lots of other things.
While we do so much more than we did in those halcyon days of the Noughties, there’s loads we’ll never go near. They don’t work for cricket, there’s no potential audience growth or upside, or someone already does it so darn well we couldn’t compete.
Why try something if you can’t make a success of it, or are simply going to launch it into the new media space and let it orbit aimlessly like a slowly ailing hunk of digital junk?
Having some idea of how you’ll quantify that success always helps: your xxx,xxx downloads, data capture, engagement metric of choice…
There’s probably a hyper-complicated pan-galactic formula out there to help you make the calculation? In the meantime, stick to your guns (or gargle blasters), pick your moment, get your budget and resources in line, prioritise what works for you – and most importantly DON’T PANIC.
Julian Goode is Head of New Media at the England and Wales Cricket Board. With a background in sports journalism, he has been working at Lord’s since 1997.
The views of our regular columnists are independent, and as such do not represent those of Leaders in Digital Sport.
THIS MONTH’S ARTICLES:
PHIL LINES (LAGARDERE UNLIMITED): FIFA TV – FAR FETCHED OR FAST FORWARD?
RICHARD AYERS (MANCHESTER CITY FC): TOWARDS DATATAINMENT
JOSH ROBINSON (SPORTS REVOLUTION): SOCIALLY-SUPERCHARGING THE CONNECTED STADIUM
DAN MCLAREN (UK SPORTS NETWORK): PINTEREST – THE NEWEST FRONTIER
