I met a couple people at NACMA who asked for some background on our ChooseYourOwnTickets.com site... Be careful what you wish for, here's more than you could ever want to know:

Target

Our primary target was people interested in learning more about tickets but who felt intimidated to call a sales representative on the phone. Our outbound sales team has done a fantastic job at converting prospects when given the opportunity to speak individually on a one-to-one basis, but we needed a way to 1) make people feel comfortable enough to call or 2) replicate the personal feel of a one-to-one conversation online. Our secondary target was a broad mix of all past buyers, alumni and basketball fans in Milwaukee.

Goal

Our bottom-line goal was to break even on our investment with row27 to develop, host and maintain the site. We also wanted to improve our customer service, as measured by 1) fewer general, time-consuming, non-buying questions to our ticket office staff, 2) more calls to our sales representatives from fans with specific, buying questions and 3) fans being more ready to buy when they do call a ticket representative. Lastly, we wanted fans to feel like they were a part of our program and to forward the site to their friends and family.

Details/Logistics

We feel that printing ticket brochures is an antiquated strategy, as it is overly expensive, untraceable and boring. ChooseYourOwnTickets.com was designed to be the complete opposite: fully-traceable, viral, interactive and engaging at a minimal investment.

Created by row27 Studios, ChooseYourOwnTickets.com was inspired by the classic “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, whereby the reader can make decisions regarding how to let the story unfold. Our ticketing microsite is designed in the same fashion, whereby the user is prompted to enter their preferences regarding number of games they would like to attend, where they prefer to sit, how much they would be willing to spend, and so on. The site then presents the best fit based on these preferences, suggesting the person’s ideal ticket package. Potential buyers are then able to purchase the tickets online right away, or are given a number to call if they would feel more comfortable purchasing over the phone.

The language used on the site is intentionally informal, as we wanted to decrease the intimidation factor as much as possible. We want to communicate to fans that they shouldn’t be afraid to give us a call, that we’re not slick used-car-like salesmen, but rather friendly people who genuinely want to help them enjoy Marquette Basketball however they feel comfortable.

ChooseYourOwnTickets is also designed to upsell fans who were originally interested in a smaller plan/package; both the single-game ticket page and mini-plan ticket page give fans the option to learn more about how to get better seats through a full-season ticket package.

Additionally, the site lets people input their information if they would prefer to simply have one of our representatives contact them directly. Fans are also encouraged to share the site with friends and family via Twitter, Facebook and email.

All links to purchase tickets online were tagged with a unique “Came From Code” which allows us to trace all sales that originated from the site. A Google Analytics account was also created to monitor web traffic.

Results

ChooseYourOwnTickets.com significantly out-performed all of our goals. Ticket sales revenue from the coded links alone more than doubled our total investment – a figure that does not include sales from individuals who preferred to call us directly instead of checking out online. We did our best to track call-ins – a conservative estimate of this amount is roughly equal to that online sales. Overall, the site more than quadrupled our investment before accounting for the intangible benefits of improved customer service.

On top of this direct revenue, our ticket office received notably fewer calls from people with the usual time-wasting questions/complaints, and those that did call in were better educated and more ready and willing to buy.

As of February 15, 2011, the site has been visited 19,856 times from 16,689 unique IPs. Roughly 75% of this traffic came during our peak season-ticket sales season, as we averaged about 1,520 hits per week from the site’s launch in mid-August through the end of October. These numbers were aided by the site’s sharing features, as 857 visits originated from either Facebook or Twitter.

Anecdotally, our fanbase’s reception of the site was overwhelmingly positive. We noticed comments (from real fans/student/alumni, not affiliated with our department in any way) on Twitter saying things such as:

- “Coolest website I've ever seen for buying tickets to a basketball game. Way to go @muathletics”
- “So I am pretty much in love w/ Marquette's ticket site: http://chooseyourowntickets.com/ Interactive, customized, awesome.” 
- “Holy cow, the @MUAthletics #mubb ticket website is amazing. Freaking out about it with my co-workers. http://bit.ly/byoJ7c”

Since the site’s launch, we only received negative feedback from one person: an elderly woman who called to tell us that she was offended by the inappropriate language on the site, specifically the word, “cool.”

Images

(download)

Click here to download:

nacma-recap-chooseyourowntickets-com-cFyAeudwGonzHjrGxjCb.zip (5.17 MB)

I'm planning out a presenation for NACMA tomorrow with @johncanaday of Banshee Music... Here's our outline plus a handout of our favorite game day songs...

Outline

Choice of music at key points of games can have dramatic effects on arena atmosphere

            Band vs. Canned Music, what's the ratio

Hot Timeouts

            Speed is Everything

            Our job in marketing is to sustain crowd energy throughout timeout

 Try new music

            Chicago Blackhawks – Chelsea Dagger

            Jock Jams was barely cool when it came out

  Social Media

            Engage fans before and during games

            Song of the game

 Research and Testing

            Pandora & SiriusXM for new song ideas

            Get feedback before major launch

Brian & John’s Favorite Gameday Songs 

                                                                                              
PRE-GAME 

GOAL: Build energy and excitement in arena; fun, upbeat and motivational; Good window to play newer & more modern songs

Artist:                                     Song:                         

Arcade Fire                            Ready to Start

Blackalicious                          Excellent        

B.o.B.                                       Beast Mode

Electric Six                             Danger! High Voltage

Empire of the Sun                 Walking on a Dream

Fabolous                                My Time        

Kaiser Chiefs                          Ruby / I Predict a Riot

LCD Soundsystem                 All My Friends

Lloyd Banks                           Start it Up                              

Mute Math                              Electrify

My Morning Jacket                I’m Amazed

Nas                                          Hero

Passion Pit                             Moth’s Wings

Pharrell                                  Number One                         

Phil Collins                             In the Air Tonight    

Saul Williams                         List of Demands

The Soft Pack                         Answer to Yourself    

The Strokes                           You Only Live Once

T.I.                                           I’m Back        

Vampire Weekend                Cousins

The Who                                Eminence Front                    

Yeah Yeah Yeahs                   Zero                               

HOT TIMEOUTS  

GOAL: Call-To-Action music, Up-tempo and High Energy to sustain momentum & atmosphere

Artist:                                     Song:                         

The Fratellis                          Chelsea Dagger

The Hives                               Tick Tick Boom

House of Pain                        Jump Around

Todd Rundgren                     Bang the Drum All Day

Zombie Nation                       Kernkraft 400

OUT-OF-TIMEOUT

GOAL: Maintain fan excitement and energy; enhance drama and elevate the moment  

Artist:                                     Song:                         

Arcade Fire                            Wake Up

Dropkick Murphy’s               Shipping Up to Boston

Franz Ferdinand                   Take Me Out 

Linkin Park                            Bleed it Out

Silverspun Pickups                Panic Switch

Three Doors Down               Duck and Run

Van Halen                              Jump

The White Stripes                 Seven Nation Army

Wolfmother                           The Joker and the Thief  

UNDERNEATH PA

GOAL: Varies by message, but good opportunity to capture fan’s attention through music

Artist:                                     Song:                         

All-American Rejects            Move Along

Beck                                        Timebomb

Doves                                     Jetstream

Foo Fighters                          Learn to Fly

The Isley Brothers                Who's That Lady

Kings of Leon                 Crawl

Mute Math                             Typical

Pearl Jam                               Corduroy

U2                                           Desire

White Rabbits                        Percussion Gun

BEATS / INSTRUMENTAL

GOAL: Powerful, high impact music beds ranging from goose bump effect to energy boosters

 Artist:                                     Song:                         

50 Cent                                   Ready For War

BirdMan                                 Fire Flame

David Holmes                        $160 Million Chinese Man

DJ Casper                               Cha Cha Slide

Fabolous                                You be Killin Em

Gnarls Barkley                      Crazy

Jay-Z                                       Dirt Off Your Shoulder

Kenna                                     Lock it Up

Nas                                         Hip Hop is Dead

The XX                                   Intro

It's been roughly one month since our last Twitter follower update... here are new rankings as of September 16.

Tip of the cap to @hurricanesports for using the rankings to rally fans and build followers-- The U picked up 1,399 new followers since August 10, jumping from 25th to 17th in the rankings. Here are some of their better tweets...

http://twitter.com/hurricanesports/status/20846609156
http://twitter.com/hurricanesports/status/20907971699
http://twitter.com/hurricanesports/statuses/20847330755

And for official Twitter lists organized by conference, visit: http://twitter.com/muathletics/lists

Thanks solely to the work of @maryzpink and the Iowa State Marketing Department, here is an updated look at the ranking of official athletics Twitter accounts:

Also, you can find official Twitter accounts organized by conference here: http://twitter.com/muathletics/lists

By far the most influential* classes I've taken thus far have focused on leadership or organizational behavior. Nothing against accounting -- I love a good balance sheet as much as the next guy -- but listening to influential members of the Milwaukee community talk about their growth as leaders has been the highlight of my educational experience.

Here are eight key leadership concepts I've adopted from class as well as personal experience... 

LEADERSHIP IS HAVING FOLLOWERS
Recognize those who make the choice to follow you and treat them like gold.

EXPERIENCE IS NOT ACCOMPLISHMENT
Your career is not a constant training program. What have you accomplished?

BEST SUSTAINED RATE OF IMPROVEMENT WINS
No matter how good you are, you have to keep improving.

EVERY RELATIONSHIP IS A CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP
How would you act differently if you treated your boss, coworkers like they are your customer?

DO WHAT YOU SAY YOU ARE GOING TO DO
Trust & credibility cannot be earned otherwise.

LEARN FIRST HAND
Know how to ask the right questions and understand the answers.

BE GREAT AT SOMETHING
Distinguish yourself from the pack. What is your competitive advantage?

BE GRATEFUL
Appreciate those that have gotten you to where you are at.

*Daily vocab lesson: I originally used the word impactful, but apparently such word does not technically exist. Who knew?

Like fielding stats are to baseball, social media analytics pose an intriguing and frustrating new frontier to understanding the impact of our online presence. As with such hardball metrics as RAR or UZR, it's tough to wrap your arms around similarly proprietary analytics tools like Klout or Twitalyzer. Without understanding how these stats/grades are calculated, you can't really get excited about a True Reach of 247 any more than Andre Ethier is losing sleep over his MLB-worst -49.9 UZR/150. Given these limitations, baseball and social media gurus alike are more or less stuck counting errors, both literally and figuratively.

That said, there are a few crude metrics to better measure social media success. Here are a few of the things we've been tracking over the past several months:

Count of followers/fans

Not to belabor this point, but a count of your Facebook Fans or Twitter Followers only tells you so much. While it's cool and fun to see where you stack up against others, quantity of followers does not necessarily imply quality of tweets. The Milwaukee Panthers, with 518 followers, make fantastic use of their Twitter account, interjecting personality and engaging with fans. Other schools, who have significantly more followers, simply use Twitter as an RSS feed.

OK, enough said on ranking Facebook or Twitter accounts, I promise.

Count of interactions as a percentage of total fans/followers

The ability to interact and engage with fans is the primary benefit to social media, and therefore a super-critical factor to measure. Facebook insights track interactions for you, as page administrators can export a handy Excel file with comprehensive data. Twitter does not yet offer this service which makes things a little tougher: every week or so, we will manually count the number of times @muathletics is mentioned in a Tweet and add this number to the number of times our Tweets have been RTed -- A highly scientific process to be sure.

Then at the end of each month, we'll take the sum of the interactions and divide by the number of our Fans/Followers as of the last day of the month, to get our interaction rate for that month. Thus far in June, our Twitter followers have mentioned or retweeted @muathletics a total of 134 times, which, divided by our 3044 followers, equals a 4.4% interaction rate for June. Lacking context, of course, this figure means little. When compared to previous months, however, we can begin to better quantify our success at connecting with our fanbase. Our record to beat thus far is 17.3% from November 2009.

Obviously, there are many variables that will skew interactions -- it's a lot harder getting people talking Marquette Basketball in June than it is in March -- but if nothing else, it's a step in the right direction.

Growth rate

Quite simply, the percentage increase in followers or fans over the past month. (If you're really nerdy, you can take the second derivative and track the growth rate of your growth rate, but that seems excessive even to me).

Again, variables will impact this stat, as our Twitter followers grew by an average of 12.3% per month during basketball season and only 2.8% per month since.

Referrals to the official website

While not the ultimate goal of social media, it is still interesting to see if Twitter and Facebook activity lead to increases (or possibly decreases) in traffic to the primary website. CBS College created a Nielsen account for our department, which provides us access to data on page referrals-- the domain of the page a user linked from to reach GoMarquette.com.

Referrals from our social media pages to our official website have been minimal, though this reflects our primary strategy of interacting with fans rather than bombarding them with links to GoMarquette.com story releases. So while we do not get too caught up in the numbers, it's still something we're keeping our eyes on.

Records

Because what's more fun than keeping track of your most retweeted tweet or most liked facebook post? (Be flattered, Villanova.)

So in lieu of an algorithm that can perfectly combine and grade interactions, retweets and followers on a 0 to 100 scale (or accurately quantify the suckiness of the LA Dodgers' outfield), the above measurements will have to do for now.

Thanks to research from @maryzpink and the Iowa State Marketing Department, below is a ranking of all schools in Division I in terms of their Facebook fans.

And while we're at it, here they are ranked by conference... 

At the risk of appearing to be a bigger geek than what has already been firmly established, I took some time this evening to assemble a list of the official Facebook fan pages of BCS Conference schools. As with the ranking of Twitter accounts, the numbers below reflect the schools' general athletics page.

*These eight schools either do not have an athletics Facebook page or cannot easily be found via their official website or Google.

A couple notes of interest...

- The average Facebook page has substantially more fans people who like this than the average Twitter account has followers. This is not surprising, as Facebook claims to have 400 million* active users while the more youthful Twitter recently shared that they have a paltry 105 million registered users.

*Side note: this figure is so large it's easy to gloss over the ridiculousness of it, but 400 million people is roughly the population of the United States, Canada and France combined.

- There are fewer sport-specific Facebook pages than Twitter accounts-- to be expected given the nature of the two social networks.

- Two schools, Pittsburgh and Mississippi, have incorporated a sponsor's logo into the profile picture.

- Whether it's a coincidence or a concerted effort to share best practices, Big XII schools have some really cool landing pages. Ex: Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech or Oklahoma State.

As always, if you notice anything's off, give me a shout @brianbowsher or @muathletics.

The good folks over at LSU have been doing some pretty cool work in the social media realm lately, including ranking NCAA D-I Men's Basketball and Football coaches on Twitter in terms of followers. 

Thanks to a perfect storm of factors, including (1) a new student worker looking for something to do on a spring Friday, (2) a legitimate interest in measuring our progress in social media and (3) not wanting to be outdone by this guy, we have joined in the fun and compiled a listing of the general athletics Twitter accounts* of all 73 schools belonging to BCS Conferences.

*These schools in particular have placed a greater emphasis on promoting accounts for individual sports or personalities, though many others amongst the 73 do the same.

Data updated March 22... Sorry, Florida. 

And again March 24... Apologies, Iowa State.