Sport industry marketers have long understood the importance of nurturing customer relationships. The new challenge is how best to face the shifts in customer relationship marketing posed by sports organizations and proactive consumers, or “prosumers.” In this article, the elements of the relationship-building process are presented with a focus on communication, interaction, and value, concepts identified in Gronroos’s (2004) relationship-marketing process model. An expanded version of Gronroos’s model is developed to include prosumers and to describe the interactions that occur through social-media exchanges. The value of specific social-media tools and Web 2.0 technologies in helping sport marketers meet their relationship-marketing goals is also discussed. Finally, directions for future research employing the expanded model are suggested.
Social media has exploded over the past few years, with sport fans now acti vely contributi ng to social networks, blogs, news feeds and content-sharing sites. Because social media tools encourage user engagement, they should also increase consumer affi liati on with their teams. However, not much is known about the atti tudinal and behavioural diff erences between posters, sport fans who post content, and lurkers, those who post infrequently or not at all. This study, using mediati on and moderati on models of team identi fi cati on and game att endance, confi rms that both lurkers and posters identi fy with their teams and are likely to att end games. This study fi nds, however, that lurkers att end games more frequently than posters. These diff erences are discussed and recommendati ons are made to improve the use of social media by sport organizati ons. Suggesti ons for future research are also provided.
Twitter has become a favourite social media vehicle for sports organizations looking to connect with fans. Less is known, however, about the value of tweets for the fans themselves. This research is a preliminary investigation into assessing this value by attempting to classify sports tweets from the fan perspective, and determining whether there is a relationship between value and team identification (TI). Results revealed that TI significantly influences how much people value specific categories of sports tweets. Future avenues for research are suggested.
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