When the media refused to cover the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the league cultivated its own massive following through grassroots social media rapport. Now the UFC is the fastest growing sport in the world, and its firebrand CEO, Dana White, still spends almost every day reaching out to fans on the Internet.
I had the opportunity to pick White’s mind about how he leveraged social media to beat his competition. Below are several keys to his success.
Social Media Boot Camp
Much of the UFC’s commitment to social media outreach comes from White himself, an avid Twitter-er. In order to bring his organization up to speed, White hired PR firm Digital Royalty to teach the fighters how to properly use social media. He gave the fighters a simple instruction: “I want you to Twitter your asses off,” recalled Amy Martin, Digital Royalty’s founder and CEO. Digital Royalty ran a one-on-one boot camp with the fighters, churning out 200 new media mavens over the course of three days. After the boot camp, fighter education is still an ongoing effort. “We’re constantly doing one-on-ones with them,” Martin said. “They also have my personal email address and mobile phone number.”
In addition to education, Martin helps orchestrate a real-time “behind the scenes” look at the fighters preparing for a match, video blogging their outlook on the fight. A guest fighter live-tweets from the official UFC account during each event. All this gives die-hard fans as much interaction as they can possibly handle. “The volume is pretty intense,” she said.
Martin maintains that the UFC’s openness and willingness to experiment with social media has been the key to their success. Many large sports franchises are still just dipping their toes in the social media ocean, and are missing an opportunity to capture fan enthusiasm as a result.
Raw Honesty
White is known for his unflinching honesty and his confidence to share even embarrassing or shameful moments with his fans. These important traits have become part of the UFC’s social media brand. When one of the UFC’s star fighters breezed through a prizefight with noticeably little effort, for example, White gave this apologetic interview (which has been viewed over one million times).
Transparency, outreach, and openness are now more important than ever, as social media allows fans to subvert traditional channels and voice their opinions directly. White is willing to meet them halfway, foregoing false showmanship in order to genuinely connect with fans: “Some fights are going to be the best fights you’ve ever seen, and some are going to suck,” White said. “And I think you’re better off to go out and talk about why the fight sucked and you know, be honest about it. You’re not going to fool anybody.”
The Power of Twitter
Before broadcast media would air the fights, the UFC was vaulted to popularity through direct interaction with fans on fighter enthusiast blogs. Now, in order to scale with the UFC’s global reach, White has a new favorite sounding board: Twitter. “I love Twitter,” said White. At more than one million followers, it’s clear that the love is mutual. White’s unusually strong commitment to @reply’s and real-life meet-ups has cultivated an incredibly responsive audience.
During the run-up to big fight in Montreal, a marketing agent asked White how he quantified Twitter. White responded, “How do you quantify billboards? How do you quantify newspaper adds? You can’t quantify it. But let me show you how [expletive] strong this is.”
White and his dinner companion strolled over to a local gas station at 11:30 p.m. and tweeted his location. About 36 seconds later one fan had shown up, after three minutes White estimated there were about 100 fans at the gas station.
“Twitter is amazing,” he gushed, “you can talk directly to your fans instantly.” A pessimist could chalk up White’s commitment to fan interaction as a crude PR calculation. The more he talks, however, the more it’s likely that White is a textbook case of what happens when someone has an unmitigated passion for their job.
“Why would I not want to talk to somebody who loves what I do just as much as I do,” White said. “Makes no sense to me… I could sit there and hang out and talk with the fans all day.”
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More social media resources from Mashable:
- 5 Things the Library of Congress is Archiving Online
- 5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media
- How the U.S. Engages the World with Social Media
- How Social Media Can Effect Real Social and Governmental Change
- 6 Ways Law Enforcement Uses Social Media to Fight Crime
Tags: amy martin, dana white, digital royalty, social media, twitter, ufc, youtube