Industry Series: Vol 1.2 — Andi Perelman, Director of New Media, Pittsburgh Penguins
Jack: When producing content, thinking about content, the four key elements of social you previously mentioned must come into play. Are you actually asking your team the questions “is this cute, is it funny, disgusting, etc.”?
Andi: Yes. We look at it and discuss if our content is something our fans will share. We know those are the four attributes of content that make people share and engage accordingly.
Obviously, we provide normal hockey news as well. When we share the line combinations people will know what to expect at that game. It’s not necessarily something they are going to share or super engaging content, but we try to create a balance.
We ask ourselves the following:
· Are we getting people to share?
· Are we providing hockey news that’s important? (information, stats, analytics)
We realize we can’t be everything to everyone, and it’s a balancing act.
Jack: I want to talk a little bit about you personally. You have a really cool job. People want to know how you created this career path for yourself. What was your big break? What was your “ah-ha moment” where you knew you could excel in a role that you have today?
Andi: I feel like it’s a bunch of little moments. I don’t think it was one big moment where I knew that ‘this is what I want to do’, or ‘this is how I get there’. I think a lot of little things have created little pathways that have gotten me to where I am today. Realistically, lots of small choices and small successes have led to this awesome job I currently hold.
When I went to college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up studying government and politics, and I thought I wanted to work in politics. I liked the idea of marketing a candidate. I liked the marketing end of the government and politics.
Then I thought about law school. Most people that were in government and politics at my school (University of Maryland) knew they wanted to get into government. I knew right away that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I thought about law school. What kind of law would I want to do?
I like words — maybe I could do contracts. Maybe I could do the nitty-gritty. It’s so funny looking back on it now how many career thoughts I had. I wanted to do marketing. I wanted to do clever wording. I wanted to do sports law.
The role I have now? It didn’t exist in my head. Social media for a professional hockey team wasn’t a thing I knew was even possible. When I was in college (started in 2008), the Penguins’ Twitter account didn’t exist. It started in 2009. Social media really grew in importance while I was developing my skills in school.
I got my own Facebook account in the summer of 2006, or right around the time when I was trying to figure out what I was doing with my life, my career path, and where I wanted to go to school.
I think the first success was realizing what I didn’t want to do (politics). I worked to figure out what aspects of my internships and my school program I liked.
I went to a grad school fair in college and saw that there was a sports industry management program. I was interested in sports and I ended up talking to the recruiter and she told me all about this Georgetown program. I thought it sounded really interesting but I still didn’t know anything about it. I went to an event in downtown D.C. to learn more about the program.
I actually remember calling you! (Jack), as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and I didn’t know enough about these types of programs. I was trying to collect as much information as I could about where the sports industry was and if it was where I wanted to be. I wanted to learn more about what experiences people had in school and how the real world worked.
It’s funny now that we work together!
Jack: It’s exactly how the sports industry (and many other industries) work. People should always be aware of who is watching and a person you speak with one day may be your coworker in the future.
For everyone reading this, it’s funny to think that when I got my job at the Penguins four years ago, you (Jack) e-mailed me a nice congratulations note.
Then when you (Jack) got your job with the Penguins I emailed you.
Jack: My very first email!
It’s interesting. I think I found the email that you sent me when I started and replied so it would be in your inbox on your first day.
I had the same experience with one of our co-workers, Devin (Beahm), who I had talked to before because she worked with a mutual contact. We had already connected and had known each other, and then she came in for an interview. Now she works with us as well!
It’s funny how that works. I think about everyone that put me on the right path to think that this was the right thing for me. I knew sports and I knew marketing going into grad school. I knew hockey.
I was into other things too, but I know hockey better than I know other sports. My dad’s Canadian, so I grew up watching hockey.
When I got to Georgetown, I took a social media class and I loved it. After talking to two professors of mine, I decided to create my own hockey blog. After the class ended, one of those professors ended up helping me get a summer associate position at Blackboard doing B2B social marketing.
It was really interesting, because it was completely different from what I had done in the past. I did an internship with a non-profit in sports doing tickets — similar to Tickets for Kids. It was called Most Valuable Kids.
I was doing some of their social media and doing some ticketing/foundation work. At that point, I was thinking about going into community relations.
I learned more about the business side of social, not necessarily the community side. I interned at Octagon and I did PR and writing. Lots of press releases, internal emails and marketing for athletes. I knew then I wanted to be in hockey and that I wanted to do social.
I was at the company’s yearly meeting and I asked Allan Walsh (agent for Octagon) seemingly a thousand questions. He came in and talked about his relationships with players, and how he keeps them updated on important hockey news through a robust social media management and Google Alert system. It was so interesting meeting him.
I ended up interviewing him and a bunch of other people about the NHL. I asked about the league expanding its reach through mobile and digital. I ended up talking to the NHL more formally and met John Collins. John, at that time, was the COO of the NHL. He is most well-known for being the genius behind the creation of the league’s Winter Classic.
I walked up to him and was star-struck — who gets star-struck when they meet a business person? But I was!
I had so many questions, and he ended up connecting me with a bunch of colleagues.
The digital space — it’s changed so much since then. I think all those little events (like meeting John) combined with my internship experience and how it helped to create this career path for me.
Jack: How did you get to the Penguins?
Andi: I ended up working at an ad agency in Pittsburgh when I graduated. I also helped out the local Arena Football team (the Pittsburgh Power).
I was working at this ad agency and they happened to be the agency on record for CONSOL Energy (our building’s previous naming rights partner). The agency was working on some pretty awesome projects that tied to the Penguins naming rights partnership.
With the Pittsburgh Power also playing at the arena, I was getting a feel for covering live sporting events. In my day job, I was working at an ad agency where I was learning more analytics, tools, and really learning to be creative.
At that time I was working on social for toothpaste brands and a bicycle company — which made you work harder to produce good content. It’s not hockey, and it wasn’t easy.
Toothpaste is toothpaste, and to make toothpaste exciting takes some thought. I was working there and I was loving the challenges being thrown my way.
However, I saw this job posting for the Penguins and was excited. Previously, I had already reached out to my future boss on LinkedIn months before I had even gotten a job at the ad agency.
My ask was simple — I wanted to learn about what she did, how she got there, her day-to-day, etc.
She didn’t respond — which I can definitely understand now. I’m sure she got a billion LinkedIn requests. I get so many, it’s hard to keep track.
She posted on her LinkedIn that there was a job opening and I also saw it on TeamWork Online. I applied and wished for the best.
I think one of the things that really helped out was that I knew the social analytics tools needed, which came from my agency experience. I was analyzing what people were saying about brands and doing reporting on those things.
Jack: So flipping the script a little bit, it’s clear you’ve been very successful in your current position. I now actually want to hear about a failure that you’ve had. What is a memorable story where you failed?
Andi: There have been plenty of tweet failures/social media fails.
My first scary moment in my job was related to a player video series we were posting every week. We’d put out a photo asking for fan questions about a particular player. James Neal was the player that was up that week and we put out the graphic like we always did. It backfired. #AskNeal — you may have heard of it.
In that moment, I didn’t know where the fans “were”. I didn’t realize at that time (I was brand new) that Boston fans were mad at James Neal or Philly fans were mad at James Neal. We were getting responses from opposing fans that he elbowed or kneed someone. Whatever had happened in that time period created this environment that made it not safe like previous players.
I think this was the first failure where I felt I should have tried to stop this from happening. I definitely learned from that experience. I learned I need to know where the fans “are”. Not just our fans, but fans across the league and the general feeling toward a specific player(s).
With experience comes wisdom — you learn.
We did a live Periscope with Marc-Andre Fleury — the premise was that fans were coming in and receiving season tickets from players unexpectedly. I told Marc that I was “periscoping”, and that we would be live.
Well, at the time he didn’t know what Periscope was, so…. he didn’t realize I was taking live video.
He was scanning someone into the building, pretending like he was building security and he had the wand. This gentleman’s belt kept going off, and he (Fleury) kept scanning…that area… over and over. After scanning him, Fleury asked him a question that definitely shouldn’t have been broadcast on Periscope.
I had it live on Periscope and I panicked! I learned that I need to tell everyone “when I am streaming live, anything you say is immediately going to be seen by thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands of people.”
You need to be mindful of what you’re saying, what you’re doing, and how you’re conducting yourself.
In this case it was really just funny, but it’s also something that you just don’t know. You don’t know what someone’s going to say at any given moment. I learned something from that experience. We Periscope a lot more often from public media events and press conferences than we would just players running around doing funny things.
Jack: Plenty of companies attempt to talk to you from a sales standpoint. You get pitched new products & technology by social media vendors daily. How do you evaluate when to enter into a partnership that will benefit the organization?
Andi: It’s tough. It’s sometimes tough to figure out which ones are the right products and what we really need. Some things pop up that didn’t exist before and we didn’t know we needed.
You want to give people the time of day and you want to look at what’s out there but there are so many people coming at you with ideas and new products that are tied to digital and tied to sports. Many want to work with sports teams. We have a lot of name recognition. There’s a lot of benefit to working with the Penguins. We’ve won (the Stanley Cup) twice in the last two years.
I’m an active reader. When somebody sends me an email, I always read it. I read about new products. I read about what other teams are using and I try to get an understanding of what products and things are out there so when I get an email it’s not a surprise to me if they’re pitching something that we haven’t been using in the past.
I’m always trying to educate myself first. Beyond that, I like the emails that are well-thought-out; people that understand our business. I want a partner that knows what we’re doing and what our strategy is. That’s what’s more helpful to us — attempting to understand our business.
They say “here’s how we can help you” rather than “here’s a product we have — it may or may not help you.” The companies that send demos or slides about our social channels and how they can help us are the best.
I’d like to think I give those more of a chance. We make most of those decisions in the offseason. I like the people who have an understanding of our business — people who aren’t emailing me the night of the Stanley Cup Final. Those people will be immediately written off.
Jack: Can you give me an example of a technology partner that you have chosen that you’ve been really happy with choosing?
Andi: Yes. TrackMaven — we’ve been thrilled with them.
Our relationship with them has been great. We signed on with them this summer and they’ve really helped us streamline our reporting.
After looking at our yearly partner reporting and the amount of time it was taking us to produce it, we knew we needed to make a change from our previous vendor. We reached out to other teams to ask which companies they were using. A lot of times you don’t see the back-end of a platform until later in the purchase process. That’s why it was so helpful to talk to other social managers who were dealing with the same challenges we were.
We ended up going with TrackMaven and it has been a great partnership. We use the tool to assess what content is the most meaningful for our fans, the volume of posts for partners…etc.
They also just did a call with our ticketing team to help us sell more tickets on social (in an organic way of course!) That’s one of the things we really enjoy about Trackmaven — they have been a resource for us and many other departments in the Penguins front office. They aren’t just tracking posts — they are analyzing and are a strategic partner.
Jack: Monetizing social media. It’s being discussed by every single professional sports front office across the world. What are your initial thoughts — how do you monetize social media?
Andi: Social media is this crazy, limitless place in most people’s minds. It’s endless — you seemingly can do anything in this space.
You can post as many times as you want. You know our dasherboard signage? We only have a certain amount — it can be sold out.
For social, there’s nobody saying you can only post five times a day or twenty times a day. We try to be strategic.
We don’t succeed when we are pushing out too many messages — people aren’t catching what we’re pushing out. We don’t succeed when messages are not being viewed as authentic — because we’re promoting too many things.
As long as you’re doing your social media in an authentic way, it can be monetized.
We’re not a commercial, we’re not a TV ad, we’re not a newspaper ad, we’re not a radio spot — we’re humans. That’s what makes social media so great: fans can interact with us just like a human being.
It’s not just pushing information, it’s a conversation. You would never hard sell your friend. We want to be authentic. We want to provide value.
Social is a two-way emotional connection. We joke with these people, we have the same interests as these people, and they’re part of what makes our brand so valuable. They’re part of our story. Treating them like a money pit is not the best way for us to have a nice relationship. Being authentic, and providing value, and treating them like human beings — that’s what we want to do.
Jack: In our Partnership Sales & Marketing department, we’re looking to integrate partners with what you do in the social media world. Can you talk a little bit about how the partners that we have at the Penguins integrate with the platforms that you manage?
Andi: One of the things we started new this year was the KeyBank Challenge video series. It’s been great. We’ve done three so far.
We saw what Montreal was doing their duel videos and we loved it. We wanted to adapt it to work for the Penguins.
It always resonates well with us when we have players doing something. It’s fun, it’s competitive, and they look like they’re having a good time.
We wanted to integrate a partner within really great content. In this case, what does KeyBank really have to do with challenge videos? Does it make sense? It does — and here’s why:
KeyBank is still a new brand to Pittsburgh, and they are continuing to work with us to drive brand awareness and recognition. As a bank, you need to build trust — your customers need to know it’s a reputable place.
Integrating their name with this video series ties them to the Pittsburgh Penguins, whom people already trust. It’s perfect. They’re in the intro and it’s tied in. It has a nice hockey animation and it ties KeyBank to the Pittsburgh Penguins in a powerful way.
Now we have the KeyBank Challenges, and people see that name with us, they see it with great content, they recognize that brand name as a powerful brand in Pittsburgh — in their business and in ours. Being able to successfully integrate a partner within our social (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) is important. It’s really a good piece of content and it’s accomplishing their goal — brand recognition/awareness in Pittsburgh.
Jack: That’s a great example. What questions should current or prospective partners be asking of a team like yours? What questions should partners ask when it relates to social media?
We ask partners all the time — typically new partners — what are you going to do to help this initiative? What are your main goals and what do you really want to achieve? We consistently get different answers.
It’s hard to drill down to what is most important to the partner. Knowing that in advance is so helpful for us because then we know we can focus and achieve.
Here’s an example — with Emporio: A Meatball Joint, we have the five goal promotion. We score five goals and everyone can get a free meatball. Show the tweet, come in to any Emporio location and get your free meatball. They tweet when we score five goals. They have GIFs, they have content, they are paying attention. Every time we score that fifth goal, there’s a tweet from Emporio and that makes the partnership stronger.
It’s not just us, we’re not just pushing a message. It’s an initiative between both us and the partner — an initiative that they care about and we care about. We want to work on these activations together.
Social can’t be everything to everyone. You can’t get people to the store, and your website, and get followers, and get engagements on the post, and get comments, and get people to redeem a deal. It can’t all happen in one initiative. Having partners know their objectives is a great start.
We want them to ask us questions like ‘How do our brands and audiences mesh?’ or ‘How do we overlap?’.
If we reach an understanding and have a nice conversation about who they are as a brand and who we are as a brand we can move forward. We love to know what their biggest partnership successes have been but I would love if they would ask us that as well.
‘What are your biggest partnership successes and why?’
‘What are you doing with other companies that you feel like is really working for your social and their business?’.
We want to field those questions from a partner. We know what’s currently working for the Pittsburgh Penguins and our fans, and we can help them reach this audience. We want to collaborate.
Social changes. We’re doing Instagram stories now every single game. It’s something we definitely didn’t do last year and didn’t really even exist two years ago. Having a partner understand how we’ve adapted and what new things we’re doing to kind of fit the platform and the fans and how things are moving for us, I think that’s helpful to the partner. It illustrates new opportunities and what we have to offer.
