Case Study

San Jose Sharks

Overview

In California, a state teeming with major sports franchises — three in the NHL alone and fifteen across the Big Four leagues — how does an NHL team like the San Jose Sharks stand out?

Geographically, San Jose occupies a smaller market within California and the Bay Area, but unlike broadcasts and in-person attendance, social media is less concerned with where you are on the map. Coupled with the uncertainty of traditional revenue streams 2020 provided, understanding social value for a team and their sponsors has become increasingly important for teams like San Jose.

To set themselves up for social success in the NHL, California and beyond, the Sharks turned to Zoomph to monitor and maximize their social media and digital sponsorship.

The Challenge

Compiling owned, sponsorship and competitor social data in one place.

  1. Getting quality, useful owned social metrics.
    • The value of social media depends on much more than just a single metric, like engagements or impressions. A complete overview of multiple metrics and understanding the worth of different social media posts were important for the Sharks internal social team and external partners.
  2. Tracking brand value for assets like watermarks, dasherboards, helmets and jerseys.
    • Beyond sponsored posts tagging partners, the jerseys, helmets and dasherboards appearing in social posts provide added value to sponsors, and San Jose wanted to evaluate these assets too.
  3. Understanding how other teams in the NHL and Bay Area are performing on social media.
    • Rather than manually monitor other teams’ feeds, San Jose needed a quick way to survey competitors and other franchisees in the area.

The Action

Customizing a Zoomph dashboard for the Sharks specific social needs.

  1. Create a comprehensive series of feeds to monitor their own social media, as well as compare to other sports teams in the NHL and Bay Area.
    • Using Zoomph, the Sharks can dive deeper into their social media performance relative to themselves, competitors and the region. Zoomph provides to-the-moment data on specific social posts, moments and campaign performance.
  2. Program Zoomph’s Logo AI to track different sponsor logos within images and videos.
    • San Jose can see and analyze when a sponsor’s logo appears on their social. For a helmet sponsor like SAP, this is crucial in providing data on how their partnership provides additional value

The Result

Making the most of their partnerships across social.

Zoomph can’t necessarily help a team win the Stanley Cup, but with Zoomph the San Jose Sharks took a huge step forward in being more competitive in the social media and sponsorship space.

“San Jose Sports & Entertainment Enterprises have always placed an emphasis on digital technology since being one of the league’s first expansion cities and built an impressive data and analytics team.” Zoomph President Amir Zonozi said. “We were happy to partner with the Sharks and we’re honored our expertise in partnerships analytics can help them grow & showcase their amazing social presence to their valued partners.”

Armed with top-of-the-line data, the Sharks front office can now make better creative and business decisions to make sure they’re a first-class franchise on and off the ice.
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