Social Media as a Relationship Marketing Tool

1. Relationship Marketing: "Establishing, maintaining, enhancing and when necessary, terminating relationships with customers and other stakeholders, at a profit, so that the objectives of all parties involved are met, where this is done by a mutual giving and fulfilment of promises."

1.1. Helps keeping sports alive where it's becoming more expensive for loyal fans to stay involved.

1.2. Loss of loyal fans can threaten sports teams.

1.3. Relationship Marketing will help keep fans involved and invested.

2. "Twitter serves as a platform to enhance fans' sport consumption experiences during, before and after a game."

2.1. Live game updates, scores, and highlights

2.2. Enhance and extend game experience

2.3. Voicing game experience

2.4. Direct customer services

3. Sports teams all use social media (twitter) but how they use it is different. All ways boost the fan/athlete relationship.

4. Interaction episodes emerged

4.1. Casual exchange

4.2. customer service

4.3. rally messages

4.4. Fan spotlight

4.5. Player's Q&A

5. Core Components of relationship marketing

5.1. Communication - "Meant to inform the consuming public about a good or service." Broke down into seven categories: updating, publicizing, selling, promoting, appreciating, spreading and servicing.

5.2. Interaction- Measured how and how much the team would respond with the fans. Within "casual exchanges" they didn't talk much about the game. An example given was wishing one another a happy birthday. However, in "customer service" interactions where based on troubleshooting issues. Lastly; "rally message" was a place for fans to interact and share their fanship. This is where you find a lot of hashtags to keep within the group.

5.3. Value - This was broke down even further into when the fans were most present; during games, before and after and ongoing. All important in connecting sports to Twitter.

6. Social media is a cheaper and quicker way to build and achieve relationship marketing goals.

7. "Social media is rapidly becoming an ideal tool for ongoing two-way dialogue."