Stamford Bridge will pay host to the second annual Football Business Awards tomorrow evening. As a who’s who in the industry swap the familiarity of the boardrooms for the glitz and glam of a gala awards dinner.

The FBA’s were established last year to celebrate the excellence and acknowledge success in the business of football. With more than half of the Premier Leagues clubs represented, along with EA Sports, The FA, St. George’s Park, Continental Tyres and our very own Dan Mclaren to name but a few, it promises to be an insightful night.

Jo Brand will be hosting the event, working her way through a 16 strong list of award categories, ranging from Football CEO of the Year to Best Football Community Scheme (and everything in between).

As you might expect it is the Best Use of Social Media in Football that we will be keeping our eyes on and not only because I worked on the project that currently holds the crown – The FA were the inaugural winners of the award, thanks to the innovative work carried out on The FAWSL by friend of UKSN Leigh Moore.

2012 Winners – The FA for work on The FAWSL:

From the start they appointed and trained up ‘Digital Ambassadors’ at every club and gave every player social media training.  Further interactivity came via Facebook competitions such as ‘Best Goal’, and ‘Save of the Year’, and the live twitter commentary accompanying one game each week.  ‘Call the Shots’ gave fans decision making powers over elements such as music played and mascot naming.  The campaigns proved its worth with 33,000 followers of the eight ambassadors, a 65% increase in Twitter followers and a 14% engagement on the WSL Facebook page.

It was described by the judges as;

“…a very cost effective yet very impactful use of social media to tackle a very important challenge for the development of the women’s game which was sustainable over the whole season.”

Right on to the 2013 nominees, here’s a look at who has been a leading light in the football social media world over the last 12 months…

Aston Villa Football Club

With Aston Villa approaching one million Facebook ‘likes’, the club created a campaign on the official page to demonstrate its global reach. Feedback suggested the club should engage more with far-away fans, so ‘One In A Million’ was launched.

Followers worldwide were offered the chance to have legend Ian Taylor travel to their home and escort them to a Premier League match. Numerous videos thanked fans for their support, emphasised the benefits of liking the page and documented the winner’s visit to Villa Park. It led to huge increases in ‘likes’, over 25,000 new customer records from 105 countries and one happy Swedish supporter

Budweiser 

As FA Cup lead sponsor, Budweiser decided to tell the story of this year’s Cup through the eyes of the fans. Uniting the optimistic spirit of football supporters countrywide, from clubs large and small. Budweiser seeded the hashtag #tothedream, inviting fans to submit their photos. Collecting user-generated photography via Facebook and Twitter, they were able produce an epic two-minute FA Cup Fan Film broadcast just once on TV, and inside Wembley Stadium, minutes before kick-off of the final on 11th May. The film was later viewed over 750,000 times on YouTube, enjoying praise from fans, press and pundits alike.

EA SPORTS

To drive EA SPORTS FIFA 13 pre-order sales, the UK PR team developed a social media led campaign that engaged the online football community positioning fans at the heart of a LIVE UK pack reveal.
A mock ‘Sky Sports News’ breaking news announcement watched by a LIVE audience of 11,000 consumers unveiled Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Joe Hart as the new UK covers stars.  Consumers were invited to submit their questions to the stars via official EA SPORTS FIFA social channels. 
The campaign included five concurrent UK twitter trends and the highlights package amassed more than 250,000 views within a month.

Manchester United Football Club

Manchester United has over 34 million fans on Facebook so to promote Official Membership they developed ‘Find Fred’, a simple, highly playable interactive game that challenged fans to spot United’s mascot in the crowd for the chance to win exclusive prizes, while softly promoting Official Membership.

Driven by social media sharing, the game received over 52,000 unique visits, 21,000 of these successfully found Fred and submitted contact details. 10,000 marketable new records were captured. Over 90% of players were not current Official Members so the interactive element drove new lead generation. The game was especially popular with under 25s with the 18-25 age group accounting for over 25% of all players.

Opta

Opta’s family of accounts is a genuine Twitter phenomenon.

They used the stats in their database, which were previously only ever supplied to a b2b audience, to create a set of must-follow accounts.

The results have been spectacular, with the accounts resulting in a following of over 600,000 and regularly topping 30,000 retweets and 5,000 mentions in a single week.

They used Twitter as a central facet of a B2Bc marketing strategy in which they’ve targeted the end users of their products (football fans) in order to drive pull-through and increase revenue from the core business audience.

Royal Belgian Football Association

For ten years in a row the team has been missing every major tournament and fans had lost their interest. Their mission was to recreate the enthusiasm for the Red Devils. “The Challenges” was launched. Before every match the players challenged the fans to support them in a unique way. All communication went directly from players to fans via their own Facebook and Twitter pages. The outcome of the challenges could be followed directly on a specially created Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/BelgianRedDevils). Very soon, an open dialogue emerged between players and fans.

I’m sure you will agree a pretty impressive list of businesses who are at the forefront of social strategies. The judges will have a hard task picking out a winner!  To find out if your favourite is victorious and to keep up to date with the evenings proceedings following @footiebixawards

To refresh your memory on last years event have a look here https://digitalsport.co/?s=football+business+awards&x=0&y=0

Who do you think will win and why?… or who do you think has been left out and should be there?  Let us know in the comments below