The National Hockey League has long been at the front of changing the Twitter game, as it was there that teams began tweeting more as fans. The Social Sideline
has done posts in the past talking about this exact topic. The Los Angeles Kings were the first to do this, lighting the sporting world afire with this tweet after defeating the Vancouver Canucks in Game 1 of their playoff series on April 12, 2012:
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| The tweet that started it all |
Today, the Social Sideline has the honor of talking with the two men behind that tweet and the Kings' Twitter account during the team's run to the Stanley Cup in 2012: Dewayne Hankins and Pat Donahue. Hankins was the Senior Director of Digital Strategy of Anschutz Entertainment Group (who owns the Kings and is better known as AEG) and currently holds the title of Vice President of Marketing and Digital for the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers. Donahue, who pushed the send button on the infamous Canucks tweet, is the Director of Digital Media for the Kings.
Russell Varner: How did you end up working on the Kings’ Twitter account? How long were you working on it prior to the 2012 playoff run?
Dewayne Hankins: I was hired by the Kings in November of 2010 to take over their digital properties. I hired Pat shortly after that and worked with the Kings on trends, how we could be different than the other teams on social media. I always told people I follow when social media got popular among sports, I went and followed all [accounts] around all the leagues and it was all pretty bland. It was very much black and white stuff where they were talking to their fans, not really with their fans, and I saw an opportunity to take things in a different direction, but needed to get the buy-in from our manager and staff that it was a good idea and we’d be protected. Although it was a risky move, it was gonna pay off in the end, show what we needed to prove. We had kind of been doing that for a while and hiring Pat was a great move because he and I have a very similar sense of humor, so you could really never tell when Pat was running the Twitter or when I was. It wasn’t until Pat’s brilliant tweet against the Canucks in Game One of our playoff series that the rest of the world started to take notice.
Pat Donahue: I had done it, I forget when it was, but I was down in Anaheim and Dewayne said, “oh yeah, you can tweet tonight”… and I just ran with it. Even now, looking at all these accounts, it’s the most boring, kind of very PC fan, and from the beginning, we just tweeted how Dewayne and I talked. It’s our humor. It’s our kind of voice. It’s not fabricated, it’s not trite or made to sound like something. It was just how we really wanted to do it. It was pretty natural to do that from the beginning.
RV: Did you have any reservations when you first started doing so? What were your biggest fears?
PD: No, and I knew if I said something wrong that Dewayne would take the blame for it. *Laughs* So I was just reckless abandon. But Dewayne always had my back.
DH: I always attribute [our success] to the fact that we have a president and an owner and a president at AEG who really understood what we were trying to do. Because of that, it was so much easier to do the things that we wanted to do. An example of that, the day after Pat’s tweet [to the Canucks] set Canada afire with controversy, I was driving to work and wondering whether or not we were going to have a job the next day. And our CEO at the time calls and says, “How do we want to handle this?” “I don’t know. I don’t want to delete it and say we got hacked because that’s what everyone else does I want to stand by it.” “He was like, “Yeah. And we need to tell Canada to get a sense of humor” was his comment. After he said that, I could breathe a sigh of relief and knew that we had a team in place that understood what we were trying to do and the value of all that engagement and interaction. It’s too much and too often, like I said, that teams aren’t able to sell to a higher up because the idea is you are trying to engage your fan base and teams talk about follower counts and how much that stuff matters. I don’t get too worried about that because different market sizes that have different needs – you look at the Lakers and the Kings have a huge disparity between a lot of people that follow the Kings and lot of the people that follow the Lakers. But I would be willing to bet a lot of money that the Kings get more engagement than the Lakers do because the Kings go about it a different way and Pat does an excellent job at keeping hockey fans engaged.
"(F)rom the beginning, we just tweeted how Dewayne and I talked. It’s our humor. It’s our kind of voice. It’s not fabricated, it’s not trite or made to sound like something. It was just how we really wanted to do it. It was pretty natural to do that from the beginning." -Pat Donahue
RV: What were the initial reactions to it from your co-workers? From other teams? From fans?
PD: There was the old-school approach of ‘this is unprofessional’ or ‘classless.’ We got classless a lot. And then the majority were….
DH: Twitter is such a crafty place.
PD: And sports is also. But in terms of friends and family and employees and our LA Kings fans, they loved it. Again, you look back on it and it’s nothing offensive. I never said anything that would actually offend someone. We knew it was OK. It was just dealing with the people that are watchdogs on the Internet and they just like to make a stink over any little thing. You still see it now with an off-color phrase that someone says that gets completely blown out of proportion. It was quite the interesting experience. … I think it was the next day and [Dewayne and I] would just sit down our phones and flip through [what] seemed like three day’s [worth] of replies. I’ve still never seen anything like it before.
RV: What did you think when other NHL teams started treating Twitter the same way you did?
DH: For me, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, or however that phrase works. It was fun for us and I had always envisioned how much fun it would be if other teams would get involved that way and how much fun you would get out of it. A great example of it is, (with the Blazers) now we know we can go to the Phoenix Suns and they’ll be up for anything and we can go to the Atlanta Hawks and they’ll be up for anything. And for the Kings, the Columbus Blue Jackets are an example of a team that totally gets it and understands the difference. To me, the more teams can do that, the more everyone will benefit.
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| The Kings and Blue Jackets have quite the Twitter-mance |
PD: I’m the same way. We’ll try to engage, mainly with Columbus because they are the ones that kinda ‘get it,’ and
we have a fun online relationship with them. There are some teams I’ve noticed that try to do the exact same thing, and usually it’ll backfire or there will be a lot of ‘we did it first and you are just copying us.’ But at the end of the day, there’s nothing better that we do online than talk to other teams. People just go berserk over it. So, when we do play teams and they don’t respond – they don’t respond to us, they aren’t responding to their fans – it’s definitely much harder because then we have to fabricate a story and content, whereas if the other team is willing to engage with us – whether it is friendly… it is a much more fun and engaged experience online.
RV: Why do you think more teams from other sports don’t treat social media the same way you did with the Kings?
DH: I don’t think it is a matter of them not wanting to do it. The people that are behind the keyboard and typing the tweets, they would love to do it. It’s a matter of being able to convince your management staff to take a certain amount of risk to do it. And there are many, many people who still feel social media is too risky and things that are said can cause more backlash than good. So it is just a matter of convincing them that yes, there is an inherit, small amount of risk, but the benefits outweigh the risks.
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| The biggest tweet the Kings ever sent |
PD: And sometimes, the higher up people only know about the negative things, like maybe they read something negative in the
[Sporting] News Journal or something where they don’t see the day-to-day positive stuff that comes out of it. Negative things make news more than positive ones. … I haven’t talked to the guy, but Dewayne has, where the tweet I sent to the Penguins after we were eliminated, asking them to get a drink? To us, number-wise, that’s the biggest tweet we’ve ever sent, even bigger than the Vancouver one. But they never were able to respond… They had a meeting for like an hour over whether to respond to it and they never did. Whereas, with me, my bosses know what I do and everyone’s bought into it, so I’m going to respond to them in five seconds and I’m not going to think twice about it.
RV: What do you think of the current state of social media and where it will go from here?
DH: It is constantly evolving. There are obviously the main stays like Twitter and Facebook, but you can’t be complacent. Pat’s team’s doing a really good job on Instagram, we’re finding our way on Instagram right now with the Trail Blazers on what makes good content and what doesn’t. In the NBA specifically, they are certain things we can’t do. We can’t put highlights in our Instagrams and we’re still governing the rules around this stuff and we need to talk to the NBA and let them know, “hey, they are things we might want to change here because the social media landscape changes so fast and people are consuming media so much faster.” So I think the most important thing is to stay ahead of it and when each social media [application] comes out, don’t try to do everything, but certainly be in the places your fans are and then figure out how you’re going to make it work for your team. Like Snapchat. I’m not a personal Snapchat user, but there’s way that a team could use Snapchat to help engage fans and enhance their space in social media.
PD: Yeah, I think the same things. It’s just moving even faster than it used to. There’s few NHL teams that are using Snapchat and [the Kings] have one, but when our team is running around shooting stuff, it goes up on Vine and it goes up on Instagram and the idea of using Snapchat… I’m 29 years old, I’m past the target demographic for that. I just don’t even really think about that. But you got to stay open to things like that, and we’re really lucky that the blogger we work with,
the Royal Half… without him, I would just fall behind. He’s so into everything social and digital. We’re probably the only NHL team that does GIFs to put highlights on Twitter. We get those up within two or three minutes and I haven’t seen any professional team do that that quickly, and he’s the one to show us the whole GIF world… Just be around other creative people and try to stay on top of it all, because I remember a couple years ago, Dewayne and I talked about Snapchat when it came out. Dewayne was like, “have you seen this thing?” I said, “ I don’t know what that is.” And Dewayne goes, ‘oh, it’s just for like, little kids to send naked photos to each other.’ And now it’s more of the most valuable assets on the Internet. So stay on top of it because who knows where it is going to go.
RV: What is the best piece of advice you can give fans on social media? Teams? Athletes?
DH: Be authentic. It’s really simple: be authentic. If you are an athlete and you don’t want… I know, for our team, if you don’t want to be on social media, then don’t do it, because if you don’t want the work that comes with having to answer people and engage with people, then don’t it. You have to have a passion for it, first of all, and you have to be authentic. If you aren’t, people’s BS meters are way, way better than they were years ago.
PD: I was just say for teams, and especially athletes, just to talk to people. It’s such a common thing where athletes just post photos. But then, you look at the replies and they never say anything. That’s a one-on-one contact that they could give a fan that has never been possible before. And there are still so many teams out there that I’ll look through their replies, and they’ll respond to maybe two fans through a whole day. At that point, you are just ignoring people. They know it. You’re in season and fans know that you’re reading their stuff. At least favorite it, or something. Give someone a short reply. Those little things go a long way.
"You have to have a passion for it, first of all, and you have to be
authentic. If you aren’t, people’s BS meters are way, way better than
they were years ago." - Dewayne Hankins
DH: I think that’s what honors the Kings so much in using social is that the Kings are known as an account on Twitter especially that is willing to engage with the fans and reply to their fans. Pat does this thing during the second intermission (of games) where he asks ‘Q&A Time with the Kings Twitter Guy,’ and it probably gets more engagement than anything else they do, and it’s just goes to show how much Pat’s team invests in the fans and talking to them, not at them.
PD: Yeah, it’s still unbelievable how many people respond to that, and especially during a slow game. Yesterday, they played Winnipeg. It’s not a national broadcast, a smaller Canadian team. It was a 4 o’clock start, it was just slow on Twitter. And then all of sudden, it’s time for second period Q&A, and I couldn’t even keep up with how many tweets we were getting. And I respond to at least 80 percent of them, even to the point where we’ve had out account shut down a few times for sending out too many tweets in a short amount of time.
You can follow Hankins at
@DewayneHankins and the Trail Blazers at
@trailblazers. You can follow Donahue at
@patatack and the Kings at
@LAKings.
