Digital Marketing for Sports Team Merchandizing.

I have recently been looking into how English Football Clubs are using Social Media for maximizing their income from merchandizing and sponsorship.

It strikes me that there is all to play for here by thinking outside of the box.

For example, I would consider that the Players and the Team should be seen to have a role as digital brand ambassadors, quite literally.

Here's an example of what I mean by this. I created a Pinterest Board consisting of the Players of my local team, Barnsley FC.

Each Player is a Pin. Each Pin is a link. The link is back to the Barnsley FC website. There is no reason why the link could not be more directly associated with a merchandizing page where the "Buy Now" buttons are.

Each pin can be shared. The more high profile a player, the more likely the Pin is to be shared. By encouraging fans to share the Player pins, not only to their own Pinterest boards, but to other social media pages, this would mean that the Players' links back to the club's website will end up all over the internet. The Players become the true digital ambassadors of the club.

Moreover, the entire Pinterest board can be embedded not only on the club's websites, but the embed code can be provided for fans to embed it on their own personal sites.

There are many ways in which this can be gamified too. In my simple demo I have only included the Player's names in the pin descriptions. There is no reason why their stats could not be included also, enabling "Top Trumps" type games. Or all past Player's could also be included and competitions to build the fantasy dream team of all time ran.

This would also scale to league level, with each club maintaining their own boards on a League account.

This is just for illustrative purposes, and these concepts are not limited to Pinterest, for example Google+ Collections, LinkedIn Showcase Pages and Carii Communities could also be bought into play.

While I have picked a local Soccer team, the ideas are also applicable for any Sport, of course and can be woven into more complete strategies which exploit the vast content on which any sporting business sits.