The Evolution of Fandom - Episode 1: Social media in sports

I think it's safe to say that social is no longer just the place where fans react. It's where culture forms, athlete influence grows, brand relevance is tested, and fan sentiment moves in real time. So I sat down with Rhys Ryan, CEO and co-founder of Ekkobar, to take us deeper into the data of social media.

Rhys, you've been in the space a very, very long time, and what I'd like for you to do for the crowd is go ahead and give an intro on yourself and exactly what Ekkobar does in the space, and then we'll move on to some cool questions.

Sure, and thank you, Kyle, for having me on your inaugural event. It's an honor to be here, and I like to say, I'm your quintessential nerd. I have a traditional computer science, mathematics background. I did the Fortune 500 thing at Google, AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, but it really found my passion when I joined my first startup during the dot-com era, for those that remember those days back in the '90s. And I actually got introduced to the dot-com era and the startup world through the music and audio industry, and after working at my first startup, once it was sold, I actually went and did my own startup as CTO and co-founder, and we put together some really cutting edge tech, it was a lot of fun. I loved the versatility, the craziness, the excitement, the ups and downs and rollercoasters, and I guess you could say I just caught the bug.

After the dot-com crash, we survived, sold that company, moved to LA, got into the film and TV world, developed some software that went on to become number one in the industry and is actually still working today as number one in production, film and TV management after 20 years. That company got sold, did another company. After that one, took a little bit of a break, went and got advanced degrees in AI and data science because I was always fascinated by data, and I thought there are many problems that can be solved if you understood data correctly. And during that time, I had the opportunity of working with some marketing friends on social media legacy systems, and when I saw what they were doing and looking at the raw data, my first thought was, "They're missing something. There's more value here than just a series of numbers."

We can talk about qualitative versus quantitative, but I actually wanted to go deeper, and that became the beginnings of what would eventually become Ekkobar. And through an odd series of funny coincidences and happenstance, working with HBO and Gregg Fienberg, the executive producer of True Blood, ended up creating a formula that became the actual beginnings of Ekkobar.

So when people say, "What is Ekkobar?" We like to stay away from the term analytics. Yes, we do analytics, but who doesn't do analytics? That's not what we do. We are all about authentic social intelligence and how we can understand, find, measure and amplify your true social signal. Social media is the largest data set in the world, and the key is to understand the moments, the conversation, the balance, the influence, and what's really driving sales and fan engagement, and that's what we've accomplished with our technology, and grown our company to do what it's been doing well now since our launch.

We spend a lot of time, all of us brainstorming together, talking about Ekkobar, talking about sports, talking to teams, talking to leagues, and I liked how you mentioned the data piece of it. And one of the things you've said multiple times is you have to get down to the real signal, and you always mentioned bots and paid posts and things like that. I think it'd be interesting if you maybe talked a little bit more about that. You mentioned get down to the true social signal, which I think is important. You look at not only sports, but maybe across the industry, everybody is, maybe I use the word guilty, guilty of buying a social monitoring tool, and all that does is what it says it does, it monitors. It gives you a bunch of stuff on a screen that you're supposed to figure out how to leverage and it doesn't weed out all the noise.

So I always find it interesting when you talk about Ekkobar and how you find the true social signal, so do you want to expand on that and talk about the bot relationship and the paid media piece within social?

Absolutely, and what we talk about a lot is the concept of yesterday tools for today's decisions. And if you're still using social media analytic tools, fine, you know how many likes and followers you have, but what do you do with that? Nothing. If you have a social listening tool, oh, it surfaces this post and that post. What do you do with it? Nothing, and that's the problem, is you have to find the inherent value in social media, and so many people think social media is just a throwaway thing. "Oh, we have to post because you have to post." You do, but you also have to measure. You have to find, you have to understand the moments, you have to understand the narrative. You have to get to the value of the conversation or the true social signal, and numbers aren't going to tell you that, and surfacing key posts are not going to tell you that, and sentiment clouds are not going to tell you that. So you have to really get down to the core, but to get to the core, you have to get past the noise.

And so recently, we did a project for a national sports organization. They had a tournament, and over the course of one weekend, they had around 41,000 posts about them. And our software is specifically designed to understand, again, the noise and the signal, and so when we went back and reported what the conversation was about, we were only reporting on about 1,000 posts because 40,000 of those posts were fake. They were AI bot generated. They had no value in the conversation, they didn't offer you knowledge or insight or any value at all, and if you were looking at a legacy tool, you would see 41,000 posts. With us, you saw a thousand posts, you knew exactly what people were saying, how people were talking and where the value was in that conversation.

We have now hit a turning point in social media where 51% of all social media posts are AI bot generated. Every year for the last several years, there's been an 8,000% growth of more AI generated content, and while it may put out fancy words and em dashes between phrases, it's still noise. There's nothing real, there's nothing authentic, and that's why we started the campaign, #SaveAuthenticity. People are tired of hearing about AI. It's AI this, AI that. It's on the news, it's on social media. Everybody's talking about what it's going to do, and what it's doing is it's saturating, it's overfilling and it's over-flooding, and if you don't have the right technology, the right systems, and the right people who understand how to actually look at the data the right way, you're never going to find your true signal. If you can't find your signal, what's the point in social media?

Right. The signal, I think that's one of the key soundbites, and I'm curious, so AI is dominating the social space and the stat that you gave for that organization still blows my mind when you talk about ... Virtually everything that was posted about them was AI driven or on that side of it. Is that trends specific to sports or is that across every industry, every space, everywhere? Is this really what all of us are dealing with in the social space and it doesn't really matter what your product service is you're selling, it's basically the same thing?

Well, I don't want to flood you with stats and numbers because it'd be almost contradictory to what I've been talking about, but I will tell you this. If you look at social media, sports, entertainment and politics dominates 78% of social media, and in those three spaces, that's where the AI bot generation is. If I post on social media of, "Oh, I walked the dog today and I went to this restaurant and did that," no one dealing with me is going to worry about AI in bots, but I also have nothing of value to say either. I'm just taking up space with my comments. So in sports, in entertainment, in brand marketing, in politics, that's where the AI in bots is really kicking in.

Yeah. Great. I'm going to read what segment one is about because I think it's super interesting to me and I think it will be everybody out there. So our first segment that we're going to talk about is simply titled Social Media has Outgrown the Marketing Department. And I think that if you really step back and you think about that, and it's, oh, social for years and years and years has been treated like a content and brand awareness function, that's it, so we kind of monitor, we put things out there. So you're obviously in the weeds with a lot of teams and leagues, so how has the role of social media changed for those teams, leagues, athletes and sponsors over the last, I won't say five years, say over the last literally 24 months, in your opinion?

You know, it's funny, when we meet with potential investors, we get the, "How are you different than analytics question," which we've already addressed. And then you get the, "But it's just the social media and marketing department," and we're like, "Oh no, no, no, no. No, it goes way bigger." We were meeting with a local football team here where I live and they were talking about who utilizes social media, and he named one department after another. So obviously, social media marketing first, then you have general marketing, then you have content, then you have sponsorships, brand alignment, broadcast. Even their mascot and the charity they sponsor, everybody gets involved in social, because again, it is the one place where everybody's talking. And if you're putting out social media related to your team and what happened at a game or about a player, and if your mascot is putting out social media about something at the game, and during the week you're putting out social media, don't you want everything to be aligned?

If you're talking to your sponsors and you've got a company sponsoring your team, and you're putting out messaging related to them as well, and maybe they're putting out messaging related to you, it all has to tell the same story. Marketing 101 is always about tell the same story, and educate and promote and grow, and if you're not using social media in the right way across your enterprise, you're failing, and we've seen this over and over again. And when we start working with people, and we've worked with a number of studios in entertainment, and as we've helped them grow across from their awards group to their social group to their marketing group to their sponsorship group, once they start seeing the tie-ins, they realize the tremendous value that's in social media data, and the conversation.

Right. That's great. I think it's important. You mentioned enterprise I think at least twice, and I think folks need to start looking at it that way. Again, this isn't a siloed channel anymore, that you've got a coordinator sitting there that's looking at your monitoring tool, that's dropping content they think is relevant out into the social sphere, and you wipe your hands and go, "Yep, we're done. We're good, we're ready to move forward." So I think everybody needs to start looking at it much, much more from an enterprise perspective, because you talked about sponsors, you talked about fan engagement, everything all ties together. And I always look for threads. We talk a lot about fan threads, and I think social media needs to start being viewed as a thread that runs through your enterprise that's very effective and efficient at connecting everything.

So I ask, one of the next questions, you talked a lot about analytics. We said, "Oh, it's a social monitoring tool. It's this." Talk a little bit or maybe give a better definition on what is the difference between social analytics and social intelligence?

So social analytics is numbers. It's pure quantitative. How many likes? How many followers? What's my engagement rate? The funny thing is engagement rate is usually based on likes and followers, which you can go out and buy bots to buy likes and followers, so you can create an inflated engagement rate. And if you talk to marketers and CMOs, they all know it's fake, but when it's all you ever have, it's all you've ever had.

And so then came social listening. "Oh, now we're going to listen for keywords." Okay, that's great, and you're going to find out that some favorite sportscaster talked about your team because you have your social listening set up. Great, and what does that do? Again, you can't do anything with it other than maybe repost it or try to cross promote it, but you're not going to get a lot of business answers. You're not going to get revenue decisions in there.

Now, if you know, for example, let's pick one of the popular sci-fi franchises out there. We'll leave them unnamed for this conversation, but you pick one of them, and let's say a team says, "Hey, we're going to pay 10,000 in licensing fees to have some characters dressed up at a game, and it's Star This Night at the game." Well, don't you want to know what people thought? And if you actually go and look at social media and the conversation in the right way, you can find out between that night and the next couple of days, here's what the fans thought. Was that 10,000 worth it or not? And if it wasn't, you know, you move on, you do something else. If it was, let's do some more.

If you find out there's certain individuals who are your super fans who are out there promoting your team and saying certain things, there's value in that. There's ways to engage with them and there's ways to properly measure them, and so think about fan engagement. I have a 28-year-old, and you know when you got kids, they live on their phones. It's the world of second screens. We won't even talk about third screens, so we'll just stick with the second screens.

When I recently went to a game here in Indy, you wouldn't believe how much of the younger generation were on their phones, and I thought, "Oh, they're just doing social media or watching videos on YouTube or something." So I actually got up and walked around and was peering around. They were interacting with things related to the game, but it wasn't social media. They were looking at clips or they were Googling things, and I started to think about what happens if you could actually capture them on the second screen and bring them into the game? And that's what social media can do if it's used the right way with the right technology, and that's why we're partnering with a number of companies to really think about how do you take that conversation and bring it in?

There's nothing better than sitting there in a game, you post on social media and you make a comment that you think is the best thing in the world you could have ever said, and then all of a sudden, in the app for that team, your post shows up because they loved it so much. Well, how would they even know that post existed? You don't have enough followers to even register on social listening tools, but with technology like ours, you can bring the fan into the game, and once you can bring them in, you're going to create obsession, and when you create obsession, you create revenue.

We spend a lot of time in the meetings we have with teams and leagues talking about the younger generation, the new generation. How do you capture and connect with a new generation of fans? And you're right, they consume media much differently than, let's face it, folks in our demo. It's not the sit down in front of the TV for three hours and watch a sporting event start to finish, and that goes back, again, what's the connection point? I almost look at social media as the entry point into fan experience, fan engagement and those things, and you're exactly right. They spend time looking at video clips, looking at highlights, bouncing back and forth, and again, talking with their friends on whatever channel they so choose and looking at what's happening on social, and what I like about Ekkobar and Sports360 is it brings all of that content and conversation together in one ecosystem.

So if we're thinking about that and we're creating this ecosystem that gives executives deeper insight into what's going on on the fan relationship side, what do you think is one of the questions that a sports executive couldn't answer, again, we'll go back two years ago, that they can answer now based on the tool set and the intelligence they have available?

So you want to know what questions they would want to get answered or what they cannot answer right now?

So what they couldn't have answered two years ago that they could probably answer now. What I'm trying to do is give the folks that are listening, "Oh, I understand. I couldn't have done this two years ago, but now given infrastructure, technology, intelligence, I can now answer those questions." And maybe more importantly, that question needs to maybe tie into more of the enterprise business level than it does anything else.

Just look at your fans. I mean, your fans are your fans, and in our generation, we would sit in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon and for three or four hours, watch one football game after another. We'd have our snacks, we'd have our drinks, and we'd yell and scream, and that was our Sunday afternoon. And then you got into the world of DVRs. Oh, now we can pause. Bathroom break. Oh, got pizza being delivered, let's pause the TV. Oh, you know, now we can record and we can go back and watch it later, and then we've evolved into the second screen world. So your kid may be doing whatever, but they may be on their screen and they may be looking at certain things related to the game, but they're not watching the whole game. And so every step of the way, the fan is being pushed back at a distance, and what we want to do is we want to pull them in. That's the key. You want to get them into the game. So the question is, how do you get them into the game?

Well, if they're chatting with their other friends for a soccer event which is international, and who knows how you've made your friends on Reddit and Discord and everything else, and now you're chatting and talking about a game. You're all watching on your second screen, or even the big screen, but you're on your phone chatting. Don't you want them chatting in the app for that team with each other? Don't you want to have them talking in a community room where they share the same interest? So I might be talking about one player and my son might be talking about a different player for the same game, but we're talking to like-minded people.

So when you asked executives, how do you bring fans into the game? "Oh, we have promotion nights." We're not talking about butts in seats, we're not talking about bringing them into the stadium. The stadiums are saturated, they're done. Once you fill the stadium up, unless you raise prices, you're not going to create more revenue. That's not the revenue opportunity. The revenue opportunity is bringing the fans in. And so the key is not a better social analytic tool and not a better listening tool. We're not about building better mousetraps. We're about creating brand new, new infrastructure, new technologies, new AIs to change the game completely.

Imagine you're sitting, you're in a venue and you go to get something at the concession stand, and there's a TV monitor there and you're seeing what's going on in the game, and right next to it is a TV monitor where you're seeing trending topics about what people are talking about on social media about that game. And so all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh, interesting." I'm bringing them into the game. And you could do that at sports bars. There are so many opportunities to use the knowledge and the insights from social media that you can create a deeper involvement with your fans, and as soon as you do that, you're winning.

Right. I'm going to pivot because it really ties in nicely. We had a conversation yesterday with a North American based pro sports franchise, and what you said is basically what they said. "We have the building under control, we have the arena under control. We know how to sell tickets, we know how to fill the building, we know how to do those things." What they were struggling with is, I think the term he used was how do we create and open the door for our fans to come into the organization outside of the arena, which I think is really telling, and it really ties back to exactly what you're talking about. They're looking for a mechanism or a tool to open the door and welcome fans in, and it is absolutely 100% not about the building. It's about everything outside the building.

I think everybody's guilty of saying, "Oh, well, fandom and fan experience is 365 days a year." That's probably a little over the top, but it's relevant because it's what is the tool, what is the mechanism, what is the gateway that allows fans to come in and become part of fandom outside the building? And I'll say it again, and you even said it. Social media, simply put, it allows you to know who your fans are. Well, if I know who my fans are, then I'm able to create and open that door.

So it all ties together and I think everybody's saying the same thing, so if there was talking about that and leveraging Sports360, Ekkobar, technology and everything, what is your one piece of advice to the sports teams and leagues out there listening on how you would jumpstart this journey and start leveraging things to open that door? What's the first step? What's the first phase in your mind to get this whole thing moving in the right direction?

I feel like answering by talking about a TV show where they go and fix restaurants, because if you think about walking down the street and there's 10 restaurants, how do you decide which restaurant to go in? There's many, many factors. So if you think about the game, how do you bring fans in? Well, I'm not the same type of fan that you are, so what works for me may not work for you, which is part of the challenges with the diversity that's out there in sports and fandom. How do you bring it all together? And so that makes it tricky.

The biggest thing we see is that for someone to take advantage of what we can do and show them how to increase their ROI is they have to open their minds first. If you want to be open for fans, you got to open yourself. How do I think about my fans in a new way? How do I think about their experience in a new way? Just having truffle fries instead of regular fries is not going to bring more people in the building. Well, it depends if you love truffle or not, but it could, but for the most part, it's not.

My son's a big gamer, so if it's working with an app for a team, and he loves hockey, so if the app has some gamification elements in it, that might make it more interesting for him. I'm a stats person, I may want to see stats related to the team, things that are interesting that matter to me though. And so how do you at a team level personalize and be diverse, and yet not overwhelm your team? And with social media, you can understand not only the fans and who they are and what they're talking about, you can understand the moments they care about. You can understand the tidbits of things they care about.

One of the MMA leagues, if you go look at one of their matches, the way they package it up before the event is amazing. You know all about the player and their family and their kids and why they do it, and all of a sudden, you care about them. And now you're going to ... And you may be rooting for both people, but you're going to care now instead of just a couple of people getting up and taking swings at each other. And so especially with the new and emerging leagues out there, they have to be storytellers first and foremost. And myself and my co-founder Amber, we both come from entertainment. We're all about storytelling, and social media is the ultimate storytelling venue, so let's start telling stories that the fans care about. Let's utilize the stories they're telling us. That's the signal.

So I like how you mentioned MMA and emerging leagues, because one of the next talking points was about how you leverage or how athletes are becoming, and I'm going to quote it over here, "Media brands and cultural signals." And I'm going to cheat a little bit because I know some of the capabilities within your platform, so I'm going to set up a question for you.

So when you're looking at an athlete and your sponsorship and everything, we talk about data analytics and dashboards and all that other kind of great stuff out there, and I always go back to if you have data and it's not actionable, it's not doing anybody any good. So talk to me about how you are able to look at an athlete or a sponsor through your platform and build, let's call it a social media marketing strategy. Because again, I think what's truly unique about your platform and its capabilities is, again, it's not a listening tool, we clearly define that, but what it is is an intelligence tool that actually outputs things you can implement. So do you want to talk a little bit about that?

You've given me four or five stories over all the times we've talked and everything, and I just think the whole thing of looking at how all the content and everything is curated within your tool and then the output being a marketing strategy brief, quite frankly. So if you'd like, expand on that for the folks on the phone. I think it's super interesting.

Well, thank you. Two stories. One, major beverage company wanted to find a college athlete to promote their brand. They wanted that athlete to naturally love their product. They don't want fake, they want authentic. You have to love it. They also had to make TikTok videos about dirty soda. So they had gone to their agency of record, two months go by. They spent five figures, and I mean a good five figures for the agency to come back with five names. None of them had any social media about their drinks, none of them had made TikTok videos about dirty soda, because they sat around a room, they did what we call the court of public opinion, and they're like, "Oh, what about this athlete? What about this athlete?" And if it was in the zeitgeist, they knew. If it wasn't, it wasn't. And they were looking, when we got introduced to them, they told us about this problem, and we said, "Well, let's use our software."

So we went into our context matching technology and we typed in someone who loves the brand name and who makes TikTok videos about dirty soda. Hit the search button. Seven seconds later, up popped five names. One of those names was a female athlete, a very popular one. Not a top level Olympians so not too expensive. She had 18 videos on TikTok, all of them teaching her friends how to make different types of dirty sodas, and at the core of every video was that brand. Perfect match in seven seconds. A lot cheaper than multiple five figures.

Another fun example is a league, another major league, and they've got a group they call legends, and it's 100 athletes who have retired that are available for sponsorship for their brands. So the league will get a call and the woman in charge of that group will listen to what the brand wants. Now we introduce Ekkobar. So she's got our product, all the hundred legends are loaded into the system, all their social media, and she goes in and she types in the question, "Here's what I need for this brand." Hits the button, a few seconds later, here's the matches and why.

And then she goes in the software and we have this feature called Ask Away. So she types into the Ask Away dialogue box, it's a natural language interface, and she types in, "Why would this person be a good sponsorship for," and she puts in the brand name, and it will actually write out a plan of why it's a good sponsorship program and a match. And it does not go out to ChatGPT or Google to get the answers. It's our technology looking only at their social media, and that's important. It's only at their social media. So for that one person, if they've got a thousand posts, the answers are coming from those thousand posts. And you can go in and have it write marketing plans, you can tell it to write posts and it will actually generate a post, but it will generate it in their own voice, because all the software knows is their voice. It's not using any external data, and that's what makes it authentic.

And so all of a sudden, what could take weeks of work can happen in minutes to hours. On top of that, we're vetting people, we're looking at their background. We generate intense audience psychographic profiles, several pages printed out, so if you're like, "Oh, well, they have this many 18 to 24 year olds," and what can you do with that? Nothing. But if I come in and say, "Hey, here's what they talk about and here's how the audience interacts with them and accepts what they're talking about," and really understand the profile of their audience based on these interactions, all of a sudden, my psychographics are amazing. I know if it's a fit. I don't have to guess with a bunch of numbers. The time for guessing is done.

Right. That's awesome. So time is ticking. We're at a little over 30 minutes now, and I think, to start wrapping this up, I think if I were to summarize this for everybody joining in, social media is an opportunity engine, and if you look at the capabilities within Comcast Sports360 and Ekkobar, we're in a position that we can help you take advantage of that opportunity. So that may be a shameless sales plug, but it's a shameless sales plug, and I'll take it since this is our podcast, but I think that's the summary. So I'm going to kick it back to you and do the... If they could walk away with one thing out of the 30-minute conversation, what is the one thing you would leave our listeners with as we move into the wrap for this?

You mentioned social media as an opportunity, right? Engine?

Yeah.

It's a revenue engine. You have to open up, you have to think about it that way. You have to let go of the, "Oh, I'm used to a cheap, greasy burger." No, you want the best. You want to understand the value, you want to understand the conversation and all the tidbits, and we can show how you can take social media and actually turn it into a revenue engine, because that's what it is. Again, it's the place where everybody's talking. It's the largest data set in the world. It's just always been considered a throwaway because you've never had the right tools, the right platforms to give you the answers, and now, here we are.

Yeah. That's great, and I'll consider myself smart for having you wrap it up and tying it back to revenue, because again, everybody's ears, I think, peek up when you talk about that. So as we wrap up, again, thank you, Rhys. This was fantastic as always. The stories and the throughline and how you think about social I think is truly unique, and this was a great kickoff to our podcast series, so with that, I'm going to say it's a wrap and I'll chat with everybody next time. Thank you, Rhys.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for listening to The Evolution of Fandom. If you have any thoughts about what you've heard, we'd love to hear from you. Visit comcasttechnologysolutions.com/fandom to get in touch, learn more, or subscribe to the series.