The applications of social media in sports marketing

n the era of big data, sports consumer's activities in social media become valuable assets to sports marketers. In this paper, the authors review extant literature regarding how to effectively use social media to promote sports as well as how to effectively analyze social media data to support business decisions. Methods: The literature review method. Results: Our findings suggest that sports marketers can use social media to achieve the following goals, such as facilitating marketing communication campaigns, adding values to sports products and services, creating a two-way communication between sports brands and consumers, supporting sports sponsorship program, and forging brand communities. As to how to effectively analyze social media data to support business decisions, extent literature suggests that sports marketers to undertake traffic and engagement analysis on their social media sites as well as to conduct sentiment analysis to probe customer's opinions. These insights can support various aspects of business decisions, such as marketing communication management, consumer's voice probing, and sales predictions. Conclusion: Social media are ubiquitous in the sports marketing and consumption practices. In the era of big data, these ＂footprints＂ can now be effectively analyzed to generate insights to support business decisions. Recommendations to both the sports marketing practices and research are also addressed

Customer perception of switch-feel in luxury sports utility vehicles

Successful new product introduction requires that product characteristics relate to the customer on functional, emotional, aesthetic and cultural levels. As a part of research into automotive human machine interfaces (HMI), this paper describes holistic customer research carried out to investigate how the haptics of switches in luxury sports utility vehicles (SUVs) are perceived by customers. The application of these techniques, including an initial proposal for objective specifications, is addressed within the broader new product introduction context, and benefits described. One-hundred and one customers of SUVs assessed the feel of automotive push switches, completing the tasks both in, and out of vehicles to investigate the effect of context. Using the semantic differential technique, hedonic testing, and content analysis of customers’ verbatim comments, a holistic picture has been built up of what influences the haptic experience. It was found that customers were able to partially discriminate differences in switch-feel, alongside considerations of visual appearance, image, and usability. Three factors named ‘Affective’, ‘Robustness and Precision’, and ‘Silkiness’ explained 61% of the variance in a principle components analysis. Correlations of the factors with acceptance scores were 0.505, 0.371, and 0.168, respectively

Developmental contexts and features of elite academy football players: Coach and player perspectives

Player profiling can reap many benefits; through reflective coach-athlete dialogue that produces a profile the athlete has a raised awareness of their own development, while the coach has an opportunity to understand the athlete's viewpoint. In this study, we explored how coaches and players perceived the development features of an elite academy footballer and the contexts in which these features are revealed, in order to develop a player profile to be used for mentoring players. Using a Delphi polling technique, coaches and players experienced a number of 'rounds' of expressing their opinions regarding player development contexts and features, ultimately reduced into a consensus. Players and coaches had differing priorities on the key contexts of player development. These contexts, when they reflect the consensus between players and coaches were heavily dominated by ability within the game and training. Personal, social, school, and lifestyle contexts featured less prominently. Although 'discipline' was frequently mentioned as an important player development feature, coaches and players disagreed on the importance of 'training'

Putting the self in self-tracking: the value of a co-designed ‘how might you’ self-tracking guide for teenagers

Although teenagers engage with Personal Informatics tools to track their health and fitness, many do so without adequate guidance, and they express concerns regarding the potential for these practices to bring harm. Further research is needed to understand how we might leverage resources beyond these tools to support young self-trackers. We worked with 44 teenagers (aged 13-18 years) in the United Kingdom in two series of online workshops to co-design a reimagined 'how might you' guide to promote lifelong, healthy behaviors with self-tracking tools. Our findings emphasize the importance of flexible resources that can support teens' self-tracking practices. For example, guidance on asking critical questions can be particularly valuable in the preparation and reflection stages of self-tracking. To better design teens' interactions with health technologies, particularly Personal Informatics tools, we must think critically about how we design the broader information ecosystems within which these tools reside

The Interplay of Organizational Demography and Institutional Change

Our paper analyzes the interplay of organizational demography with the propensity to adopt an innovative practice. In particular, we examine how the demographical composition of professional German football teams influenced the adoption of the chain-defense-system (?Viererkette?) as well as the success of implementing this system. In doing so we strongly believe that the underlying relationship between organizational demography and the innovation diffusion process is not only relevant for football teams: Other smaller organizations or profit centers whose team structures seem comparable to those of football teams might be subject to similar processes. We hypothesize that a high level of team heterogeneity leads to a greater propensity to change. We also hypothesize that homogeneous teams are more successful in executing a new practice once they have overcome their skepticism. Our results support the hypotheses on change, but do not provide final support for our hypothesis on performance. --Organizational Behavior,Economics of Sports,Innovation and Invention,Diffusion Process,Duration Analysis,Performance Analysis

Not on my watch: understanding the affordances of self-tracking for adolescents' social and psychological wellbeing

We can see aspects of our everyday lives through data – how many steps we took to the supermarket, how many kilometres we covered walking the dog, or how many calories we burned cycling to work. Whilst self-tracking is not new, and indeed not always digital, we have seen the continuing development of digital tools that enable us to monitor, control, and analyse vast quantities of personal health data. Self-tracking tools have become increasingly relevant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 has raised important questions about what it means to track data, what it means to be tracked, and how we understand the consequences of tracked data. Never has it been more apparent that our self-tracked data have social consequences. We know that many adolescents engage in self-tracking practices. Nevertheless, existing research on adolescents’ self-tracking is limited outside of intervention-based studies. Most work has focused on adult users; however, adolescents’ self-tracking practices do not always map neatly onto those of adults. In this thesis, I describe insights from my mixed methods study involving over 600 adolescents in the United Kingdom across an online survey, online interviews, and online co-design workshops. Drawing data from these methods together, I explore the affordances of self-tracking for adolescents’ social and psychological wellbeing to better understand how we can take positive steps forward to empower adolescents’ autonomous choices around their self-tracking practices. My empirical findings emphasise the complexity and variation in adolescents’ self-tracking practices, illuminated by the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Adolescents negotiate complex sociomaterial relations with self-tracking tools, with key tensions around practices of creativity and control. I argue that the limited attention paid to adolescent voices in self-tracking research and design is problematic and that urgent work is needed to ensure that these valuable perspectives are heard and heeded