Double Winning St Johnstone FC Thread

[tree house tam]

21 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

This will sound far more sarcastic than it's intended, but what would a £20k investment into "marketing" actually consist of?

A nice wee Euro jaunt for Stan n  Steve to talk to a marketing guy on an Algarve golf course?

[LarsGunnar Carlstrands Dog]

Hi I’m usually just a lurker but thought I’d reply to this topic.  I’ve been a season ticket holder for a few years now and I agree to communication and information that comes out the club is amateurish at best.

I know Gary is getting it a bit tight but he has nothing to work with as I believe the problem is top down, as long as the board of directors and pals know what’s going on the rest of us don’t really matter.

The best marketing in this day and age for a football club is free, Twitter, Facebook, instagram, YouTube, all these things with a person updating them regularly would make the club seem more accessible.

The club updated the website and somehow it’s even worse and more difficult to find anything that it was before. The club online shop is difficult to find and doesn’t really have much to buy.  No new season ticket holders can get to the player of the year awards due the the fact they have went for the last 10 years, only regulars and their pals are invited.  The clubhave  had event for players testimonials and haven’t advertised them, not even to season ticket holders.Even  One with off the ball where they only invited about 50 people.

Yes the club do lots of great things, but the lack of communication and engagement with the community is undoing all the great work

[capt_oats]

54 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

This will sound far more sarcastic than it's intended, but what would a £20k investment into "marketing" actually consist of?

That's actually 100% a fair question.

Spending a pile of cash on running adverts or such really doesn't really do much if there's no overall strategy. Giving 'Gary' a budget may not achieve much if there's no direction coming from board level. If the board don't think it needs done then why spend £20k (or more) doing it.

I don't mean this in a 'check Motherwell out btw' way but a lot of what folk are talking about on the thread at the moment actually seems to fit in with stuff that we've done quite recently. I'd meant to say the other day when I'd posted about Motherwell's season ticket campaigns, part of the investment Les Hutchison made when he (briefly) took over was to put money into various areas of the club that were possibly viewed to be underperforming.

Essentially he invested a substantial amount of money (that we're still paying off at the moment) to help make us a bit more sustainable. That was part of a 5 year plan that ended up being a 2 year plan after he jumped ship. Not only have we added staff to the comms dept but also recruited an entirely new team recently in Commercial & Hospitality, Business Development and Hospitality & Events. We brought in staff who'd worked with Celtic, the SFA etc to improve specific departments.

It feels like there's far more of a strategy and plan in place at the club in terms of all those departments; Comms, Commercial, Business Development etc. I don't know if it's just the case that we actually tell people about things more now but since that re-structure we seem to have been selling out hospitality on match-days far more readily and there seem to have been a steady stream of sponsorships and corporate tie-ins.

In a marketing sense the fact that I'm actually noticing that sort of stuff when I didn't before suggests there's been an improvement in an awareness & visibility level at least.

On the point of interns earlier in the thread, the way we seem to do things is we've got a small comms & media team (2 or 3 staff) who come up with the creatives and if necessary we get some freelancers in to help deliver the content along with  the media team.

Anyway, I suppose the point of that long post is that the improvements we've seen in all those areas have really come from board level decisions. Rather than just hiring someone and poking him with a stick saying 'do something' it seems to have been a much broader strategy/plan. Though Hutchison put up the money it's really been Burrows who has been implementing the changes and the direction comes from him in the GM role.

Edited November 15, 2018 by capt_oats

[jamamafegan]

Good to see folk who don’t normally post are making their voices heard on this issue. I hope someone from the club reads these comments.

[Saint Huck]

I thought this article was interesting about trying different things .... 

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/46213364

Especially the quote - "Not everything is going to work, but I learned a long time ago, if you are going to fail, fail fast and learn quickly, and if you don't try you are never going to succeed."

[RandomGuy.]

2 minutes ago, Saint Huck said:

I thought this article was interesting about trying different things .... 

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/46213364

Especially the quote - "Not everything is going to work, but I learned a long time ago, if you are going to fail, fail fast and learn quickly, and if you don't try you are never going to succeed."

Easy for a man with over £500m sitting in the bank to say, I suppose.

[Saint Huck]

36 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Easy for a man with over £500m sitting in the bank to say, I suppose.

Not really about the money, more about trying different things to get people through the turnstiles.

[realmadrid]

On ‎14‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 16:48, DundeeSaint said:

Obviously resources are going to be tight at the club for employing an additional person. That makes Gary's job even more difficult. 

Is their no possibility the club could use some students that need work experience (sorry Tam). There are three universities reasonably close by, many interns work on a voluntary basis in the hope of getting a decent reference. Bring a couple in get them to work on some marketing campaigns and give them a small amount of money for executing them. If it works great  and if it doesn't then the club hasn't missed out on much. 

Like the two interns from Edinburgh Uni who work with the club through the week and on match days, that's how the club have been able to cover the  reserve games as all the media volunteers (myself included) work Monday to Friday. While I did not mind covering the under 21's on a Tuesday night I am not taking time off to go to Kelty every second Tuesday.

I am not sure what else they are working on but its more than just match day coverage.

Unlike in the past however everything social media wise comes from McDiarmid during the week, in the past the match day volunteers would post and reply but that's now only done by the office staff and interns so there is a strategy outwith game day.

[realmadrid]

7 hours ago, LarsGunnar Carlstrands Dog said:

 The clubhave  had event for players testimonials and haven’t advertised them, not even to season ticket holders

You do realise if the club were to advertise them or the player themselves talk to club media about the event the cash raised on the night is then subject to tax and its not a testimonial event. I remember Ross asked Ando about it in one of his rare interviews and it then had to be cut when this was pointed out to the media team.

[Squirrelhumper]

1 minute ago, realmadrid said:

You do realise if the club were to advertise them or the player themselves talk to club media about the event the cash raised on the night is then subject to tax and its not a testimonial event. I remember Ross asked Ando about it in one of his rare interviews and it then had to be cut when this was pointed out to the media team.

That isn't a rule anymore.

[RandomGuy.]

6 minutes ago, Squirrelhumper said:

That isn't a rule anymore.

It was a rule when we had testimonials, which is why it's being discussed.

[LarsGunnar Carlstrands Dog]

17 minutes ago, realmadrid said:

You do realise if the club were to advertise them or the player themselves talk to club media about the event the cash raised on the night is then subject to tax and its not a testimonial event. I remember Ross asked Ando about it in one of his rare interviews and it then had to be cut when this was pointed out to the media team.

No I wasn’t aware of that.  Makes things a bit clearer. Thanks .

I know a few season ticket holders who were annoyed by things like that who have got to the point of not renewing their season ticket, because there seems to be 2 levels of fans, ones in the know and the rest.  But if these things need to be passed on by word of mouth then it’s only understandable that you would need to know volunteers or people active within the club to find out about them 

[realmadrid]

3 hours ago, LarsGunnar Carlstrands Dog said:

No I wasn’t aware of that.  Makes things a bit clearer. Thanks .

I know a few season ticket holders who were annoyed by things like that who have got to the point of not renewing their season ticket, because there seems to be 2 levels of fans, ones in the know and the rest.  But if these things need to be passed on by word of mouth then it’s only understandable that you would need to know volunteers or people active within the club to find out about them 

That's the job of a testimonial committee. Certainly with Ando and Dave Mackay there was a Facebook page etc. for all the events.  Even at the Mackay match with Dundee it was the testimonial Twitter account who tweeted the match (done by Watty who normally does our home games) 

The player of the year event should be open to everyone but does have limited space so I can see why people feel that way.

[The Woolshed]

Best run we’ve been on in a good while, serious positivity on the park and yet the crowd issues are the only talking point. I genuinely fear for the crowds if we actually lose to Killie.

[Stelling]

Is big Gary on twitter? Missed opportunity if he isn't. Best way to shut up the h8rz is to show them all the work you're doing.

[tree house tam]

2 hours ago, Stelling said:

Is big Gary on twitter? Missed opportunity if he isn't. Best way to shut up the h8rz is to show them all the work you're doing.

Even better if he could produce the content to shut folk up. The reason folk are asking questions is that compared to predecessors, the content and quality of said content  has went down, now if that's because he's currently working on new stuff or is implementing changes then all is well. If on the other hand this is as good as it gets? We have a problem.

[Stelling]

3 hours ago, tree house tam said:

Even better if he could produce the content to shut folk up. The reason folk are asking questions is that compared to predecessors, the content and quality of said content  has went down, now if that's because he's currently working on new stuff or is implementing changes then all is well. If on the other hand this is as good as it gets? We have a problem.

Agree mostly tam, we're probably all on the same page about the quality being pish.

Point was that media staff at other teams all have their own accounts to engage with plebs like us and update on projects or day to day things. Ross did and beve does. It's low effort high impact and builds the idea of transparency. Gary H is getting pelters now because the output is dross but he's not really helping himself because nobody knows what he's doing. The lad could be out visiting schools 24/7 or leading projects that bring in thousands through commercial deals, he could be a massive asset, but we don't find out and because there's no improvement in the media we assume he's done bugger all and questions get asked like they are now.

 

Edited November 16, 2018 by Stelling

[tree house tam]

You're right Stelling, surely Gary can see this though and if he can't there lies the problem. He needs to look on here and less on the Banter page for a broader representation of Saints fans and what would be good/bad, we'd help the boy out.

Let's face it, If P&B is a gauge on society then any twat with a smartphone can get the general feeling on many things that are right/wrong with the world, topics ranging from what Dundee pay shite players to how many names Lorne sausage has to who's your favourite pornstar, you can't pay for that kind of shit.

[RandomGuy.]

Blame Steve Brown, not the poor guy he sent into the lions den.

[tree house tam]

Just now, RandomGuy. said:

Blame Steve Brown, not the poor guy he sent into the lions den.

The spoon fed Sparky(AKA Bulletproof Broon) does have a lot to answer for but all this could be cleared up with one glorious statement.  Sick fed up of us being stuck at the bottom of that table, it's embarrassing.