Maybe It's Sports Information After All

I have been a big proponent over the years that the SID business is missing the boat by not attempting to be more involved in the public relations part of the athletic department. Follow CASE rather than NACDA as a model.

I remain committed to the concept that in an era of Brand Management, the best equipped office within the athletic department for that task is the SID office. In that space resides the expert on media relations, the person with the background of the history of the department and the creative staff to project the message. At too many schools, that lead role is taken by marketing, which respectfully, has the job to sell the message; not craft it.

After NAB, let me re-introduce CoSIDA to its old roots -- sports information. Session after session spoke of the ability to create meta data, based on statistics and other predetermined parameters, to enable the search of video, photo and other collateral material.

Guess who has that information? Oh, yeah, those people down the hall with their dirty little pencil pushing stat takers.

I've argued with limited success nationally that every school has three -- not two -- sets of distinct rights which they should protect, license and monetize. Everyone recognizes audio and video; radio and television. The networks know that the third one is important -- data -- because they routinely "borrow" it to fuel their own internet presences. Some schools and conference have just given that away, bundled it up in other new media gifts. Those that resisted had their data scraped.

True story -- told by tech support for a major national sports web presence that yes, they were just watching the TV and updating their live stats. Too bad the telecast was by a rival, and theoretically it could be argued, they were violating the copyright of the live performance by taking score, play and time from the broadcast.

Right now, third party programers lifting our RSS feeds from the official website -- and worse using on-line assests like FeedBurner to make RSS where it doesn't exist -- to serve as the engine of their iPhone apps. Some of them are charging fans $1.99 to get the info.

This becomes another arrow in the SID office's quiver -- the data management of the athletic department. That will bring a shudder down the spine of every PR type; we just got rid of the idea that we were the geeks of the department, the pencil pushers that don't need a seat at the table.

Here's the rub: if you lack good data going forward, you will lack rich content and the ability to monetize all those pretty picture assets. By data, I mean the old game files that can be easily converted to XML for search, dropped into pre-set columns within a meta data array.

As an organization, we're likely to not regain ground loss to the money creators. However, we must position ourselves as the office that protects and enhances the value of those money creators. You can't sell a bad brand for top dollar; you can't create Long Tails for old archives of video on demand without search data.

Let me be clear -- this isn't a call for a return to the hand written box and the mimeograph (mmm -- smell the fresh "ink"). Media relations needs to get a grasp on the modern data basing software, understand XML and its value, be conversant with the best ways to index within an array.

One of the best presentations to this was by the head of NASCAR's archive division. Every race is now indexed by an array of 256 variables; and with in those are a layer of sub variables related to race position.

Bring it into college sports, lets use football as the example. It's more than the data fields of date, site, home, visitor, score -- these are visual assets. Helment color, uniform color (and at many schools jersey and pants), player numbers, weather condition, time of day, network producing, record of teams, etc.; then all the data points within the game.

Why? So a producer can say I want all the footage of Casey Dick as a junior playing in Fayetteville in the red/white uniform that includes third down conversion passes to players X, Y and Z that were completed -- and be able to get that result in minutes.

Just like the Brand Management, Data Management best lives within the SID office that is aware of the value. Key phrase: aware. Harvesting that data will migrate to athletic IT or coaches' offices for the SIDs that don't get it. Who can give context to the numbers, depth to the decision of what data fields over the long term are significant? Only the people who live the brand and the historic information.

There's only one office that has command of both brand and information: good old Sports Information. These are distinct, but critically related, functions. The most efficient managers of message, brand and data are the people who understand and create those.

Maybe being CoSIDA -- with the correct rebranding -- is the right name after all.