I was recently invited to give a keynote talk on digital sport and fan engagement at Coppead Graduate School of Business in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Like my own University at Salford, the staff and students and the local sports clubs in Brazil are all very interested in using technologies Read more…
I registered for a PhD at Salford University in October 2014 and on Tuesday 06 February 2018, I had my final PhD Viva. This involves two external examiners reading the full thesis and then asking me lots of questions on it. Pleased to say that I successfully defended it. I Read more…
My PhD is all about football and social media and there has been some bad press for social media recently. This article explores some of the issues related to football and asks the question if full time is approaching for football and social media. It is based on an original Read more…
I was recently asked for my views on sports brands and social media. This crosses over into my PhD on this subject, so I thought it would be worth wrapping these thoughts into a blog post about social media and brands and what might lie in store for the future. Read more…
The recent fan boycott of the FA cup game between Blackburn Rovers and Blackpool was labelled by the Independent as the most important fan protest in years. Blackburn owners, Indian poultry firm VH Group (Venky’s) purchased the club when it was a well-run Premier League club in 2010. Initially, Venky’s Read more…
A couple of years ago, I was asked to put a talk together on ‘Websites for International Audiences’. The slides on Slideshare (below) have had over 5000 views so I thought it may be time to pick this up again. Since then, I’ve been conducting some research into what engages Read more…
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the fortune to be able to present some of my Netnography PhD work at a number of great conferences and events. I started off with a talk at the Football Collective Conference at FC United’s ground on 30/11/16. The talk was entitled: Building Read more…
As part of my research into football and digital culture, through articles,blogs, comments online and interviews, these various phrases arose to describe lesser connected football fans: bandwagon jumpers, plastic fans, armchair supporters, glory hunters, not a real fan, fair weather fans, flaneurs, part-timers, light attenders, casuals, followers and many others that I am Read more…
This article explores social media analysis tools using the wealth of social media data of people’s interactions online for both academic and market researchers. This post comes from my PhD research on Netnography and Salford City FC and forms part of a recent contribution to our new book Digital Marketing: A Read more…
This research focuses on a new era for Salford City Football Club (SCFC). In the 2014/15 season, when SCFC were in the 8th tier of English football, they were taken over by ex-Manchester United players the Class of 92. The new era heralds an unusual case of a non-league football team having such high profile owners with reported ambitions to turn SCFC into a ‘digital football club’ (Conn, 2014). (more…)