Social Media 101 with Bleacher Report ‘Social Moments’ Executive Editor Jermaine Spradley
Kiel: What is you and your team’s backgrounds and how do you go about filling roles with the right people?
Spradley: I’m a journalist by trade. I started my career in journalism at the Huffington Post, and I learned a great deal there. I came to Bleacher Report in 2015 as the Executive Editor. My job here is really to be kind of an in-house entrepreneur. I work with the rest of the leadership team to identify content areas and content buckets that we think make sense for our brand, and then I go out and build a team that can execute against that. The first big project that I worked on in that vein was our ‘Social Moments’ team, which was a two-person roster when I started. It’s now well over 30 people, and the team members have varying backgrounds. There’s some folks we found who were creating viral content just for the love of the culture on their social media feeds; there’s some who were experienced social managers elsewhere that we were able to bring here and help them understand our culture and fit their strengths into what we’re trying accomplish; there’s also some people who I just thought were dope on Twitter and Instagram. The first thing we did is set some goals, and then we began to identify people that we thought could help us get there. Another thing I really value in a non-arbitrary way is diversity. I think the millennial generation is the most diverse generation the world has ever seen, and because of that, culture spreads really fast. So if you’re going to build a team whose goal is to own social media – specific to kids 14-30 – you’re going to have a build a team that reflects that and speaks that voice in an authentic way. We try to hire people who are actually of the culture – living and breathing the swag and the voice that you hear or see when you engage with a piece of content on Bleacher Report’s social platforms – instead of those who are just playing around in the culture. So the first thing for us was to keep diversity at the forefront of everything we were trying to do and make sure we hired people of varying backgrounds. I look for A) the authenticity and B) the skill set because certain positions warrant certain, required skill sets.
Kiel: So how does the process work on a typical night? I assume you must have a team member viewing sports around the clock, right? I remember a player aggressively blocking another player in a Phoenix Suns-Denver Nuggets game, and you guys had a graphic of the player dropping through a crater on the court within an hour of the block, it seems.
Spradley: I don’t want to go into too much detail because it’s a very competitive space, but we’ve worked really hard to set up a system where we’re covering, essentially, 18 hours a day, seven days a week. So anytime sports are happening, we have a portion of my team watching it. Their job is to look out across the landscape of social media, sports, news and culture, find the touch points that are going to matter and begin brainstorming content that reflects that. We also do a lot of work in advance. So the treatment you just referenced – where the player fell through a hole – was something we had as a template for weeks before it happened. It’s a matter of saying, ‘Hey, what are some things that we know are going to happen throughout the course of an NBA season?’ We know people are going to get dunked on; we know players are going to have monster, high-scoring games; we know we’re going to see some ankle breakers – there’s thing we know are going to happen every season. So one of the things we work on in the offseason is coming up with templates that we can kind of plug-and-play. We put together all of the assets in advance, and then all we have to do is kind of plug the highlight in during real time, do a little bit of massaging and then you have the treatment you just described. That’s a combination of A) forethought – knowing certain things will happen and thinking about cool ways to respond when that particular moment arrives and B) having a staff that is expected to capture every single moment that matters and being smart about how you schedule your staff to ensure that you have people on who can execute when those moments come.
Kiel: Feedback-wise, what do you hear from various athletes that you create content around?
Spradley: We haven’t really received any negative feedback. We’re in the business of sports. Obviously, when you have to tell a story, you just have to tell the story. But sports are fun, so most of the time we’re trying to celebrate how much everyone loves sports. We love all of the different sports we cover. We do it because we love it, and we try to celebrate it. That’s #1, so we don’t get a lot of negative feedback outside of your occasional Internet troll here or there. In terms of feedback from athletes, they really do enjoy what we do. Even when we’re kinda poking fun at someone – or laughing with someone, I should say – we want them to see our content and engage with it. There are tons of athletes who are big fans of Bleacher Report: we’ve done a lot of work with Antonio Brown, Wes Welker and we even shot a couple of things with Migos. The athletes really rock with what we’re trying to do, and I think that is one of the things that differentiates us from the rest of the Internet. These athletes can sense the authenticity. They know we’re not playing around in the culture, coming to Bleacher Report and creating content around them. They can tell we live and breathe these sports and culture the same way they do. So to be specific, it may be a movie we reference the right way or it may be the caption we used on particular picture that really resonates with them. They’re fans of the sports just like we are.
Kiel: What is your advice to young, aspiring content creators who want to immerse themselves in the social media world?
Spradley: My big thing with young folks entering this space is to be great at what you’re expected to be great at. I think young people often get into jobs and immediately start thinking about whatever their next move is and that sometimes ends up conflicting with what they’re trying to do right now. Once you get into a building, be great at whatever it is you’re expected to be great at. If you want to dibble and dabble in other spaces in your free time, then you do that. Speaking specifically to social media, do it for the love. If you’re doing it because it’s something you’re passionate about, people will eventually notice. The social space is big enough that there’s room for every single niche, style and aesthetic. People who do it for the retweets, follow backs or likes are obvious, but the people who do it for the love are the ones that really develop the followings. Those are the people that folks like me look for when trying to find somebody to fill a role on my team.
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