The Troy Trojans were ready for their moment.
For the second consecutive year, the Trojans scored a major upset on the road against a traditional college football power. In 2017, the victim was LSU. On Saturday, the Trojans went into Lincoln, Neb., and stunned Nebraska 24-19.
The victory came with a $1.5 million payday for the Sun Belt Conference program. This time, it also came with a payoff on social media. The Trojans were ready to capitalize on their big moment on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook too, using the Influencer (INFLCR) software.
Even before halftime, as the Trojans were building a lead, the Troy media staff was preparing for the possibilities. Staffers were creating digital content — photos, videos and graphics — and uploading it into the university’s cloud-based INFLCR account. Then a client services team from INFLCR, based in Birmingham, Ala., began tagging Troy staff, coaches and players featured in the content to create customized galleries accessible by each user of the INFLCR mobile app. This software-with-a-service positioned Troy to maximize the opportunity.
When the upset was complete, Troy players were notified of the new content via text message and could share it easily via the app to their personal social channels. The Troy Football story, as told by those who live it, could be amplified while the moment was still hot in the minds of all college football observers during the weekend, and Troy could measure this impact via convenient INFLCR dashboards.
“I always tell the teams that we serve at INFLCR — whether it’s the players, the coaches, the media staff — that this is all about helping the athletes and their coaches be ready for their moment,” said Jim Cavale, CEO and founder of INFLCR. “You work so hard on and off the field to get to a stage like Saturday if you are Troy University. You’re in Lincoln, Nebraska, 363 consecutive sellouts dating back to the early 1960s. You’ve got a packed stadium, a new coach and a lot of expectations coming off a tough loss against a rival in Colorado. And yet Troy showed up and controlled the game from the beginning to the end.”
Cavale took in the game as a guest of Troy Athletics Director Jeremy McClain. That gave him an up-close view not only of Troy’s latest giant-killing victory but of the way the program used his company’s software on gameday. At halftime, he saw Troy’s media staff uploading content from the first half “because they wanted to make sure everything was loaded” for the INFLCR staff to tag so that the Trojans’ players would have personalized galleries waiting for them.
“Troy was ready for the moment,” Cavale said. “The players were sending thank-yous back to the INFLCR text alerts that automatically notified them they had new content in their personalized INFLCR mobile app galleries. The players then could share that content on their Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat accounts.”
Those players also had the benefit of some personal coaching from Cavale, one of the nation’s leading experts on social branding. Cavale personally visited Troy during the summer to speak to the team as part of the product activation.
For Troy, it was an additional layer to the victory that will help the impact linger in ways that benefit the program in the long-term, Cavale said.
“The reach that Troy was getting to potential new recruits and fans, new audiences of sports fans who don’t know as much about Troy but now are following them because of their coaches and players sharing what they shared,” he said. “It’s an engine that all works together.
“While we’ve built great software that helps streamline it all, it takes players being ready for the moment. It takes them being responsible with their social medias and not doing things that might contradict the character that happened on the field. It takes media staff being excellent and getting content shot and uploaded. It’s really neat to see it all come together.”
Troy and fellow INFLCR clients Fresno State (over UCLA) and South Florida (over Illinois) all scored big victories over Power 5 programs on Saturday, something Cavale noted.
“We serve various innovative Group of Five team brands now at INFLCR,” he said. “It’s exciting to see them on the national stage, doing what they are doing, and to know that we are helping them tell their story.”
And Cavale may catch a few more Troy games.
ABOUT INFLCR
Influencer (INFLCR) is a social media CRM that allows teams and leagues to efficiently distribute their digital assets across the social channels of their most effective brand ambassadors (student-athletes, coaches, recruits prominent alumni and fans) while being able to track and measure the reach and performance of the content at scale via a convenient dashboard. With INFLCR, teams can store, share and track their digital assets (game photos, videos, etc.) as they flow through the social media channels of their brand ambassadors. Learn more at inflcr.com
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