Rachel Pincus is the Strategic Communications Manager for Kansas Jayhawks Athletics. She recently spoke to INFLCR for 3 Questions about her role at KU:
- You work with one of the biggest brands in college sports, KU Basketball. With that comes some advantages. What are some of the biggest challenges?
Brand awareness, brand advocacy and brand loyalty are three points of focus for us and the reality is, with the prevalence of social media, our athletes are quite often more popular than our organization’s brand. Finding the best way(s) to promote our brand, as well as our student-athletes’ personal brands as they connect to KU basketball, is a complex process that we are always working to develop and refine.
- How do you deal with it when you face a PR crisis on social media?
We like to be as proactive as possible – education is everything. Being able to engage with our student-athletes to educate them on everything about social media – from best practices to potential dangers. Quite often, education delivered in a way that speaks to the specific student-athlete does a lot to deter crisis but obviously that is not a catch-all approach. We are lucky to have a dedicated and talented communications department that has a collective wealth of experience and expertise in handling crisis situations and we lean on this staff to approach any issues head on and in a timely manner.
- What do you see as an important trend on social media and how is KU looking to leverage that as an opportunity?
The social media trend that has my attention right now is the opportunity to partner with athletes (in our case student-athletes) to help tell the story of your brand and increase awareness. As I mentioned earlier, our athletes have fans that go beyond our program’s fans. Their families, friends and followers are fans of them and in turn are fans of what they are a part of. By leveraging their reach and the loyalty they have for their personal brands, we benefit by converting new fans but our brand can benefit the student-athletes because our fans welcome them with open arms. It’s a true symbiotic relationship.
INFLCR is the proud content delivery partner of University of Kansas Men’s Basketball, providing their creative team with the INFLCR platform to store, track and deliver its content assets through their brand ambassador network of KU Basketball student-athletes, alumni, coaches, etc. to grow the brands of these individuals and the KU Men’s Basketball brand.
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