What a crazy last couple of months. We really have had no downtime here at work…
1) We took on the interactive marketing for the Rose Quarter. This is no small feat as there are a lot of events that go on at the Rose Quarter.
2) Upped our coverage of the team in the off-season (Jim Taylor, BlazersEvangelist, traveled to New York and Las Vegas to cover the draft and summer league)
3) Brought in a new email marketing tool, Eloqua. This tool has some really remarkable features including a good integration to CRM and automated work-flows for drip marketing campaigns.
4) Greg got hurt. This one was tough since there was so much buzz about all the guys coming back early and playing together. Greg doesn’t get out on the court, but we will cover his comeback (video features of his rebhab, checkins with the trainers etc) and will be able to involve him more than if he was playing.
5) Launched our new season campaign titled “Rise With Us”. Pretty cool in that it goes beyond the organization. We will be placing cameras in the hands of the players, fans, employees to show what it means to be a part of this team. We should capture some really exciting footage of locker room talks, fans getting ready for the games, players on the road. I’m excited to see some of the stories unfold. More about Rise With Us in a future blog post.
6) Make It Better. This is relaunch for our Community Outreach program. We are launching this today and is to show how the whole organization “Makes It Better”. I think it is really cool all the work that the employees here take part in on a weekly basis. From the weekly projects in the summer to the larger projects during the season. One of those large in-season events is coming up on Monday next week (Harvest Dinner). We will be feeding over 5,000 homeless people here at the Rose Garden. The players get involved and man the food line, I think this year I’ll be helping with haircuts. I doubt I’ll be giving haircuts, that duty ended in college… probably helping with crowd control.
7) Upcoming Greg Oden Bobblehead night (Friday, November 9) and 90 & 92 Heritage night with Drexler, Porter, Williams, Duckworth and Kersey (Tuesday, November 13).
I don’t want to turn this into a promotion of all the events the Trail Blazers have coming up. More of, wow… there is a lot of work that has been done here at the organization… and still a lot more to come.
Iamatrailblazersfan.com continues to grow (over 8,500 members) and will be working on getting more this season. This is going to be a focus of mine in the next couple of months on how we can improve involvement in the social network. I will save all my current thoughts about social networking in upcoming posts, but they include: Facebook (I’ve found really good value so far with FB), LinkedIn (Is this like collecting baseball cards?), Twitter (one of the reasons I haven’t blogged in awhile), blogs in general, and finally Google’s announcement to Open Social.
