Xavier Nation Magazine Feature: Social Engineering

Xavier's men's basketball team is 20 minutes from tip-off against DePaul at Cintas Center and there's palpable energy in the Musketeers' social media press box, The BarrackX. Scant sightings of Edmond Sumner have followed his season-ending ACL tear, but word has it that he's watching warm-ups courtside.

"See if you can find Edmond and take a picture of him, maybe throwing up an 'X,' " says Brendan Bergen, Xavier's athletic communications coordinator.

Bergen is the general of The BarrackX. He has a fleet of undergraduates, and five per game execute social media initiatives for the Musketeers' Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts.

Two crew members immediately leave to find Sumner. They stay down on the court after that, using their phones to capture and transmit crowd color and video, like a Tyrique Jones dunk or halftime show highlights.

The other students assume specific jobs in The BarrackX. A "listener" watches multiple social media feeds to see what people are saying about the game and issues "favorites" and retweets to the best of the lot. Another student works with the listener to compile tweets for Storify, the social media recap Xavier posts after each game. Still another student posts FOX in-game clips through a program called SnappyTV.

Bergen oversees it all. He posts tweets to the @XavierGameday account, like "Tre's Trey Tracker." It's a GIF, or graphic with animated features, signifying the three-pointers made by junior Trevon Bluiett. Other times he employs the hashtag "#CookingWithTre" in his tweets, replete with Bluiett in chef's garb, for when the guard scores in bunches.

As he's monitoring the game and minding Twitter, Bergen learns the students on the floor have tracked down Sumner. The result? A tweet of smiling Sumner, posing with his forearms crossed. The post features emojis of hands waving and the message, "Look who we found! Get well soon, @EdmondSumner."

The tweet generates 46 retweets and 231 likes. There's no time for the team to savor those stats—high-level, by the way, for a lone post—because there's so much more to do. The night is just beginning.

HARNESSING MOMENTUM

As social media has grown in recent years, so too has Xavier Athletics' presence on it. Athletic director Greg Christopher is a proponent of reaching as many people as possible with the best stories and messaging, and staffs led by associate athletic directors Tom Eiser (communications) and Brian Hicks (marketing) have collaborated to execute the vision.

Xavier's Twitter handle, for example, used to be @VictoryParkway. When the decision was made for the men's basketball handle to change to @XavierMBB, Eiser had to find a squatter who had taken the handle and convince that person to abandon it. And it was Hicks's idea to model The BarrackX after similar hubs at the University of Oregon and UC Irvine.

When a position on Eiser's staff opened, Bergen was an ideal fit. He was qualified to serve as the primary contact for men's soccer, baseball, and men's and women's golf, but his master's degree in new media studies from DePaul provided Xavier with a valuable resource for its video and social media efforts.

"The philosophy that we've established at Xavier is that engagement is the No. 1 thing," Bergen says. "There are all these vanity metrics out there where it's, 'We have so many followers' or 'We post so much.' Our thing is, did we grab people's attention? Did we cause them to want to share Xavier content? It's nice to be able to brag about having the most followers, but creating conversation and amplifying the brand is much more important."Xavier's men's basketball Twitter account had 1,725 followers when Bergen started three years ago. The following has now surpassed 21,500 due to his efforts and those of others.

The number of @XavierMBB followers grew exponentially last spring in particular. The basketball team's record-breaking season fueled interest, as did Twitter's decision to make Xavier a featured school. The latter distinction led to Bergen's visit to Twitter headquarters in New York City during the BIG EAST Championship, where he was given a Twitter mirror for the program to use.

The mirror essentially was an iPad in a plastic case. It was awarded to a dozen or so schools for March Madness and pre-loaded with programs like Periscope for live video streams. Xavier used it for a Selection Sunday team selfie, a view of the locker room after defeating Weber State in the NCAA tournament, and a Q&A with forward James Farr.

With the help of the mirror, @XavierMBB gained 9,000 followers and reached nearly 800,000 people in a two-week span.

A VALUABLE RESOURCE

Xavier's social media strategy involves a cross section of the athletics staff, but Mario Mercurio, the men's basketball team's director of administration, is most hands-on with @XavierMBB.

He created the #GamedayGuide that coach Chris Mack tweets before each game. The infographic, built in Adobe Illustrator, is jam-packed with information like game date, time, location, and TV. It includes stats, the series record with the opponent, and the game-day uniform.

The guides have generated immense feedback, with how-to inquiries from the NCAA and other schools. Moeller High School, for example, has a similar guide for its varsity basketball team.

Ditto for outsiders' interest in Xavier's National Signing Day splash on social media, which boasted cartoon likenesses of players who signed National Letters of Intent. The 49-second GIF of class of 2017 commit Jared Ridder, for example, displayed information like his current school and AAU team, his player ranking on recruiting sites, and a quote from ESPN.

Mercurio said social media has evolved into an immense resource for recruiting. It allows Xavier to separate from other programs and strengthen its brand.

"Every kid that we touch from a recruiting perspective is on social media. It's the easiest avenue," Mercurio says. "In a lot of ways it has replaced the mail-out, it has replaced text messages, it has replaced e-mail blasts. It's up-to-the-second. It's colorful. It's interactive. And for us, we actually get a pretty good barometer from kids in terms of who follows us. If we really are interested in a young man and look and see he's not following us, and he's following several other programs, it really tells a story for you."

That story is something Xavier can control. The men's basketball team's message can be conveyed directly from the department—instead of relying on the opinions of outsiders—which allows those with direct knowledge of the program to relay unique and creatively packaged information.

Mercurio said The BarrackX initiatives are a huge part of that puzzle. On the night of the Seton Hall win on February 1, Mercurio talked about the way social media can heighten a single home game.

"The bigger you can make game night feel, the better," Mercurio says. "And it is big. There are almost 11,000 people here and you're on national TV. You've got a high-stakes game. Being able to project that to 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds who don't necessarily have that information at the tip of their fingers—they're from Atlanta. They're from Chicago. They're not as familiar with Xavier as we are. To sneak into their timeline and just give them a quick glimpse of any of those little pieces—like our throwback jerseys—can, over the course of a year-long or 18-month recruitment, swerve into their mind a little bit and just clear up the picture of who we are to them."

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

There's another part of Xavier's social media team, and that's Patrick Dillon. The Musketeers' director for marketing views social media as an opportunity to ramp up exposure for sponsorship partners.

Like everything else in social media, he says change has abounded.

"Four years ago, we were posting on Twitter: 'Like this if you recycled today. Brought to you by Rumpke.' Obviously, that would never fly today," Dillon says. "But that's kind of where our sales team was four, five, six years ago. And we said, 'How do we provide value for our fans through that?' "

If tweets, say, can encompass value for fans and sponsors, that's ideal. A post-victory image and score with a United Dairy Farmers logo in the top corner is a win-win.

Dillon says the program Xavier uses to measure social media analytics, RivalIQ, also allows the university to compare itself with its peers. Bergen spoke specifically about how Xavier stacks up in the BIG EAST.

"For pure followers, we're slightly above the middle of the pack, but other metrics show us to be a leader in our conference when it comes to consistently engaging with our fans," he says. "Being a smaller school in terms of enrollment, there are some challenges in measuring success just based off follower counts, but I think Xavier fans are extremely passionate and I think that shows in how they choose to interact with our accounts."

Xavier's cross-channel social media engagement—which includes stats like shares, retweets, likes, and favorites—has consistently been a BIG EAST frontrunner since the school began tracking those stats during the 2014–2015 season. From August 1, 2016, to February 13, 2017, the most recent analytics show Xavier's primary Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts (@XUAthletics on Instagram and Twitter, Xavier Musketeers on Facebook) in first place in the league with more than 251,000 engagements on all three platforms.

Only Georgetown (234,000) is in the same ballpark as Xavier, and no other league school has more than 153,000 engagements this academic year.

Xavier's vision is to keep growing, to continue building audience engagement, and to find new and catchy ways to present information.

"I think any sports team, whether it's college, pro, or high school, you expect a couple basic things," Christopher says. "One would be the brass tacks: What happened in a game? What are the statistics? The basic building blocks of sports. But then you also want to be connected. You want to be connected to your coaches, you want to be connected to your teams, you want to be connected to the student-athletes. And that's kind of the secret sauce in what we're putting together. I don't know that there is a perfect formula for it that anybody's got. So it's, 'How do we connect our alumni to our university, to their university, and connect them to our student-athletes, to our coaches, and to some of the great work that they're doing?' "

A microcosm of that connection unfolds in The BarrackX, where senior Mike Karpinksi has interned for four years. Karpinski is a finance major who thought tweeting during hoops games would be fun. It is fun, he says, but with a purpose.

Members of TheBarrackX also contribute to a blog (fromthebarrackx.wordpress.com). The 2016–2017 undergrad team members are Karpinski, Connor Killian, Connor Backman, Paul Fritschner, Will Ponds, Maddie Craigo, Rose Fantozzi, and Jenn Talken.

Karpinski recently marveled at the robust state of Xavier's social media presence.

"Seeing it grow from freshman year to senior year has been really rewarding," he says.

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