Digital Sense. Snook Chris

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      The “Save Our Chiefs” Movement

      The situation with the Chiefs continued to gain momentum. The wave of public disgruntlement grew toward the Chiefs almost daily, and the compounding losses in future weeks did nothing to quell the rage. A couple of more losses into the season and people from all over began to reach out to TW about doing something bigger.

      ChiefsPlanet.com had been around since 2000, before Internet 2.0, and was one of the few remaining independent message boards about the Chiefs. It was founded in August 2000 after a group of core users were fed up with the Kansas City Star message board moderators. After a negative experience with moderators at the KC Star happened in 2000, they started their own private community to commiserate with fellow Chiefs fans. Travis has been a card carrying member since 2003.

      Message forums are a form of social media organized around communities of common interests. As a participant, you can really get to know people, over time, through the medium. There had been several ChiefsPlanet in-person bashes and tailgating events at Arrowhead with members of this forum over many seasons. It remains a great community, that commiserates over the 16 years of Chiefs futility. ChiefsPlanet is still going strong today.

      A couple of weeks after the initial tweet shit-storm, Travis was perusing ChiefsPlanet and one of its users, Eric Granell, created a thread that said “Hey we're thinking about flying banners over Arrowhead Stadium before each Chiefs game. What do you think of this idea?” In another thread, Marty McDonald was setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter page for something he coined Save Our Chiefs.6 As they were all talking virtually on the thread, it was decided to merge efforts. Save Our Chiefs was born after the fourth game of the 2012 season.

      With Travis being the disgruntled Twitter “cc get a clue” guy, he wasn't about to be on the forefront of this movement. However, he was able to give key strategic advice and help grow their social media channels rapidly. A fundraiser was created on ChiefsPlanet for airplane banners to fly over Arrowhead. When it was all said and done, they had crowdfunded almost $6,500 to have airplanes fly a banner over the home stadium and parking lot before each game. Once the banner was funded, Travis reached out to his local media contacts, who had interviewed him for the Chiefs Twitter story. He relayed the news back to the members at ChiefsPlanet.

      WE DESERVE BETTER! FIRE PIOLI! BENCH CASSEL! the first banner said.

The local KC news outlets feasted on that development. Within two weeks, @SaveOurChiefs had almost 80,000 followers on their Twitter account. For perspective, that was more than the seating capacity (76,416) of Arrowhead Stadium where the Chiefs play. The perception of having nearly 100,000 followers on Twitter freaked out the Kansas City media. It was 2012. New stations were still struggling to figure out how to leverage Twitter. They ate it up. They were like, “Oh My God! The Save Our Chiefs movement (Figure P.5) already has 100,000 followers and over 20,000 Facebook fans!

Figure P.5 The Save Our Chiefs Facebook Page

      The media freak-out enabled greater visibility. Eric and Marty were being interviewed on sports radio stations all over the nation, talking about what's going on with Save Our Chiefs.

      Travis penned a letter and sent it to the CEO of the Chiefs, Clark Hunt, and the general manager, Scott Pioli, stating what the plan was and that the intended outcome was to see Pioli get his walking papers. Using e-mail technology called Yesware, he was able to track all opens for that e-mail. His e-mail never got a response from the Chiefs; however, it was opened up 49 times on 27 devices in 13 different cities. The movement definitely had the Chiefs' attention.

The group even worked out a deal with a local sporting goods company, Sports Nutz, and created custom black hoodies that said, “Save Our Chiefs Blackout-Arrowhead November 18th, 2012. (Figure P.6)”

Figure P.6 Arrowhead Stadium, November 18, 2012, During the #blackout

      On November 18, 2012, roughly 50 percent of the fans were wearing black on that game vs. the Bengals. Save Our Chiefs literally blacked out the Guinness Book of World Records for “Loudest Stadium in the World.”7

      The group had other, more positive community events planned as well, like a food drive. They were partnering with a local food bank on a canned-food donation campaign called “Can Pioli.” Phil Kloster, CEO of Edgewood Construction in KC with the username “Phobia” on the ChiefsPlanet forum, came up with that one.

      However, in a parallel narrative, that was the week that a linebacker of the Chiefs, Jovan Belcher, committed a double homicide-suicide. Which was absolutely tragic and brought everyone back to reality about what really mattered in life. Out of respect for all parties involved, the entire group ceased all of the Save Our Chiefs activities until the last two weeks of the season.

The overall statistics from the movement were impressive: 41,545 mentions of Save Our Chiefs, with 359 news articles written about it, 160 blog posts about the movement, and 113 mentions (Figure P.7) on various message forums.

Figure P.7 The Social Media Mentions of #saveourchiefs after the @teedubya @kcchiefs Firestorm

      At the end of the 2012 season, the Chiefs ended up with two wins and 14 losses. On the Monday following the last game of the season, Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, went after the best candidate possible and hired Andy Reid as coach. He also hired John Dorsey from the Green Bay Packers front office as his new general manager. Former GM Scott Pioli and the Chiefs' head coach, Romeo Crennel, and the coaching staff were fired and a new regime began. The Chiefs were saved! For fans, it was long overdue justice. Travis immediately sent Clark Hunt, the CEO of the Chiefs, a note of thanks.

      Mr. Hunt,

      Thank you. You've proven yourself to be extremely tenacious in getting your man, Andy Reid. I'll never call you cheap again. You've displayed balls of steel, went above and beyond, and as a result KC fans are rejoicing, today, at your awesomeness. I put on a Chiefs jersey for the first time since preseason, just now. It feels good to have our Chiefs back from Pioli and in the hands of Andy Reid and John Dorsey.

      I love the Chiefs and am grateful that we have an owner who cares. Could I be unblocked from the @kcchiefs СКАЧАТЬ