#H2HChat: UFC Takes Their Gloves Off and Shares How They Do Social with Shanda Maloney

Hey everybody, how are you doing? We are back for another H2H. We're so excited to be here, and we have a really great guest. Really excited to talk about sports marketing with one of the best in the industry on— in marketing. Before I do a full introduction, I want to say a quick hello to my co-host, Bryan Kramer. Hey everybody. How are you doing, Suzie?

I am doing well. How about yourself?

Doing well, doing well.

Good, good.

Sitting well in this nice Thanksgiving week.

Yes.

It is a true H2H week, if you will.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm actually going to brave it down to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Wow.

For the first time. Yeah, I am.

Are you crazy?

Somewhat, yes. My parents are visiting and the University of Virginia's marching band is going to be in it. My husband's alma mater. So we'll see.

There you go.

Social post, yeah.

Right. If we don't hear back from you, we know what happened.

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully I'll be joining you guys next week. Otherwise, a big balloon ate me.

And let's go ahead and introduce our guest this week. Our guest is Shanda Maloney. How are you doing, Shanda?

I'm good. How are you?

Good, good. Thank you so much for being on, especially just after you get back from Australia. Really, really exciting match there in Australia. How are you feeling?

A little jet-lagged still, but coming back from Australia is more challenging than adjusting to the time frame there, or time zone there. We're good. We're good.

Good. Good. Well, you know, one of the things that we want to talk about today is just how you manage such an incredible— I mean, like, I think we were just talking offline and you said there is no season to what we do.

Mm-hmm.

So what you do really is a 24/7 job, and I think you'll probably agree that you don't run it with as big of a team as everyone thinks that you might. So, you know, there's a lot of challenges, but there's also a lot of rewards. So we want to walk through some of that. But first and foremost, I'd love to just hear from you. I know everybody else out there would love to hear, kind of, what do you describe what you do when somebody says, what do you do? What would you say?

How much time do we have? Yeah, right. You know, it's everything from coming up with the social strategy, the tone, figuring out what kind of pop culture events we want to jump into. Perfect example, yesterday during the NASCAR race, we had Jeff Gordon— it was his final race, and he's a big UFC fan. We have several athletes that are fans of his and of NASCAR in general, so we quickly reached out to a couple of our athletes wishing him well. We posted that on our site. Not just keeping on top of our own events, which are nearly year-round, but also looking at other opportunities for us to engage with other sporting events, with American Music Awards, or whatever the case might be. We're overlooking 600, almost 600 athletes— Wow. —and their social channels and making sure that, you know, they're not doing anything that's inappropriate or trying to give them some insight and best practices for their accounts. Holly Holm, who's our new champion, I spent the weekend with her trying to help her understand what kind of content to generate on her account because she's fairly quiet on her social accounts. But now that she's a new champion, you know, really gotta help educate her on what to do. So we are the concierge team to the athletes as well as to our fans and taking our fans behind the scenes, everything from, you know, the beginning of fight week to fight night. Connecting with our fans, answering their questions, troubleshooting, you know, how do you buy tickets, what time is the event, I mean we cover everything.

Wow, wow, how do you, do you sleep?

Nope, and people can attest to that when you're getting emails from me at 3, 4 o'clock in the morning and they're just like, oh, you woke up real early, and I'm like, no, I haven't gone to bed yet.

Oh, I can imagine.

A lot of times people ask, like, you know, where are you based? And, you know, most people say, oh, San Francisco, Vegas. And I'm like, airports, hotels, my stuff lives in Vegas, but—

I'm chatting you from a taxi right now.

Yeah.

How do you— how did you— when you first climbed onto this role, how did you view the role? Like, what— how do you prioritize? I mean, so that there's so many, as you just mentioned, now you've got your, your hands in there, you kind of know the lay of the land. But how do you prioritize from the get-go when you're looking at so many opportunities, almost so much low-hanging fruit? Everything's low-hanging fruit in that, right? Is that right?

Totally. We've got our top priorities, which are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are kind of the top 3 right now. But then there's always new emerging platforms. We've gotten involved in Snapchat. We just had a really, really successful Snapchat campaign wrap up in Australia. We had a Snapchat artist that took over the account for us and did a really great job doing some storytelling and trivia questions and doing some fun stuff. super rad Snapchat art, and then we did a Snapchat Our Story, which was one of the live stories that you could see globally, and performed insanely well. I'm not allowed to share the numbers, but it's like ridiculous. Wow. You know, then you've got new platforms like Blab, and, you know, what do you do on Tumblr, what do you do on Pinterest? Those 2 particular platforms we haven't done quite as much as we would like to, but Those are going to be things that we're going to kind of start bringing back into our portfolio again. When I took over in 2010, we've actually been on social for much longer. You know, we jumped into social very early, like 2009 I believe it was. When I came in, I kind of looked at everything that we were doing and analyzed what was working and what did our fans want, because I think that there's a perception of this is what people want us to push out through social. And internally the company looked at it as a form of free advertising. It's like you don't have to pay for your traditional reach and your SEO and things like that. But I was trying to explain to them it is free, but it comes at a cost. If your fans don't care, then what good is it? Yeah. If they don't want to hear about a certain product or certain you know, event or something like that. You know, you just have to figure out ways to message it to get the point across to them.

Right.

So really what I did was I came on board and I started to analyze and study how we were creating our posts, from the imagery to the links to even the copy itself. Things had felt a little bit more headline-y, and I wanted it to be a little bit more conversational and open-ended questions. And engage the fans to interact with us. Huge difference in the engagement rates that we started to see on our posts.

So is that a big metric for you? Absolutely. Is engagement rate one of the things that you basically keep your finger on the pulse against? Would you say that's the biggest?

Yeah, that's definitely one of the biggest. You know, we have this conversation all the time, and I spoke at the Lifts Social Summit in Seattle a couple of weeks back in October, and everybody, you know, we joked about people that measure their total followers, which I'm not saying it's a bad thing to measure your followers, and yes, absolutely you want to have more followers, but at the end of the day, you know, somebody could go out and buy the followers if they really wanted to. So if you have, you know, a million followers but less than 1% engagement rate, then what good does That million— what good does a million people do you if they're not listening?

Yeah.

We definitely look at our engagement rate. We do, we want to make sure our fans are engaged with us and they are interacting with us. Thankfully we do have a very, very engaged community, so it hasn't been a problem. But we're always looking at certain things that we do post about, especially if we're trying to figure out a way to involve a client into a post, that's where I push back a lot because the client obviously is gonna say, I want you to promote when our video game comes out in stores. And I was like, yeah, but people don't follow the UFC account to find out when that game comes out. That's not why they're here. So we'll negotiate back and forth and find a way to make it a little bit more organic and work for our community.

Yeah. How do you manage, how do you manage with all those channels, especially around a fight? I mean, it's fast and furious. You don't have time to to sit there and think about the tweet you're going to send out. And yet, you know, everything needs to potentially be— and correct me if I'm wrong here— but be spelled correctly and have the right tone in the right manner and not say something that you're going to later regret. So, you know, you're putting it across on a brand platform, and so— and I doubt it's just you. Mm-hmm. So, you know, how do you manage that? How do you train for that? How do you How do you do that?

Yeah, so it's funny that you're talking about typos, and I'm actually— for anybody that's watching, I'll tweet out an example here in a second. But there's 3 people on the team. It's myself, Gavin, and Brandon, who are managing from headquarters office, kind of managing the main account and overseeing all of our different region accounts. And we had— thank God, the 3 of us have such a good vibe together, and we have the same sense of humor, the same tone, that you actually can't really tell when it's one or the other tweeting because we all would write really similar. So that's a good thing because then there's not like a real obvious shift when somebody else takes over the account. But we had a situation where somebody on the team had done a TBT, a Throwback Thursday, said, @AmStill or @AmNew, tag 5 friends you're watching UFC 181 with, but he misspelled your, Y-O-U-R. And so a fan replies, just like, at least hire a media guy who can use the correct form of your. Rather than deleting the tweet, redoing it, we owned it, we owned it, but we responded to the guy in complete typos. Everything we wrote back was complete typos. And then the guy was like, damn it, even when the UFC fucks with you, you can't even kick their ass for it. Probably, you know, and then another guy jumps in and was like, best tweet ever. So, you know, at least, you know, you got it. Yes, we're a brand account, but we humanized it and owned it, you know.

Love it. Yeah, I love it. And how do you— so between the 3 of you guys, how do you manage taking over, living within the same voice? And taking over tweeting and managing all of that at the same time. Even with 3 people, I mean even with 2 people, you still have to maintain a voice that's not separate. Is that right?

Yeah, so the 3 of us, you know, we have fights. We have 40, probably over 45 events a year, so we're always on, the 3 of us. We just split up who's got what responsibilities. So one of us will be doing the live tweeting, the snappy TV clips. The other person will be doing behind-the-scenes content, you know, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat. Then the other person will be managing fan engagement, customer service, analytics, celebrity engagement, and working with our production team if there's any tweets to screen that we need to push into the broadcast, all that kind of stuff. So the 3 of us are always on, and we have a group text that we keep going all night long, because if there's something that, you know, if Gavin's behind the scenes and he's got something cool he wants to push out, it's a quick update to the team. Hey, hold your tweet, I'm pushing this out. So it's literally, we're a little production team.

Mm-hmm.

It's no different than what you would find behind the scenes in a production truck, like, you know, camera 2, camera 3, only it's us saying, Facebook, go! Instagram, go! I have a Vine, I'll have to find the Vine because it's like we joke around in the office where we're just like, okay, ready, go, 3, 2, 1, Devin, your turn. You know, it's like, I mean, it's literally what we're doing. It's kind of ridiculous. But part of that is because you don't want to have, you know, everybody just like jumping in and then posting the same thing at the same time. And again, different voices. Yeah. So we're pretty coordinated and we always think about it. We're like, okay, if we ever bring in somebody else into this team, they have to fit so well

with

what we've built here. So

that's interesting. You really get along with your team in order to make this work. It has to be not just a social relationship but an in-room physical relationship where you guys bond, you guys get to know each other, and that's what makes it successful. Does that sound right?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, we spend so much time with each other that you kind of don't have a choice, you know. And again, luckily we do. We do have such a great working relationship with everybody, and, you know, but we probably spend more time with each other than we do our significant others.

Yeah.

Without a doubt.

So maybe everyone can do like easier boyfriend or girlfriend swapping. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you use— what's your balance of tools versus the natural setting, Twitter, Facebook, and so on? Are you— we've kind of talked about this a little bit, but for the sake of the audience, are you a tools person or do you just like that natural environment of Twitter? Or TweetDeck, I should say.

No, actually, I love tools. And probably I'm going to say that and then I'm going to get 45 phone calls in like 20 seconds.

Don't sell Shanda, please, after this comment.

Don't call me until next week. I don't have time for that. I do. I really do love different analytics tools. Each of them have something a little bit unique. You know, I think even for my company, they're just like, well, do you need this one and this one and this one? And it's like, can't you just find a one-size-fits-all? Unfortunately, there isn't a one-size-fits-all. Different tools have very unique things about them that I find useful. So one of them, for example, is a platform called SocialBro. Yeah. And SocialBro is one that I use to discover more about who our followers were, and I wanted to understand, you know, what celebrities followed us and who followed us that had the most amount of followers. We were actually able to discover an entirely new group of celebrity fans from that. And so I found that opportunity to start reaching out to people and starting a conversation with them, or doing even more research and figuring out, you know, are they just following us, or do they follow us and talk about us, or do they follow us and talk about a specific athlete? So that has turned into having a relationship with Demi Lovato, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mario Lopez, like so many different celebrities. And so now when I, you know, I can DM them and have a conversation with them, and, you know, if I ask them to retweet something or share their thoughts on an event or who they're going for, they respond like that. And it's like, you know, there's not a lot of people out there that could be like, oh yeah, let me just tweet Demi Lovato real quick, you know. You know, but I say that, but I'm also really protective of that relationship as well, because I'm not going to be like, hey, we have this new thing, can you tweet about it? Hey, we've got this, can you tweet this? I don't abuse the relationship like that. I know she's a fan, I know what she's interested in, so I'll present opportunities for her, or any other celebrity for that matter. I don't want it to come across— and then on the reverse side, we also support her as well. So when she was up for an MTV Music Award We grabbed a photo of when she had attended our event, tweeted it out, you know, good luck, we're voting for you, hashtag whatever her hashtag was for that particular award. And she retweeted it and it got retweeted like 22,000 times. So it's a reciprocal thing as well.

Wow. And is this the UFC handle that you're talking about?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So this isn't— because I'm curious, how do you manage the difference between the UFC handle and the Shanda handle? When do you play UFC and when do you play Shanda?

It's funny because when I first started my Twitter handle, I started it as UFC_Shanda, and originally my first tweets were just like all fight-related, like, don't miss the fight this weekend, live on pay-per-view. Everything was like promoting the event, and then I'm just like, that's not just who I am. I like Jeeps. and I like corgis, and I like this, and I like that. And so I started to embrace all the rest of who I am into my handle. And if people were interested in it, then we could talk about all those other things. Yeah. So there's a lot of crossover in the MMA community who also have an interest in Jeeps. And Jeep should probably be paying me a commission because I've sold a lot of Jeeps. I've had a lot of fighters that have called me about Jeeps. I've had fighters that have put me on FaceTime and like held the phone out the window asking me, what the noise is when they're driving, so I've become a mechanic over social media. So, you know, anytime you're representing a brand, even like not just the company you work for, but you yourself, you're a brand. You know, sometimes I see people when they're writing things on their Facebook page and I'm just like, wow, you're super negative, you know. Yeah. I'm super excited to hire you. No, not so much. You know what I mean? So I always tell people, think about those things when you're— even when you're posting on your own account, you're representing your own brand and you got to think about that in somebody else's lenses, how you're making yourself look to the outside world. I'm not a negative person in general, so that's not who I am and I wouldn't really be sharing that kind of stuff, but I always think about that stuff. I'm like, oh well— Sure. you know, if another company is looking at me, or, you know, there are a lot of celebrities who have followed my personal account. You know, I just, I'm conscious of that kind of stuff. So, you know, that's just a little note for everybody out there.

How do you, what would you say is your biggest challenge? Like, you know, first of all, congrats on such an amazing event last week. That event was what was probably one of the biggest events I've seen blow up online and just do a complete internet takeover. Not just internet, like TV, everything. I mean, it was an unbelievable show. And I know that you guys, that was your first time, I think, in Australia too. So it was like just, right?

It was our first time in Melbourne.

In Melbourne, okay.

So it's actually been a huge challenge for us to, get the ability to be able to fight in Melbourne because it was illegal to have the Octagon there. So that's new for us and we're very excited about it.

So how do you— how did you manage the chaos of an event? What's your chaos, your chaotic plan?

Chaotic plan.

You guys have certain things you lock in on, a specific set of A cadence, if you will.

So we figure out, you know, we go into the event and we know exactly— we work with our photography team, for example, so we say, okay, can you get into the locker room? We need hand wrap shots, we need shadowboxing shots, we need the fighter arrival shots. So we figure out all the images that we need, and a lot of those images are collected, you know, several hours before the event actually starts, the doors have opened, so then we can start teeing up all of our posts. So whenever you see things like coming up next, it's this fighter and this fighter, usually that's going to be a photo of a hand wrap. We shot that picture 2 or 3 hours ago, but we've got it lined up and ready to go.

I see.

Then that allows whoever's doing the live tweet, you've got all your assets set up in Dropbox, and all of our international teams have access to that. So you've already started to prep that content, then that relieves that person to get then not the live tweeting person, but the behind-the-scenes guy. That person then starts to switch gears to now you're covering things for Vine, you're covering things for Snapchat, you're covering things for Instagram, for, you know, pushing out things to Facebook that are a little bit more actual real-time moments. So a lot of times you'll see us tweet things like, you know, when the fighter's getting ready to walk out and they're walking through the tunnel. We did one with Ronda Rousey. We actually had the Wi-Fi It was like 56,000 people in the arena, so the Wi-Fi was just not hanging with us. But if you're going back to Ronda's last fight in August for UFC 190, I did a live Periscope broadcast as Ronda and Bethe Correia had both walked out of their locker rooms. There was a 5-minute countdown, and, you know, one girl's walking this way, the other girl's walking that way, but I'm smack in the middle. And so I'm just like this on Periscope, like, oh my God, this is so exciting. I had 17,000 people watching. 17,000 or 18,000 live viewers and I didn't, I didn't pre-promote that I was going to be doing that on Periscope because I didn't know what the Wi-Fi was going to be, if it was going to be able to handle it.

Yeah.

We were in Brazil and so every time we're in Brazil we always have internet issues so I just, I didn't want to like, you know, get people amped up about it and have it not work and so I just was just like, alright, let's try it and it worked and it hung in there and 17,000 live viewers.

I mean,

I think Periscope sent us a note and that was— they were like, that's one of the best Periscopes we've ever had on the platform.

Wow.

Wow. Oh man, that's phenomenal.

So when you're looking at the event night, you know, we've basically divvied up who's handling which platforms, and then as a team, if there's things that happen throughout the night, we're making sure we're on it. Ruby Rose showed up to the event, so I ran out from backstage and I had my Twitter Mirror and I had her do a quick photo and she autographed it and we pushed that out. Then I ran backstage and then I'm with the athletes. So all the athletes that won, they come and they do their victory photo with our photography team. Well, then I run in there with the Twitter Mirror and I have them do— I gave them the option. I'm like, you could do a photo, you could do a video, you could do a GIF. And so they all wanted to do a GIF. kind of do their dancing. So that one was a lot of fun. So yeah, so we've just kind of, between the 3 of us, we kind of just have to divide and conquer, you know, who's taking what platforms and then what specific content.

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. What would you say is the most challenging part of your job? If you could solve something or wish that something could be solved, what would that be? Or maybe it's a couple things.

Well, we can't change the schedule, so we're year-round. We're year-round, we don't have a season, so we do work pretty much every single weekend. So we're kind of a 7 days, 24 hours, 7 days a week operation. Again, we're a small team of people, so, you know, we don't have a lot, you know, if you wanted to be able to be like, oh, well, this is the event team for this weekend, and then, you know, kind of alternating the groups. We don't have that currently, which would be nice, but hopefully we'll get there. Even when you— if you do have an off weekend where there's not a UFC event, there's usually going to be something else going on that we have to be a part of. So for example, we have a product called UFC Fight Pass, and it's a— basically it's like the Netflix for fight fans. So it's, you know, a subscription-based model. We have live events that happen on that platform. We have our fight library, but we also have purchased the distribution rights to other MMA organizations. So, you know, groups like Invicta, that's the place where you're going to watch all the Invicta fights. So if it's not a UFC fight weekend, it's probably going to be another organization's fight weekend that's on our platform. Yeah. So we also have to kind of be on for that from, you know, engagement. We do snappy clips. and highlights from that, and then also from a customer service standpoint in case people are having a hard time, you know, figuring out how to log in or how much it is and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, we're on for that as well.

What about localization? You guys are all over the world, and being such a small team, how is— is that challenging, or is it— or do you find it that you have such rabid fans that it's not really a big deal?

Both. Yeah, the answer is yes to both. Mm-hmm. So we do have rabid fans that are going to follow us regardless on the main account, you know, and obviously most of the stuff that we tweet about, we're going to say things in Eastern and Pacific timeframe, but we also do a lot of localization. So our Facebook page is actually a global Facebook page. So if your Facebook page identifies you as being— that you're in Canada, you're going to automatically redirect to the Canada account because then somebody from Canada is going to post things that are localized there. We'll create some content and then we'll share it with the teams internationally and say, okay, localize this when you publish it, or translate this into French or Spanish or whatever, and get that posted to the account in language so that we are speaking to our fans globally and in their language and in their timeframes and time zones.

Wow. Wow. That's some coordination right there.

Yeah.

How do you— what do you think— what would you say is coming for you? Like, what would you love to do to test more, to have more— is there anything else that you haven't done that you'd like to do, or that you see coming and you would really love to be a part of the trend?

Well, one of the things that I am working on right now is, is coming up with a social concierge platform basically. I've been working with a guy, Joe Scott, and he has managed the concierge for the Super Bowl for the last several years. So we've been partnering together because there's a lot of things that we can figure out from an FAQ standpoint. We can build out things that are pretty standard, but then there's other things that we kind of have to wing it because It's going to be different from event to event, but what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to be the resource for people. So you know when people come into Las Vegas for International Fight Week, which is every July, we want people to land in Vegas and start talking about that they're here, they've landed, they're excited to be here. You know what's going on today, and we want to be the resource to tell you what events are happening today. We want to point you to the if you're still looking for a hotel, we're going to point you to some of our hotel partners. We're going to point you to some of our commercial partners for a good margarita. Whatever the case. case might be, we want to have a team of people that are there and going to interact with our fan base because they've come to Las Vegas for us and we want to make that the best experience for them and give them a— if you want to go to a pool party, if you want to hang out with fighters, if you want to hang out with the Octagon Girls, if you want a good steak, here's all of your options. You've come to Vegas for fight week, we've got you. That's something that we're working on. That's quite an overtaking on that. Yeah. That's cool.

Yeah. Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

Um, what else? So, um, yeah, go ahead.

Also just working on, you know, I would love to set up a team that I would just kind of call them social producers because there's so many different moments that you can take on social media and create, you know, some viral Vines and, you know, just some other stuff that's happening in real time. I happened to find a clip of Rashad Evans scaring the crap out of Michael Bisping And I found it on his Instagram, and I repurposed it, and I put it into Vine, because everything's funnier on Vine when you can loop it, you know. So I took his Instagram post and then shortened it up for 6 seconds, put it on Vine, posted it, and of course we got, you know, 10 times the engagement on our post than his original post. But, you know, but just having somebody that's available online all the time looking for those different things. That particular post I really enjoyed because it did humanize the fighters. That's one of the things— where's my noise? There you go. That's one of the things that I've been working on quite a bit too, is that I want our fan base, whether you're a hardcore fan, a casual fan, a fringe fan, trying to get people to understand who these guys are outside of the octagon. And I tell the fighters this all the time when they're like, I don't know what to post. And I say, What are the things that you love outside of fighting? So more people will understand and be able to relate to you as a father, as a brother, as a, you know, whatever, than they can a fighter. Most people don't know what it's like to fight in the octagon for 25 minutes, 15 minutes, or whatever it is. So humanize yourself and make— I want to know a little bit more about who you are

than—

And that's how you get people to start being invested in you more as a

person. Have you— so you're dealing with a lot of athletes, and the athletes themselves are having a problem with personal branding, obviously, learning how to brand themselves. Do you do training courses and classes, and what's the— what do you provide them with? How do you help them be better personal branders?

Yeah, so we host a UC Athlete Summit. We've done 2 of them this year, and we bring in about 40 to 45 fighters at a time. So they get a full 2 to 3 day summit for them, and it— I mean, it literally covers everything from how to pay your taxes to social media training. Uh-huh. We're there the entire time because even when we have our 1-hour presentation with them and kind of give them a quick high-level overview, we're there. We have a table set up so that we're there to verify their accounts, help them update their Twitter handles, their Facebook pages. Some of them have some really goofy stuff on their Facebook page like, you know, official fan page, and I'm like, I don't need that part written in there once I get you verified. So, you know, we help them get all their accounts cleaned up, linking their Facebook and their Instagrams and all that kind of stuff, and then also helping them come up with content ideas. So Raquel Pennington, Jessica I have both done such a phenomenal job, just examples of those 2. They're now using Facebook Live mentions, and I text Jessica yesterday, I was like, awesome job with that. She's like, I've gained like 40,000 followers, and I'm like, you're listening. You're listening though, that's the thing. So, you know, just working with them on ideas of what type of content to create. And then the other thing I tell them is I was like, don't be afraid to ask your fans what they want to see from you. Don't be afraid to ask that question.

Yeah.

And we do it all the time from the UFC account. We're always saying, we've taken you backstage, we've taken you here, we've taken you here. What else do you guys want to see? And surprisingly, I was expecting, I'm like, we're going to get 1,000 responses of people saying, take it, we want to see the Octagon girls changing. Like, that's what I was going to guess people were going to say. Surprisingly, people wanted to know what the fighters were eating and drinking after a weight cut. And so we're like, we would have never— like, once the weigh-in happens, we're like on to the next thing. And so we're like, okay, well, let's just stick around and let's follow them backstage and let's see what they're hydrating, you know. Is it coconut water or whatever it is? So, so that gave us an idea for another content opportunity. So

that's great. That's great. Oh man. Well, there's so much, so many more questions, but I'm gonna I'm going to pass the baton here over to Suzy who's going to take over with questions from the Twitter feed, which by the way is going off. You are asking awesome questions. I'm noticing.

I'm trying to respond to people, but I'm paying attention.

No, that's good. That's good. That's all right because Suzy's going to actually take those questions that have been asked and ask them now, so you'll get a chance to actually hopefully ask most of them. Yeah, we can jump back on Twitter a little bit later, maybe right after we get off and answer a few more. But I'll pass it over to Suzy. I may jump in from here to there, but I wish you— thank you so much for the first half of this, and good luck on the second half.

Thanks.

Oh, this is great. As a social strategist, I'm like writing stuff down. Okay, this is a good tip, this is a good tip, note to self. This is awesome. Thank you so much. Our community is going crazy. Guys, I'll also put out the general call. Please keep tweeting in your questions. I am following, I'm still following the flow here and I'll pull them in and throw them at Shonda. Let's get started. We'll go ahead and I want to start with a question from JS Gilbert. I think it kind of relates to some of the last things that you were talking about. He says, do you have to put training wheels on your fighters or employees with regard to what they can do and can say on social media?

Sometimes, yes. There are some athletes that probably just shouldn't be on social media at all. So I've had to have that real tough love conversation with them and, you know, explain to them that it's not just about what they've written, but it's how they're representing, again, themselves, and then in turn representing our sport and our brand. So there's been— there's a couple people that I have to work with on a little bit, you know, tighter leash than others. Even internally with employees, I had an example of of an employee that had posted something on their personal Facebook page, and I, you know, from Australia, had to text them and just say, hey, you know, I realize that this is your personal page, but it can be misread, and you probably have clients that are also on your page that do business with us. And, you know, I would just rethink that post being up there. And she understood where I was coming from, so, you know, it got pulled down. But one of the things that we're going to be doing internally is— and I've talked to Bryan about this— is You know, setting up some social media training for the staff members and just again understanding that they're representing themselves as a brand but also a reflection of the UFC as well.

That's so interesting. That's really— I like that a lot. I like that as opposed to just terms and conditions, right? Like this, you know, it's actually getting that buy-in. I feel like that's That's super important. This actually ties into— Nikki has a whole bunch of great questions. I'm going to ask this one. She says, I feel when I live tweet about UFC, there are more trolls than usual. How do you teach the fighters to deal with them? This is a huge issue.

Absolutely. We actually— the current season of The Ultimate Fighter that's going on right now on Fox Sports 1, one of the cast members you know, was just getting attacked by trolls on Twitter. And the guy wanted to sit there and, you know, fight back with them and banter back with them. And then almost to the point where he wanted to do something like a retaliation, you know, telling the guy, well, show up to the gym. And I'm just like, hold up. Like, literally— Yeah. Had to talk this guy off the ledge. And I'm like, there's the mute button. Let's use that. You know, because then the troll doesn't know that he's muted them. If you block them, the guy's just going to set up another Twitter account and come at you again.

Right.

And I told the dude, you know, I literally talked him off a ledge. And I'm just like, here's the thing, is it's not worth losing your job over. At the end of the day, this guy has— this guy has no idea what it's like to train and to be in your position. And even the fact that you're here is more than what many people who are trying to get to this point in their life, in their career— you're further ahead than they are. So let it go, you know, just let it go. But it is— it's hard for these guys when they get amped up and you get somebody that's just egging you on constantly. I'm like, use that mute button. Use the mute button.

I love that. So how do you guys deal with it as a corporate handle when you get trolled? Ignore it?

You know, sometimes you might have a good one-liner to come back at somebody. Like, we had done a fight clip highlight on Facebook, and I can't remember what fighter it was, but somebody had responded on Facebook and was just like, you know, that knockout sucked. And then We responded back like, oh, well, we were going to post your fight highlight, but you don't have

one. Nice, nice.

You know, we like to kind of banter back and forth with them a little bit, but it's just like, I think we're probably a little bit more edgy than other sports, but we also know when it's crossed the line. And so we might have that conversation internally and decide not to post something, but, you know, we do like to have like fun banter back and forth with fans, but not to the point where we would, you know, insult them or anything like that. But unfortunately, it is something that you just have to have tough skin and be able to ignore. We do use our filters on Facebook, so we are trying to block out a lot of that stuff of being visible on the page, just because we're, you know, we're a sport that anybody can watch. So we've got a lot of younger kids that are practicing the sport and following it, so we don't want that stuff showing up on the page for them either.

I like, I like that, that awareness of that, that aspect. I feel like a lot of, a lot of groups, teams, brands even aren't necessarily thinking about that. I like that. Okay, so, so let's, let's ask a question from JS Gilbert here, and I've gotten a few different versions of this, which is how do you shift the kind of marketing perspective of We need attendance, we need revenue, we need sales bottom line to social media and then kind of back again. So maybe your offline-online interaction, where does that— how does that all play together?

Basically from how do we monetize from social?

In some way, yeah. In some ways I think that's the question. So how do you take this and in some ways I think I would Maybe reword this and say, how are you measuring your ROI when you report to your stakeholders, for example?

Well, we do look at a couple different things. So, you know, one, just, you know, when we're able to look at our Twitter trends and, you know, we're the number one in Twitter TV ratings from the Nielsen data, I mean, that obviously we did our job from getting enough people to talk about our event and tuning into our event. That's always exciting for us, especially when it's a pay-per-view that's outperformed live free TV. Absolutely. That's fun. But we also do— I do look at things where, you know, where we can drive revenue. I am protective of our account being a constant like, buy this, order this, but finding ways to, you know, again, looking at that social concierge opportunity. If fans are asking, you know, where do I get that t-shirt, or how do I get a replica belt, you know, Obviously we want to point them into the right direction and link them right to that product. We're also looking at opportunities with our sponsors to integrate them organically into some of our content.

Mm-hmm.

You know, we— a lot of times we're looking at different pieces of assets that we have and we're just like, oh, this would be great for this client or this client. And that works better for us and for our fans than it does if I'm just to say, you know, Go buy this product. And our fans would be like, why am I hearing this from the UFC account? You know, but we like to try to find a little bit more organic way to bring that into the fold with what we do. And then, you know, we're really proud of the amount of revenue that we have on the books right now that have come from social. I'm really proud of it. I can't share the number, but I'm very proud

of the number. So let's kind of go into that. How do you track the revenue? So you mentioned engagement. I am completely tracking with you on that, by the way. That's so essential in my opinion. But how are you measuring that and then reporting it to your stakeholders and saying this is how we demonstrate our revenue?

Sure. So one of the things that we've done is we've worked with MVP Index, for example. They have done an analysis on the value that we brought, you know, either through certain partners that we've worked with or, you know, from our athletes. So there's, there's an evaluation that they've put together for us that, you know, approximately what each tweet is worth and what the total estimated value of the social campaign has provided. And we actually, I think we're gonna have something in the Sports Business Journal Either this week or next week specifically around the Reebok stuff. So, um, yeah, so there's, there's a couple of different things that we do provide to the executives, and then we're constantly working with them to figure out, you know, is this helpful for them to understand, or is there a different way that they would like, or something else that they would like me to bring into the fold with it? So it's kind of an evolution process on reporting that stuff and figuring out what they want to see.

Yeah. Yeah, I can empathize with that. I like that. That's what it's all about, right? It's about figuring out that ever elusive, what is the value of this tweet, and trying to get it away from just the vanity metrics.

And also, I can give you an example of when I was in Brazil for Ronda Rousey's fight at UFC 190. 2 of us from the social team had flown out. We flew out to Brazil. And so I'm thinking of, okay, well, here was the, here was the hard cost of us being here for a week,

right?

Hotel, our airfare, our meals, our per diem. So I personally am gonna make sure that I think about that, and I'm like, okay, I have got to have some huge wins for the cost that they flew me out here, right? Yeah. So during open workout, we're on the beach and Rhonda gets this amazing reception from the fans in Brazil, and so she jumps off the stage She goes to meet with some of the fans and these girls are just in tears, sobbing, sobbing. I jumped down there with my camera and I captured the entire thing. I have a $1,000 phone bill for this, but I started— I streamed it on Periscope, I clipped it, I grabbed that piece of content and I redistributed it on social media. And ESPN SportsCenter picked it up, Bleacher Report picked it up. The amount of value that we got out of where that post— That's huge. When that post got picked up, I was like, that paid for my trip. That paid for my trip. Good night, guys.

Yes. I'm done. This was the beginning. I'm going to hang out in Brazil.

Exactly. The value that we got from that piece of content that I was able to put out real time versus waiting for recaps and other content to come in several hours later, that got picked up everywhere and that by itself paid for the trip.

Totally. Totally. Love that. Absolutely love that. I have a few great questions as well moving in here about your influencers. One from Christy, shout out to Christy, she joins us every week, love you.

Thank you.

She says, how do you determine— you've talked about your different types of influencers. We're using the term influencers, you use the term celebrities, but then potentially I'm assuming you have other influencers as well. Determine who will be— she's using your best influencers, maybe even segmenting your— choosing perhaps maybe which influencers you're going to reach out to for a given campaign. Maybe we can use that term.

Again, I spent— I can't even tell you how much time and energy I put into segmenting our influencers, not just finding out who they were. but then understanding who they're fans of, because I don't want to necessarily just tap into the same people every time. I know that these different influencers have a genuine interest in specific athletes, so— or I know that they live in a certain market, so I know when I can extend an invitation and have them come out to a live event. Demi Lovato, as the example, she had never attended a live event before, but she was on tour for a year and wasn't able to come out, so I knew that she was a fan of Anderson Silva. I knew she was a fan of Chris Weidman. I knew she was a fan of Ronda Rousey. So I would reach out to her around their events. And then when her tour was over, again, extended that invitation. She came out to Anderson Silva, Chris Weidman fight, had such a great time that first night. We had a smaller show on Sunday. She came back for night 2.

Nice.

And then she came out to Ronda's fight in LA. I mean, she's come out to several events since then, but again, it was not trying to push something at her or on her, but it was something that I knew she was a fan of. Right. And also, when, when I do get a celebrity follower that engages with us, I ask them the question. I'm like, thanks so much for following, we appreciate your support, you know, who's your favorite fighter? And then I make that connection, and then I make sure that that athlete knows. Perfect example is Amy Schumer. has been tweeting about Holly Holm. Holly didn't see it and Holly has been just on like a media tour frenzy and I was like, you have to respond to this tweet. Respond to Amy Schumer, here's the tweet she sent you. So Holly responded back to the tweet when Amy says, thanks everybody for congratulating me on my win. Holly responds, Amy, you looked great out there, bravo. Nice. That was picked up all over the place but then I keep instigating that conversation a little bit more. Holly tweeted something, or Amy tweeted something. She was like, you know, people think I go to the gym all the time. So false. And then I responded, what? We totally saw you training. And then I attached 3 photos of Holly.

Nice. And nice.

Again, that's, that's turned into this conversation. But I started that conversation with Amy even before the Holly-Ronda fight. But there's something cooking there, and I'm hoping that we get Holly and Ronda, or Holly and and Amy together on her show.

Oh, that would be fabulous. Seriously, if we see that, I'm going to be like, Shonda, that was you. That's awesome. I love that. It's just all about relationship building and you're talking about— I love that I asked this general question and you're like, alright, it's a case-by-case basis. Human. Love it.

Humanize.

I don't always get the applause. Yay, I

got

the applause.

I just realized I was hitting it and I was on mute, so you guys weren't hearing it. I was like, why don't they hear this?

You were applauding yourself, Bryan. It's okay, we understand.

Yeah, I was alone.

Yeah. So, oh, this is a really good one. We have pay compliment. Jumps on our chat every now and again. You guys are awesome. Thank you. Says, how do you keep track of social media assets for reuse and to make sure you're not overusing? Someone is looking for your secret sauce here. Is Box your go-to?

Yeah. We do have certain assets that we release on certain days. We know that we're not particularly reusing a lot of pieces of content. You know, if there's a certain photo that we've captured, we typically don't reuse an image more than maybe 2 or 3 times. So we're cranking out a lot of content from promo videos to photography assets to our graphic design team. I mean, they're producing probably 200 to 300 pieces of content for every event. It's a lot. We actually, in the Las Vegas Business Review Journal, just had an article about all the production that we do and our team here. I mean, we're— for it still being a small team, you know, we crank out a lot of amazing, amazing stuff from this group. So really kudos to the entire ZUFO organization for everybody that's so hardworking here, because you would easily think that there's probably thousands of people that work here, but I mean, we're like maybe 300 people total.

Wow. I'm having a hard time. I'm feeling the panic just thinking about that. That is insane.

It

is. So let's start. I'm looking through. I'm mindful of the time. Top Cat wants to know, what was the last method you used to engage or attract non-sports fans, so broadening your community. We've talked about doing the community research and saying, who are my existing community members? What about bringing in a new segment? How do you go about that?

Part of that, even working with some of our celebrity fans that maybe not necessarily have an interest in the sport in general, so if we do know that we're going to have somebody like Liam from One Direction at an event, that brings in a whole crazy rabid fan base from One Direction, but he was at our event and people were tuned in. They wanted to see him on TV, but they're being exposed to our event. They're literally screenshotting their television saying, oh, he's sitting right there behind Joe Rogan, or whatever. Huh. There's ways for us to engage with our other celebrity fans and getting their fans to cross over because they want to see their favorite celebrity on TV and in a different space than being in concert or something like that. Right. You know, even things like when you have one of our athletes on Kelly and Michael or on The View or on Jimmy Kimmel, we're listening and we're seeing what the fans are talking about because Again, there's Jimmy Kimmel or Kelly and Michael. They have their own subset of audience that are very engaged with their show, but I want to know what they're saying about our athlete that's on their show. So we'll start jumping into conversation there where people might be saying things about, you know, how nice and humble Holly is. And so we make sure that we jump into that conversation or things like that. So our ears are always turned on, really.

Yeah. That's awesome. So then I want to end this with a few secret sauce questions. So what is your go-to listening tool? What are you using? Are you doing TweetDeck, HootSuite, something else that gives you alerts?

Simply Measured is one of them that I use from an alert standpoint, so I have certain keywords or certain athletes that I set different parameters up for, whether it be a certain clout score, certain follower count, percentage of increase in topic conversation. I have those turned on for certain people or certain keywords. I also use Sisamos, is another one. That one I love to be able to, if I'm trying to do some research on a certain athlete or an event and be able to go back in historical data and figure out like, oh, you know, this person popped up that watched that fight. So next time that fighter fights again, I know to reenact or reengage with this group of influencers.

Right, right.

So I've got SocialBro, SimplyMeasured, Sisamos.

Lots of S's. I never thought of that before. There are so many S's in the tools.

Yes. Dear tool people, please find something not with an S.

Although you're Shonda, I'm Suzy, so S, but still, that's a little weird. I just noticed that. Simply Measured, SocialBro, Sysmos, love those. Any others?

Nuvi, we've been doing some tests with. They're really cool. Greenfly is one of my new favorite apps that we're doing. I was talking

about the

Jeff Gordon content. Greenfly is an app that we've just started onboarding and I jumped into it quickly. I had looked on, I had forgotten all about that race was happening and that it was Jeff's last fight— last fight, last race.

Other sport.

Yeah, so I jumped into Greenfly and I said to the fighters, if you're a NASCAR fan, we'd love to get you to wish Jeff well in his last race. There were a couple fighters that were genuine fans and they popped open the app, took a video, submitted me the video. I stitched them together and pushed that out. And, you know, they were really excited about it because we're not going to force the fighters. If they're not genuinely interested, they're not going to contribute it. But I was giving them an opportunity. Otherwise, I was just going to tweet something from the UFC anyways, but I wanted to give the athletes an opportunity to be a part of that if they wanted to.

Right. I was, I was going to ask you a question about that, whether or not you asked the athletes what they wanted to post Or get engagement from them, or how much of it was just you broadcasting it out. Is that something you tend to do, open it up?

Yeah, especially if we want to have them, if we're giving them kind of a thought starter for something. Mother's Day and Father's Day, we'll send everybody a quick note and just say, hey, if you have a favorite photo of your mom or dad that you want to share, use hashtag #UCMom, #UCDad, whatever it is. Sometimes they'll just They're just not thinking about it. I'm like, no, this is a way for you to be a part of the conversation.

Yeah. I love that. I want to end on a question about your personal branding. We have a lot of awesome people on this feed who do a great job in social, all these different things, but they are always looking to do something, do the next thing. What is your go-to tip if someone comes and says, Shonda, love what you've done with your stuff. I want to build up my personal brand. What should I do?

I think in this space of social, we're all pioneers in this space because it's not like the old school days of marketing. Here's how to do direct mail. Here's how to buy a print ad. Totally. This changes by the minute, and the thing that I would say is don't be afraid to test new things. I mean, even I have— I can't even tell you how many test accounts and dummy accounts that I have that I might just test something to see how it lays out. Then I might try it on my personal account before I roll it out to the UFC account. But don't be afraid to try something new. Don't get stuck in a box of, you know, well, this is what we tweet and this is going through the checklist of Right. This is what we do every event. We're always pushing the limits here. We've done some funny viral videos with our athletes, some that I think were awesome and some that I was like, eh, maybe not the right person for that piece of content. But I encourage my team to think outside the box and trying new things and trying new tools and trying new platforms and trying, maybe let's make this a video instead of a photo or a GIF instead of whatever. That's one of the big things. Just don't get stuck in a box and don't be afraid to always evolve.

I love it. That is awesome, awesome advice. Thank you. It has been an absolute pleasure. I will turn it over to my fabulous co-host to wrap it up. Thank you so much, Shonda.

No problem.

Well, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate it, especially on the tail end of such a big fight and travel. We're totally excited to have talked to you today, and I also know that everyone else out there has been excited. We've got a massive amount of tweets. It's like a stock ticker going through, and I know even there's some questions we couldn't get to, like Brian Fanzo was A couple out there that we couldn't, unfortunately we couldn't get to, but— I'll respond. He always has some questions, but so, and of course he spells his name wrong, so you don't have to respond to them. But everyone else, everybody out there is totally appreciated. Thank you guys for joining us again today for an awesome H2H chat. Shanda, once again, you knocked it out of the park. You knocked it out! Nice, see what I did there? Yeah, clever. This is where we go like this.

Awesome.

But that's fantastic. We're gonna have this live recording posted within the next 24 hours so you can go ahead and watch it again or share it with your friends. We will see you again one week from today. Susie, remember, do you know who's on Monday by chance?

Yes, we have. You are totally, totally putting me on the spot here. On the spot. Yes.

It's me again!

Absolutely fabulous, fabulous guest who I will remember in just a second. Seriously, you're not my favorite person at the moment. All right, all I have coming up is Shonda. Stay tuned to H2H2 when I find through my email inbox who we have next week. I know his name, I can't pronounce it properly. It's Drew, right?

It is Drew Neiser.

Drew Neiser, yes. Okay, brain worked. Alright, and we're so excited to have you, Drew. So excited!

Drew Neiser, who wrote the book on— and he collected, I think it was 25 CMO interviews, Chief Marketing Officer interviews, and built a book around all of his interviews that he turned into Fast Company articles and all kinds of good stuff. So definitely tune in for that. Sorry to put you on the spot there, Suzy.

I do remember, it's the periodic table of elements for the CMO.

There you go. So thanks everybody, we'll see you again next week. And Shanda, make it a great Thanksgiving and a great holiday, and we'll see you again soon.

Thank you guys.

Take care guys, have a good week.