A funny thing happened in Plymouth on the final day of the America’s Cup World Series. Oracle Racing skipper and CEO, Russell Coutts, beaming after a race that he obviously enjoyed, stepped onto a rib that I just happened to be on and described what had just happened.
He asked for forgiveness for the language he was about to use and then proceeded to enthuse about the race that saw him come 3rd, having had to use all his skill to stay upright.
It was a very different persona to the one that sometimes turns up for press conferences, that seems guarded, and almost glum. Not always – Coutts joked in Plymouth that a collision with Dean Barker was not a ‘love tap’ – that he was trying to sink the Kiwis to have a chance of winning, providing one of the very few moments of levity in an otherwise forgettable set of press conferences.
Off the record and on the QT, the man who has just converted his Facebook profile into a ‘page’ with circa 5000 friends, is someone that one could become a fan of.
Elsewhere in the America’s Cup fleet, there are other sailors who are engaging as individuals, but as soon as they put on the gear and have a camera stuck in their face, shut down and revert to the scripts they have had drummed into them by media training, with a few exceptions – like ORACLE Racing’s Simon Tienpont .
People expect footballers to resort to cliche when interviewed by the press. Phrases like ‘one game at a time’ and other stock phrases should not be what sailing is selling to sponsors, especially when most sailors are articulate, engaging and if they were standing at a bar telling a story; entertaining.
Perhaps it comes with experience, or perhaps it comes with a certain kind of experience. Energy Team’s Loick Peyron manages to make the simplest answer to a question seem like poetic insight. Maybe it’s just the French accent, or maybe it is the experience of being an offshore solo sailor in France, a position that puts sailors under intense media scrutiny and pressure.
The America’s Cup World Series has made a rod for it’s own back by vowing to engage a new audience using the Internet and social media. Wowing an audience with capsizes and chaos is not the same thing as creating fans.
Despite a large social media team, ACEA is still in a ‘broadcast’ mindset rather than engagement mode.
Take James Spthill’s Facebook page. Here’s a guy – an Australian sportsman in the mold of Mark Webber or Mick Doohan – a guy who cares about the sport – a guy who cares about the bigger picture and gets involved with the sustainability aspects of the new cup because he wants to not because he has been told to. But… James’ Facebook page is a carbon copy of the ORACLE Racing Facebook page. There is no sense that James has any control over is online presence or his personal brand.
At one point during the ACWS in Plymouth, the James Spithill Facebook page had pictures of Aleph capsizing… No explanation, just another outlet for ‘extreme’ images.
There’s no problem with having a PR person update the athlete’s pages as long as there is some semblance of the athlete somewhere.
Social media is an all or nothing platform. Either you want to use the power of tools like Facebook and Twitter to have a 2-way conversation with fans, or you stick with more traditional means of engagement – like Ben Ainslie does.
Though it’s not that simple either. Ben has appeared in two videos in the last week that show that he can adapt to the audience. The highly polished promo flick for personal sponsor JP Morgan Asset Management has a very different feel to the ‘meet the sailors’ video produced for the Extreme Sailing Series in which he impersonates the Terminator.
In Plymouth, ORACLE Racing signed a few posters, which will hopefully end up on the bedroom walls of kids who want to be America’s Cup sailors and not flogged off on Ebay as collectibles – simple and effective, but old-school.
Using the technology is not enough. There is a ghost in the machine, but for now, the machine is still speaking for the personalities inside.
