National Hockey League team the Pittsburgh Penguins <\/strong>have had great success in connecting with its student fan base using its text-messaging program. It all started in 2006 when in order to fill empty seats, they decided to text local students with offers of severely discounted tickets. <\/p>\n
The students who were priced out of tickets at $100 were more than willing to show up to buy tickets at $20. The demand was so high it led to queues of students waiting around the block. <\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/spacer.gif\"){kind=spacer}
\nJeremy Zimmer<\/strong>, the team’s director of new media, said the promotion helped fill otherwise empty seats and strengthened the Penguins’ bond with students that they hoped would grow up to become season-ticket holders. “We want to engage them while they’re young, and get them excited about the team early,” he said. “This was a great way to do that.”<\/p>\n
This year, as the fortunes of the team improved, all games were sold out without the need to offer tickets at a dicounted price. This led to the advertisers looking for a new way to keep in touch with this young fan base. <\/p>\n
Using mobile agency Vibes Media<\/strong>, the Penguins ran a series of successful contests and giveaways using SMS. For example, when they offered a puck signed by young star Sidney Crosby <\/strong>they received an astonishing 1,800 replies within one hour. Astonishing as the message was sent out to only 2,000 subscribers!<\/p>\n On top of the activities aimed at students, the Penguins have developed a fan base of 20,000 subscribers who receive team news alerts, including game recaps and each game’s three stars. This is up from 8,000 a year ago. <\/p>\n Although this has not yet been used as a source of revenue, some of the alerts are sponsored by Pizza Hut <\/strong>and one could imagine more of these being sponsored in the future. They may just have become the first NHL team to utilise the power of mobile.<\/p>\n National Hockey League team the Pittsburgh Penguins have had great success in connecting with its student fan base using its text-messaging program. It all started in 2006 when in order to fill empty seats, they decided to text local students with offers of severely discounted tickets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,21,16,24],"tags":[87,82],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mobiadnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"