Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
Sports enjoy a prominent status in today's society, football being the most notable among them in many countries - it has come to be dubbed "el deporte rey" in the Spanish language, a turn of phrase conveying a tongue-in-cheek sense akin to "football rules" or, perhaps more properly, translatable as "the king of sports." A large number of different companies' brands and products have tried their best to get their message through to their customers by a smart use of the image projected by players, coaches, and the clubs themselves. Getting involved in competitions and leagues generates itself publicity through the mechanisms of their continuous coverage by mass media. This helps the brands funding or sponsoring the clubs to be more visible to their target audience (Olabe, 2009).
In turn, football clubs are interested in increasing their number of fans and members because the further their image can be projected, the larger their appeal to firms with the aim of using them as a vehicle for marketing their own products. This is only reinforced by the very fact that football, standing out among any other sport, is an area where a club's corporate image is a particularly powerful driving force, enjoying faithfulness from the sport's consumer market to a large degree (McCarthy et al. , 2011).
The following question comes to mind immediately: what are the most effective tools to be used by a football club in order to increase its figures, usually massive, of faithful fans and thus become even more appealing to firms as marketing vehicles for their products? The current Information and Communications Technology (ICT) framework opens up different interesting alternatives worth exploring.
The clubs' official web sites do not usually create the necessary communication means with their users because they do not provide the means for an interactive experience (Beech et al. , 2000). A most interesting alternative comes from the hand of the tools 2.0 or Web 2.0, among which we must emphasize the role of the social network sites. Their interest lies not only in their communication effectiveness, ensuing from their interactive nature, but also in their capability to strengthen the club's marketing mix and to convey a particular image to both their regular fans and...