Sports Management Blog

The wait is over – the 2010 Lausanne International Sports Management Conference is about to start !

Under the subheading “Bridging Research and Practice”, the 2-day conference (Nov. 5-6) brings together in Lausanne, Olympic Capital, a distinguished panel of speakers from both academia and major international sports organisations.

Participants can look forward to attending prestigious keynote presentations (from representatives of, among others, the IOC, FIFA, UEFA, FIBA), as well as hearing from leading academics about the latest developments in sports-management research. Panel discussions are also scheduled, as well as product demonstrations.

The Sports Management Blog will cover the event – I’ll share with you my main observations from the various presentations, lectures and panels, and will kick-start what I hope will be a lively discussion on some of the topics which are relevant to this blog, and to the management of sports in general. Stay tuned for more!

Are there any conference topics you’d be interested in hearing more about? Any speakers you’d like me to interview? Let me know in the comments !

I thought I’d kick-start this blog with a few thoughts about why it could be interesting to write about sports management and social media.

First, I have a feeling that sports management itself is not necessarily a topic which is widely or appropriately covered on the ‘Net. Sure, there are commercial organisations active in this field which try to increase or maintain their visibility by touting their wares or value proposition on their website or blog. But I have yet to come across a forum for unbiased, non-commercially oriented exchanges on what are the key factors for a sports organisation to be managed for success.

Second, while social media is all about encouraging self-designated membership of chosen “communities of interest”, and about offering those members a way to produce & share user-generated content (think Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, or microblogging pioneer Twitter), these functionalities of social media do not seem to me to have made sufficient strides in the field of sports management – which is puzzling, since sportspeople typically think of themselves as dedicated members of a community of interest (triathletes, inline skaters, runners, you name them – they are all much more than part of a club, a Federation or a sports organisation, they feel they are part of a community).

Finally, there seem to be very few attempts out there to bring these 2 fields together, at least in the open-discussion form of a blog – with a few notable exceptions. Jason Peck’s Take A Peck blog provides very valuable insights specifically on sports and social media, with a US perspective; Lewis Howes’ Sports Networker blog also puts social media front-and-center in his dicsussions on sports, giving contributors in his very wide network a chance to share their expertise; Russell Scibetti, a regular contributor to  the Business of Sport blog, is also extremely knowledgeable on the topic of technology in sports. All are excellent, and I encourage you to subscribe to their feed – as well as follow them on Twitter, at @jasonpeck, @sportsnetworker and @rscibetti, respectively. (I will provide in a later post more Twitter handles of users I find interesting in this space).

In this blog, I will therefore try to start what will hopefully become a lively exchange on the ways in which social media functionalities can and should be introduced into the management of sports organisations and/or events.

Since my background is in consulting, and more specifically on financial budgeting & controlling, I will also post the occasional article on the financial management of sports organisations – from a budgeting as well as an expense-monitoring perspective.

Do you also think that the sports business could do a better use of social media? Do you know of any good blog which covers sports management and social media? Share your views & tips in the comments below!

What is the Sports Management Blog ?

I started this Sports Management blog with 2 objectives in mind:

1. Provide some discussion-starters on the practice of Sports Management (generally with a European focus), more particularly on the application of social-media principles to the management of sports organisations;
2. Showcase (and test with the blog’s audience) some of my ideas in the fields of sports management and new technologies, and/or some of the work I have done with clients of my mangano management consulting practice.

Who is Gabriel Mangano?

I am an entrepreneur-at-heart, currently providing finance/new-tech.-consulting services services mostly to Europe-based SMBs and sports organisations, through my consulting  practice.
Over the years, either as a Consultant or Senior Manager in multi-national corporations, I have gathered significant exposure to Russia, Western/Central Europe and the US. Although I do not (yet?) see myself as a social-media “expert”, I do qualify as a “social-media fanatic”. I am also a competitive inline speedskater, marathon runner, cyclist, and aspiring triathlete.

You can view my profile and connect with me on many platforms, most notably LinkedIn and Facebook.

You can also browse my VisualCV, and visit the website of my consulting practice, mangano management.

Last but not least, you can get in touch by following me + DMing me on Twitter, or e-mailing me on gabriel [at] mangano [dot] ch.