Service Comparison: PGA Tournament Leader Board Alerts

I love getting messages sent to my phone. Makes me feel cool when I’m standing in line at the post office or at the airport and my phone buzzes with a new message. I feel in the know, informed about things that are relevant to my life.

I’m also an avid golf fan. I respect the meticulous exactitude required to be successful at the game, and appreciate those in the professional ranks for their ability to overcome nerves and execute with such precision.

As a way of combining these two interests, I have signed up for two different tournament leader board alert services over the last year.  One from NBC Sports, powered by Simplewire, and one from PGATOUR.com, powered by Turner Broadcasting.

In the interest of best practices, user experience, and ultimately, me feeling cool at the post office, let’s dig a little and try to understand both by deconstructing each service.

First, lets get a feel for the alert content. For this I chose an update from both services from the end of the first round last week at the St. Jude Classic in Memphis, Tennessee.

Four elements comprise a successful alert campaign. Let’s break each category down, using these two messages as examples.

1. Initial Call-to-Action:

I signed up for NBC alerts because the network’s golf broadcasts contain clear and concise onscreen calls-to-action (“Text GOLF to 51515”). That, and the announcers remind viewers to sign up every hour or so.

To sign up for the PGATOUR alerts, I had to dig around on their website and came across a page with all sorts of confusing calls-to-action to different alerts.

The PGA could improve this experience (and increase sign ups) by either having a widget on the FanZone page that accepts my phone number and maybe a selector for which alerts are available, or make one keyword that returns a menu to the user to let them select which they want to sign up for. (Doing this also allows for more powerful branding of a single keyword across other channels.)

Just to note, I also tried to sign up for CBSSportsline golf alerts, but at the moment they don’t exist. Odd, since CBS covers more tournaments than NBC does.

2. Timeliness:

By nature, score alerts are most useful when they arrive in a timely fashion – when the round ends, or during a break in the action.

In our example, the first round ended around 3:30pm PT. But both alerts arrived to my phone almost two hours later.

By comparison, the average shot and score for an online leader board is posted about 3-5 minutes after the score is recorded. So if the round finished at 3:30pm and the final scores are in by 3:35pm, then to be effective the alert should be arriving no later then 4pm, right? By 5:16 and 5:20 PM (when I received the alerts), I already had watched a broadcast of SportsCenter and knew who was in the lead.

Now I could have still been away from home or internet, and appreciated receiving the updates then, but overall the delay rendered the alerts less effective.

One cause for the delay could be that hundreds of thousands of gold fans have subscribed to each service – but I doubt it (and can’t confirm either way, because no publicly accessible stats are available).

Bottom line: NBC and PGATOUR could and should find a way to speed this up.

3. Character count:

The maximum allowed characters for an SMS message is 160 characters. Not a lot, but enough to get critical information out. Let’s see the character count for these two services:

NBC – 113 chars
PGATOUR.COM – 107 chars

Both services are well under the 160 characters, but both pack in some good information. I do think both could have filled the extra characters with something else here. While each needs to be concerned about the length of the leaderboard names, and how the character count can alter any other included content, there are ways to solve these issues (such as truncation and dynamic filters). More on that in the content section.

4. Content:

Content is king, right? To start, let’s dive into NBCs alert:

The first line tells us who the alert is from, NBC and what tournament and round it is, St. Jude Classic, Round 1. So far, so good.

Next, we easily see the top four golfers and their scores and the (F) indicates that is their final score for the day. Again, exactly what I want to see. Good.

Last, a link is provided to the mobile NBC sports website. It’s a nice up-sell, and sometimes I am almost compelled to click it.

Overall, well presented. NBC also includes an up-sell for another service with their in-round updates. For example, the alert I received from them at 2:02pm PT had this up-sell at the bottom: *Reply TENNIS for NBC tennis news/alerts.

(Smart of them to up-sell their own services. Since I like golf I must also like tennis and probably drive a BMW too.)

The alert I received at 11:02am PT had this up-sell at the bottom: *Free Baller Tones http://mvp7.us/3y. Random inserted ad, but nice to see at least they are offsetting their message costs by inserting ads. The SMS industry needs more solid examples of this to demonstrate traction.

Now, let’s look at the PGATOUR’s alert:

The first line tells us who the alert is from (PGATOUR) and the second tells us what round. They fail to mention which tournament this alert is for, so a point off their score for that.

Next, we also see the top four golfers on the leader board listed. They must think we have poor vision, or are very excited to alert us, as each golfers name is in ALL CAPS. This is annoying so let’s dock them another point.

Also, notice there is no indication if the golfer is finished (F) or say on the 15th hole (15) of an in-round update. Standard leader board practice is to give an indication of last hole finished. Another point docked, that’s three so far.

Next is a link to their full website, pgatour.com, which strikes me as odd, since I’m on my phone and not a computer. Why not promote the url of their (admittedly pretty nice) mobile site @ mobile.pgatour.com instead? Fourth point off.

Last, let’s look at the information on how to unsubscribe. This is important and required by the carriers so I’ll give them props for adding it, but reply STOP PLB?  Why not reply STOP instead? There is a good chance I won’t remember the exact keyword (PLB) I signed up to. And as we all know, making the process more intuitive means I’m a happier subscriber.

In Summary

Overall, I give NBC an 8 and PGATOUR.com a 6 (out of 10).

Two ways NBC can improve their score (and increase their subscriber count) are:

1. Improve the content for in-round updates. They send 3-4 alerts per round, which always include the top golfers on the leader board. On the weekends, the first two alerts go out before the top players have teed off and rarely is a leader board that dynamic, so the content is the usually same as it was the day before. Wasted alert, in other words. The first alerts should be some other kind of tournament information. “Tiger Woods off to a hot start, -3 for the day” not only is more interesting (because we’re all wondering where he is, if not at the top) and also looks like a human is powering the content and not an rss feed.
2. Include opt-out instructions (as I mentioned earlier) with every alert in the extra content at the bottom. They send so many texts that I can see this would not be for everyone, so easy stop instructions should be included.

Ultimately, I will still stay subscribed to both (I’m in the business, and enjoy these kinds of things) but every time I see these issues, I hope they listen to their subscribers and continually look to improve the experience. After all, a better end user experience is healthy for the industry, the subscribers and the PGA Tour itself.

Ok, back to the Golf Channel. :)

(Craig Stoe runs Product and Operations at Waterfall and can often be found playing an early round at Harding Park before work.)