The Kings are having a pretty horrible year, but that’s to be expected when your top five scorers are Kevin Martin, John Salmons, Brad Miller, Francisco Garcia, and Beno Udrih. No, I am serious those are their top five scoreres and not the names of the five finalists in a season of Making the Band. But what the Sacramento Kings are good at is viral marketing as shown in the video below. Premise: Rookie Jason Thompson pays the price for forgetting his rookie duties of bringing bagels for the veterans.
A lot of organizations don’t feel the need to dabble in social media and are frigtened of the idea of a low budget video only being distributed via youtube. But in a day and age where Shaq and the Phoenix Suns organization utilizes Twitter, Mark Cuban is not only a great blogger but an investor in blogging enterprises (Weblogs which was acquired for 25 million dollars by AOL), and stars like Rasheed Wallace, Rajon Rondo, and Greg Oden are all blogging on Yardbarker, its a no brainer the younger generation of sports fans eats this stuff up. The Kings do a great job giving a fun light hearted look at the behind the scenes of Rookie Hazing 101. This prank was going to happen regardless if they were going to make a video. It simply took someone in their PR/Marketing department to document the experience along with some slight editing. The video has now been viewed over 1 million times on youtube in less then 2 weeks. For an organization struggling to find success and lacking star power, this has garnered more views then an average game would and reached further then any local broadcast. Behold the power of viral,youtube, and the the blogosphere which proliferated this video to the masses.
