Fill in the blank – Owen Hargreaves is a ________ . If you asked 100 people to fill in the blank, I would estimate that around 90% would respond with ‘permanently crocked professional footballer’, 9% would respond with an unrepeatable explicative and 1% would say a social media genius – with that 1% being me. If I had been asked that question over a week ago, I would have probably responded with the former response, so what has changed in a week?
On June 30th, Hargreaves joined Youtube & created his own channel . In just over a week he has uploaded 23 videos and his top 5 viewed videos have amassed a total of nearly 1m views to date. The only thing he is promoting is himself with the ultimate aim being to find a new club.
Hargreaves has suffered from a number of injuries over the past few seasons and achieved just a handful of appearances for Man Utd. This culminated in him being released by the club in May this year. When I saw his name trending on Twitter earlier this week, my instant thought was ‘what has he injured now?’. Having clicked on the topic I saw that he was the talk of Twitter having uploaded videos of himself to Youtube to demonstrate that he is fit and help end the perception that he is injury-prone. I have only watched a couple of the videos but the short videos go through a number of different drills to demonstrate that he is still able to stand the rigours of football.
A number of tweets have ridiculed him and there are already a number of spoofs but I applaud him. He has taken control and decided to communicate a message without relying on ‘traditional’ media. He could have chosen the route of doing an interview with Sky Sports and declared himself fit to play to gain publicity but that would have only got him limited exposure.
Creating his own channel has ensured that he is in control of the message he is sending out and has resulted in greater publicity, column inches and conversations about the player than I imagine he expected. No club will purely sign him on the basis of the videos but it does keep him front of mind in a market where there are already a number of out-of-contract players searching for new clubs. The latest rumour is that Sven-Goran Eriksson is said to be interested in signing him for Leicester City – that is what I would call a positive social media ROI.
Maybe the term ‘genius’ is a slight over-exaggeration but Hargreaves has succeeded in a channel where other brands have failed. Kieron Dyer must be looking on with interest…