An exploratory study of the opportunities and challenges of social media in meeting relationship marketing goals in sport organizations

The central purpose of relationship marketing is retaining customers through long-term mutual satisfaction between businesses and customers. Sport businesses, in order to retain customers by establishing, maintaining, and enhancing relationships, need to communicate and engage in dialogue with their customers. In order to communicate and engage in dialogue in an on-going basis, sport businesses are required to employ effective communication platforms. In this regard, social media is becoming an ideal tool for a two-way continuing dialogue. However, the effects of social media, primarily in terms of addressing relationship marketing goals were not yet well understood. Not every business seems to fully agree on the opportunities social media brings to relationship marketing. While several marketers observe in social media a new marketing opportunity, others simply consider it as a new high-tech hype. The benefits underpinning social media in relationship marketing have not yet been studied in a systematic way and there is insufficient academic research on the topic. Therefore, this study has been conducted to explore the opportunities and challenges of social media in meeting relationship marketing goals from the points of view of sport managers.;To be able to reach the purpose of the study, qualitative case studies on eight running events' organizers in the province of Ontario, Canada have been conducted. The cases were selected using a purposive sampling with an intention of including "information rich" participants that offer an organisation's perspective and experience with an in-depth understanding about social media. In the data collection process, a triangulation method has been employed by converging two independent sources of information (i.e., personal interviews with key personnel at each organisation and direct observation of the social media platforms). Data are collected to determine whether the academic themes identified in the literature had actually occurred. For this purpose, the analytic technique of pattern-matching was used where the collected evidence compared and contrasted against the initially stipulated pattern. The detail of the individual cases has been captured treating each as unique, followed by a cross-case analysis. Both in within- and cross-cases analysis, a number of commonalities and some limited diversity have been revealed. Certain issues were also found to be more prevalent in some cases than others but ultimately a number of commonalities became apparent.;This study found that organizers of running events recognized the benefits of mutually rewarding long-term relationships with their runners and now understand the strategic value and power of social media in meeting relationship marketing goals. The results of this study demonstrated that running events are increasingly adopting social media as a relationship marketing tool. The study also showed that the opportunities of social media considerably outweigh the challenges.