A note from the SMA vice president of industry relations.

McKelvey, Steve

One of the ideas that emerged from our mid-year SMA Board Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was that the board members share their thoughts in lieu of the traditional "Letter from the President." Hence, I am pleased to provide some updates and perspective in my role as Vice President of Industry Relations.

As I see it, our board's Industry Relations role is multi-faceted and remains vital to our over-arching mission of connecting academia with industry practitioners. One of the channels we are using to achieve this is through our long-running Industry Insider interviews or newly created "View from the Field" columns that appear in each issue of Sport Marketing Quarterly. Over the past year, our Industry Insider interviews have connected with senior level executives from sport organizations ranging from the Phoenix Suns and New York Knicks, to Fuse Marketing and NASCAR, to the CEO of the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games. Our goal with the Industry Insider interviews is to continue to expand our outreach to and connection with a wide range of industries, remaining cognizant of not always leaning on folks in the "Big 5" mainstream professional sport leagues. The SMA Board believes that, moving forward, we should strive to connect with more non-traditional sport organizations, including non-profits and recreational-based sport organizations, as well as to hear from a more demographically diverse group of industry practitioners. Given this charge, I am always seeking candidates for future Industry Insider interviews and encourage you to email me with ideas and contacts for consideration. Additionally, we are open to our members wishing to conduct and submit these interviews.

In some issues we will replace the Industry Insider interview with a "View from the Field" column in which we invite prominent practitioners to share their insights on new industry developments and trends. Our first such column featured Haynes Hendrickson, President of Turnkey Intelligence. In this current issue of SMQ, we feature Jan Katzoff, GMR/Sportmark's Head of Global Sport and Entertainment. As with the Industry Insider interviews, I invite your recommendations for future guest columnists.

Another charge is the need to bring more, and a more diverse, range of practitioners to our annual conferences to serve as guest speakers and panelists. It is our goal for the Albuquerque conference that every luncheon and every dinner include an opportunity to hear from influential industry practitioners. Additionally, we have put a special emphasis on expanding both the demographic profile of our speakers as well as the industry segments that they represent. We recognize that our association has been too focused on the "Big 5" leagues and, candidly, too male-dominated. In order to broaden our appeal as a membership-based association, and enhance the content of our annual conferences, we need to broaden our focus. Toward this end, we are pleased to announce that we have secured Donna Orender, longtime PGA executive and former President of the WNBA, as our 2013 Veeck Address speaker!

We also identified two particular platforms in which we can better communicate our mission of connecting academia to industry. The first, and most obvious one, is our website. When practitioners and potential SMA members visit our website, we need content that illustrates this mission. Toward this end, our website now includes an archive of past Industry Insider interviews and Views from the Field columns that have been published in SMQ. We also plan to include two-minute video clips that tease these full columns. We thank our journal publishing partner, Fitness Information Technology, for allowing us to re-purpose this content on our website.

The other platform is social media. Our social media guru Beth Grupsmith has, among other initiatives in support of SMA, made it a practice of using Facebook and Twitter to promote our members' latest research, particularly the articles appearing in SMQ. Also, in her role as Executive Director of the Sports Business Education Network (SBEN), Beth will again be on-site at our Albuquerque conference to Livestream our speeches as well as some of our members' presentations. The expectation is that such public relations efforts will not only promote SMA, but more specifically inform practitioners who follow SMA and SBEN about the exciting and cutting-edge work that our members are doing. If you aren't already following SMA on Facebook and Twitter, please do! And let Beth know if you have research you wish to share with the world. Beth's email is beth.grupsmith@sbenlive.org.

Finally, the Industry Relations team continues the process of not only renewing our existing partners--both exhibitors and sponsors--but also reaching out to new companies across a broad range of industry segments to seek to gain more financial support for our annual conference and the new award programs that Joris Drayer and the Awards Committee have created. Toward that end--and thanks to the creativity of Khalid Ballouli--we also have a terrific partnership sales deck that now resides on our website, and that you can feel comfortable directing potential sponsors and exhibitors to visit.

In sum, there are plenty of exciting initiatives underway to further cement our relationships with industry on many levels. It is our belief that the more we achieve this mission, the more vibrant and valuable SMA becomes to our membership ... and we become to the industry!

Steve McKelvey

SMA Vice President of Industry Relations University of Massachusetts Amherst