Richard Sweet blogs about PonyFans.com!

[Higher Authority]

Not Bored With The Message Board
by Richard Sweet, Associate A.D. for Marketing & Public Relations

I like ponyfans.com as a complement to our official site, smumustangs.com. I think it’s a well-run site and I appreciate the feature articles that are appear on the site. I have been so caught up in the work that I’m doing at SMU, I rarely have time to be a fan. Believe it or not, ponyfans.com provides some of the insight and entertainment I’m looking for after a long day at the office.

Working in college athletics is no easy task folks. Hopefully when the toughest of the work is done here, I’ll get to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor as we play for championships in front of sold-out stadiums (there are some of the hardest-working people I ever been associated with working in this department to make Mustang fans’ dreams come true).

Oh yes, the message board on ponyfans.com… it has become incredibly interesting, entertaining, frustrating, and heartbreaking to me now that I visit it as an employee of the athletic department. I had been visiting ponyfans.com for years as an interested fan and now I visit it for another reason as well. For years, marketers craved instant feedback from customers who had just experienced their product. The internet and sites like ponyfans.com provides just that. It’s a review by some of our best (and sometimes toughest) critics. Correctly filtered, it provides very useful information… filtered I said. As an insider now, I’m amazed at how on-track some of the know-it-alls are and how far off-track other know-it-alls are. Sometimes the same know-it-all is on- and off-track on the same topic. I laugh out loud as I read it, curse as I read it, I almost shed a tear as I read it… I said “almost” because we all know there is no crying in baseball… oh wait, we don't have baseball… I’ll bet someone posts about baseball… again. I’m amazed by the knowledge, shocked by the cruelty, saddened by the naivety, and ultimately satisfied by a topic’s self-correctibility (I love to make up words; it’s a sign of creativity).

In the end, the ponyfans.com message board provides entertainment, market research, and word-of-mouth marketing. It provides a great place to keep fans engaged, allows them to argue, show off, or make fools of themselves. The best thing ponyfans.com does is gets fans ready for the next game - Beat Tech!

Gotta go… gotta find out the latest on the 8-foot, 10-inch point guard Rivals has quoted as being “mildly” interested in SMU.

What did we do with our time before Al Gore invented the internet?

-----------------------------------------------------------

Well done, Mr. Sweet! Couldn't agree with you more. PonyFans.com IS a great site, and is vital to the biggest SMU junkies. Nobody covers the Ponies like the guys on this site. The in-depth stories here are more than we, as fans, get anywhere else. The school or the Mustang Club or some alum who owns a business should support the site to the extent that these guys can do this full-time, and give the athletic department - the ENTIRE athletic department - the coverage and exposure it deserves. There a lot of PonyFans out here who would be able to better satisfy their Mustangs addiction if there was more coverage like this.

[RE Tycoon]

I've got to hand it to Orsini and the gang over on the hilltop. That blog is over delivering (how many times does that happen on the hilltop). Unlike failed attempts of the past ala Copeland's weekly, then monthly then AWOL ask the AD feature, this is actually engaging, on point, pretty damn candid (for an official University channel), and interesting. I don't know if I can say any of those things about the athletic department's past attempts. Now if we can just get the original smufootballblog to start posting here and on his blog all would be right with my Mustang world...give us a babe of the day or something Blog...

Keep up the good work athletic department and ponyfans.

[EastStang]

This does answer one question that keeps coming up. Does Coach so and so know about this???? If an assistant AD is tracking what we say, I suspect, he shares it with some of the coaches. Even when we post that a pigmy from Nigeria who can dunk a basketball with his big toe has a mild interest in SMU. Southern Maine University.

[Mustang98]

Well done Richard Sweet. Southwest Airlines taught him well. If he can be part of a winning team like Southwest, I hope he can bring the same magic to the Hilltop. It's great to hear the athletic department is getting a pulse on the fanatic SMU bretheren.

P.S. Bring back our uniforms from the 1983 Cotton Bowl team.

[that's great raplh]

his stream of cons. style is a little hard to follow

[Eddie P]

Ha! You should see my SOC style. I hear it's a cross between Eli Cash and Kim Jong-il...with just a hint of Baxter the cat.

[CalallenStang]

These blogs are great...and the fact that we have a marketing guy reading the boards to find out how the fans are reacting tells me that the new regime GETS IT.

[Thumper]

Or at least Mr. Sweet does. Too often, teams and programs can become disconnected from their fans. Sounds in this blog like Mr. Sweet is trying to do the exact opposite by reading this site to find out what the fans really think.