Chicago Bulls’ Kamil Strycharz Talks Building A Career In Digital

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The Chicago Bulls are one of the most recognizable brands in basketball and this past weekend, they hosted NBA All-Star Weekend.

Kamil Strycharz, the Bulls’ Digital Content Coordinator, joins Social on the Sidelines to chat with Shahbaz Khan and Amara Baptist about his role in building the team’s digital strategy and various digital projects.

Edited highlights appear below:
On how his job responsibilities break down (9:54)

Strycharz:”I would say 20% of my job is game coverage. So that’s live tweeting during games, publishing on Instagram and Facebook doing live coverage of the games. I’d say it’s 20% of my role. The main course of my role is split into two buckets. The first is monetization. And so that’s a ton of branded content. I’m working on the bigger campaigns, creating social media campaigns for our partners obviously. And most of those, especially in today’s time in my role, is working with talent. So I’m working with illustrators, animators, doodle artists, just creators in general. The second bucket is expansion slash content strategy. And so under that bucket that’s Tik Tok, Giphy, Tenor, YouTube, LinkedIn… it’s growing the platform and then really bringing out and building the foundation for it so that others can hop in and then obviously create content on those platforms as well.”

On the Bulls’ success on Tik Tok (13:40)

Strycharz: “It’s been working so well for us. We’ve even had a ton of comments of people even lately saying, ‘Hey, I’m from England. I don’t watch basketball, but I love Benny the Bull. I think I’m a Chicago bulls fan.’ We’ve even had some people admit that they’re changing their teams… And it’s crazy to think that a mascot has a part of doing that. But I guess that’s one of our biggest goals and the reason why we’re on Tik Tok is to grow that fandom, hit these very hard to reach audiences. It’s a young platform. So that’s the biggest goal there in terms of how we operate. Something that’s really cool and really special is that we specifically treat Benny the Bull’s handle as a creator on the platform. So you’ll notice that other brands, when they hop on the platform, people see it right away.”

Social on the Sidelines is Presented to You By:

On deciding which trends to capitalize on digitally (22:54)
Strycharz: “I guess one thing that we’ve been getting better at is really identifying what the objective of our content is. And so there are many different things that help spark what kind of content we’re producing. So let’s say for an example, if All-Star is coming up and we need to promote Zach Levine…We know that we have to drive votes for exactly that, so that positions what kind of content we’re creating. If it’s branded content, we know partner wants brand awareness…We’ll pitch to the partner and then we’ll see from there and then we’ll obviously create that campaign. So I guess it all starts off with objectives. I guess everything that we do from the digital team has to connect somehow to the Chicago Bulls brand and/or any of the goals that we have.”

On keeping creativity flowing (33:40)

Strycharz: “One thing that’s been really helpful is disconnecting and then literally blocking off time on my calendar to be free. I don’t know how to explain this well, but being free in terms of like listening to podcasts or like doing simple things like taking a walk around the concourse, like just disconnecting. I think that really helps ground yourself. I’ve recently got into meditation…I think that alone has already helped spark out more ideas. And then the more fun part to this answer, which I’m sure everyone else actually doesn’t want to hear is I’ve been following a ton of accounts, especially with the creators that we work with on some of the cool campaigns we work with. I get inspired from them. Obviously ,follow other accounts in the industry. Subscribe to a ton of different newsletters.”

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