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As the popularity of social media increases, sports brands must develop specific strategies to use them to enhance fan loyalty and build brand equity. The purpose of this paper is to explore how two social media platforms were utilised by the Grand Slam tennis events to achieve branding and relationship marketing goals.

A content analytic design was employed to examine Twitter and Facebook posts from the official accounts during, and post-, each respective event.

Both sites were utilised to cultivate long-term relationships with fans and develop brand loyalty, rather than to undertake short-term marketing activations. However, these sites appear to serve a different purpose, and therefore unique strategies are required to leverage opportunities afforded by each. Interestingly, brand associations were utilised more frequently during the post-event time period.

This study offers practitioners with useful insight on branding and relationship-building strategies across two social platforms. These results suggest that strategies appear dependent on the event, timeframe and specific platform. Moreover, the events’ differences in post use and focus may also indicate some differences related to event branding in an international context. Furthermore, sport organisations should look to leverage creative strategies to overcome limitations that platform-specific functionality may impose.

This study offers unique insights brand-building efforts in an international event setting, which differ in a range of contextual factors that impact on social media utilisation.

While emerging research suggests that women have made great gains within the higher education sector, significant challenges remain. Notably, women are still severely under-represented in leadership positions in the academe, and this is even more so for international academics. As an early-career academic, I am fortunate that my journey so far has allowed me to hold various leadership positions (both informal and formal). In this book chapter, I reflect on my own experiences. In so doing, I share insights into how to be an ‘opportunist’ in gaining leadership positions as a woman, breaking through the glass ceiling – that symbolic obstacle women hit – while being an international academic. The chapter starts with a brief overview of my background and my non-traditional pathway into the Sport Management discipline more broadly and the sub-discipline where I now feel at ‘home’. In what follows, I consider how some of the barriers and challenges I faced along the way have served to shape my future self. It is, perhaps, not without some degree of irony, that strategies I developed to mitigate or overcome these led to what I term self-created opportunities. The chapter then reflects on some of the successes I have achieved.

This chapter aims at bringing a sport-centric approach to the study of digital marketing. This is important as most of the existing research on digital marketing takes an industry-neutral perspective that generalises theory to all contexts. The sport industry has been a major recipient of digital marketing so it is important to recognise its impact on the evolution of digital marketing practices. To do so requires an analysis of what digital marketing is and how it has changed as a result of technological innovations. This enables a better understanding about the growth trajectory of digital sport marketing that integrates a sport-specific theory to digital marketing practices.