You're probably familiar with the Cameo that the Carolina Hurricanes tweeted out after the team's win over the New Jersey Devils in the Eastern Conference Second Round.
The video -- which currently has 2.3 million views on Twitter -- shows various New Jersey celebrities congratulating the Hurricanes on the series victory and wishing the team luck moving forward.
If that seems a little off, that's because it is. It was nothing more than an A+ troll job by the Hurricanes social media team and another layer to what has been a very successful run on Twitter during the playoffs.
Between that video (among other tweets trolling their opponents) and the creative movie-poster-style game day graphics, the Hurricanes have stood out with their social media presence.
And there's a lot more that goes into it than what meets the eye.
Dan LaTorraca and Matt Sutor help oversee a creative team of about 10 people -- led by Cato Cataldo (head of the creative team) -- who collaborate together to create the daily content. The end goal, LaTorraca said, is to go "above and beyond."
"[That is] an important phrase that we'll sometimes share here," said LaTorraca, vice president of marketing & brand strategy. "The Carolina Hurricanes cannot afford to not go above and beyond. … We want to make sure that we're being fun and being different."
The Cameo video specifically was one that went above and beyond. And it needed to that night.
The Hurricanes clinched that second-round series on the same night as the NFL schedule release, the night that Sutor described as the Super Bowl for NFL creative teams. So, naturally, the Hurricanes social team knew it had to stand out.
"What can we do to break through the noise?" said Sutor, senior director of marketing. "Our video was the one that was breaking through the noise of the largest league in the world on a huge night for them. So that was something that we were very, very proud of internally."
It's the same mindset that inspired the movie poster game day graphics: How can the Hurricanes stand out from the crowd?
"Every game day we want a non-traditional graphic to hype up that game," Sutor said. "That's what we're demanding from the social team. And then from there, our creative team gets that first crack of what that concept looks like on a day-to-day basis. Then they can take that to the rest of the design team and that's where that collaboration really comes into play."
LaTorraca said some of the ideas for these graphics are cooked up weeks in advance while others come together much quicker -- sometimes in less than a day. The Hurricanes had a five-day break between the second and third rounds, giving the creative team more time to think of ideas. But then once the third round started the team had to start thinking on the fly.
"We lost some games and it was about turning the tide two games later," LaTorraca said. "And that was something that was much more relevant in terms of what was going on in the series and what are our fans feeling and what is our team feeling."
The creative team uses that fan feedback to structure the content, Sutor said, because that is what it's all about at the end of the day. And everything they're doing is working. According to Sutor, the team has seen a 55 percent increase in social media impressions through the first two rounds of the playoffs, compared to the first two rounds of the playoffs last season.
"There's nothing like being a creator or a social manager or whatever role you play on a marketing team when you see your content connect with our fans as well as it does," Sutor said. "I think that's really, really important for us to know that we're hitting all the right notes with our fans and that they appreciate the work that we do for them."
As for what the everyday hockey fan should know about producing this content:
"It's more than just the person with the fingers on the keys of the social accounts," LaTorraca said. "It really does take a village to be successful on social. … In our situation it really does take everybody to be successful in everything that we do."
"We always have our fan's best interests at heart," Sutor said. "We're not producing content for ourselves. We're not producing content for other teams. We are doing everything we can to engage our fans. That's one of the things we take a lot of pride in."
