While NHL Tweetups are nothing new, the LA Kings are making a bit of a splash as they will have front office personnel tweeting from the floor of the draft.

More on that at the Sportsin140 blog .

And you can follow the LA Kings on Twitter here.

Another Twitter first for an NHL club – it will be interesting to see how this plays out from a fan engagement perspective. Here again – some significant attention is being paid to the Kings Twitter feed and there is no apparent sponsorship. Some people will criticize me for my attempts  to  monetize social media – and some people will hire me for it. I believe  it’s naive to think that ROI just doesn’t need to apply – “adding value” doesn’t add up at the end of the day (as this article attempts to counter).

My point here – and a big part of the reason I am interested in sports marketing and social media – is that sponsorship is 100% plain as day, in your face, front and centre ROI. I recall some radio broadcasts of games in Toronto with the “Home Hardware out-of-town scoreboard” (Blue Jays, I think). There weren’t too many people complaining that sponsorship was ruining the free medium of radio. Social Media is still just media.

Tweeting from the draft floor is an innovative move on the part of the Kings – but now it’s time to take that innovation a step further into revenue.