Students will have a greater incentive for tweeting about St. Thomas athletics starting this week.

The athletic department will release a website called “St. Thomas Fan Rewards.” The system is designed to encourage students to attend Tommie games and engage with the athletic teams through social media.

Michelle Morgan, marketing manager of athletics and the Anderson facilities, explained that St. Thomas Fan Rewards is similar to FANAMANIAC, but there are more opportunities to engage with the teams in the new system.

“Like FANAMANIAC, this new program will reward students for actions they take surrounding athletic events,” Morgan said. “But St. Thomas Fan Rewards is a little bit different in that it largely ties into social media.”

FANAMANIAC will still exist, but St. Thomas Fan Rewards will take over as the primary system through which students can earn prizes for supporting school sports. The new program will be run in partnership with a company called row27, a vendor that works with professional and college athletic teams. St. Thomas is row27’s first Division III client.

“We’re not as large of an athletic department as a school like Wisconsin-Madison, or a professional team, but we’ll gain momentum and get more people introduced to row27 so that a majority of students are members by fall 2013,” Morgan said.

With FANAMANIAC, fans could earn points for attending sporting events, but for some students, like junior Trish Meyer, it’s hard to support the Tommies in-person.

“A lot of other students and I have jobs,” Meyer said. “Because of class during the weekdays, I often get stuck working on weeknights and weekends, which is when most of the sports games are.”

Meyer said she is excited for the St. Thomas Fan Rewards launch because it will give her a way to support St. Thomas athletics even when she can’t attend games.

“I would be more inclined to follow school sports if the social media was more up-to-date and efficient,” Meyer said.

Senior Matt Johnson also looks forward to the new system.

“I think I would’ve attended more games if St. Thomas Fan Rewards had existed when I was freshman,” Johnson said. “The biggest reason that I didn’t attend many events, both then and now, is that I don’t always know when and where our teams play.”

With FANAMANIAC, students had to swipe their identification cards on game days to secure points. These points could eventually be cashed in on designated days in exchange for certain prizes.

Now students have the opportunity to earn rewards for their activity on social media, in addition to attending games. Some examples of point-earning activities online are “liking” a St. Thomas team’s Facebook page, “following” a team on Twitter and “checking in” to a game via Foursquare.

There will also be promo codes, which can be redeemed for points. Earned points can be exchanged in the online store as students desire, rather than only on designated days for limited prizes, as was the case with FANAMANIAC. St. Thomas Fan Rewards’ prizes will be as small as water bottles, and as big as raffle tickets for iPad minis.

“Students can cash points in an online store whenever, so they can spend them on actual tangible items as they want,” Morgan said. “The program doesn’t dictate how or when users have to redeem their points.”

Another feature of the new website are fan photos. The photographs, taken during Tommie games, can be texted or emailed to the site and then will be posted to an online gallery and video board.

With the encouragement of social media by St. Thomas students, senior Kevin Baker Hovde said some negative feedback is inevitable.

“If you promote an event on Facebook or Twitter, people could reply to someone’s post or tweet with negative feedback, which could be bad for St. Thomas’ image.”

But overall, St. Thomas Fan Rewards has many positives. Morgan said this program will be better for students than the previous system because it relates to their lives today.

“Everybody’s mobile and communicating with their friends, both those at the game and elsewhere, through mobile devices,” Morgan said.

Maggie Whitacre can be reached at whit0467@stthomas.edu.