Thanks for stopping by. I'm Jason Peck.
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I’m at Blog Carolinas today, an event here in Raleigh, NC for people to get together and discuss how social media can help improve business practices and results. I’m excited about meeting some other area professionals and people who work in this space.
Click here for more information about Blog Carolinas.
I’m going to try to provide some updates on things throughout the day through my Twitter account. Follow me at http://twitter.com/JasonPeck
From eMarketer:
“A Rapleaf study of 30 million social network users worldwide found that women generally have more friends on social networks than men.”
80% of users interviewed had betweetn 0 and 100 friends on social networks. Women averaged 62 friends, while men averaged 57.
Among respondents with 100 to 1,000 friends (19% of the sample), women averaged 185 friends, while men averaged 172.
Rapleaf suggests that “women spend more time on social networks building and nurturing relationships, while men are more focused on acquiring relationships from a transactional point of view.”
I think I agree. This goes back to how men and women view friendship. Guys can go months without talking to friends (we don’t like long phone conversations) and then pick up right where we left off when we hang out. Girls seem to feel the need for more regular dialogue and keeping in touch with their friends, in order to consider them to be good friends. Then again, maybe these are just stereotypes…
From what I’ve noticed on Facebook, girls who are friends tend to post on each other’s walls and comment on pictures and videos much more often than guys do. Twitter is a whole different story though; I’ll interact more with people there (and people who I don’t really know as well in “real life.”). I’m curious to know if this is similar or different to your own experiences with your friends on social networks.
So today I downloaded Jing, which is a free screencasting utility for Mac OSX. Check out the video for my unplanned thoughts on my first visit to Sports Fananza, another of the sports social networking sites that someone posted about in the comments of my post, 50 Sports Social Networking Websites.
Click here for the video. *It may take a minute or two to load…
I read a book called Emotional Branding over two years ago. The book was basically about how brands should appeal to people’s senses and emotions in order to stand out and get people engaged. It’s a very interesting book, if you ever have a chance to read it.
Flash forward to today when I was trying to come up with a post because it’s been too long since I last wrote on here. Somehow I thought back to Emotional Branding and started to think about how social networking sites and blogs can use some of these principles to grow their audience and interact with them.
Sports social networks and communities should especially be thinking about emotions. For many sports fans, there are few things that evoke as much emotion and passion than sports–intense feelings for a favorite team or player, or intense hatred for the rival player/team. There are different stages and types of emotion that hardcore sports fans experience. These range from the anticipation/excitement that is felt leading up to a big game, to the joy or sadness felt due to a big win/loss, which often affects people’s moods for days. Of course, there are many, many other emotions but the point is that sports (more than many other interests) is full of passion and emotion.
While it is pretty clear that sports social networks and online sponsorship will play a huge role in the future (see Pat Coyle’s “Think outside the stadium” post), there is no substitute for the game experience. There is nothing like the visual/sensory experience of being in a packed stadium or arena and cheering for your favorite team. While websites may be able to reach more people, one thing that is sometimes missing is the emotional factor.
In order to build community and increase engagement, teams/leagues/brands need to tap into the emotions (especially in sports). Just as food/beverage marketers have gotten us to think “it’s no longer about eating food; it’s about body management, refreshment, winning, etc.” social networks need to move beyond the tired notion of “connecting” and speak to what it really means for people. They should be thinking about taking some of the typical sports emotions and feelings–competitiveness, loyalty, pride, etc—and figuring out how to bring them online.
Some things to think about to get started with this might be:
Would love to know what your thoughts are about this stuff. I’m off to a concert, so I hope everyone has a great weekend.
MPora is an extreme/action sports social network that just went under a redesign and is now looking much better than it used to. Users can share pictures and videos, post blogs, find spots to surf/skate/ski, etc and participate in the forums. According to the site’s homepage, the forums have almost 40,000 members. However if you check their stats on Compete.com, it looks like they are getting about 8,000-10,000 visitors per month. Either Compete is way off or the forum members number is wrong or there’s a lot of members who aren’t coming back to the site…
Whatever the case is, I think the site looks much better now. It’s uncluttered and easy to navigate. To attract users, Mpora is having a video contest (runs through May 
and giving away $1000 to the users who post the top 3 most popular videos. First place gets $650, second gets $250, third gets $100.
What do you think of the new Mpora design?
Even though social networking is such a hot topic right now, we’re still trying to figure out what the best way to monetize them is. So I wanted to explore some ways I’ve seen that social networks are being monetized.
1) Advertising supported - This is the main way social networks are trying to generate revenue. It’s good for the users as they get free access in exchange for seeing a few ads. This has the potential to be great for advertisers, too, as they can often target users based on various demographic info and interests. But here’s a dirty secret–click-through rates on social networks (especially Facebook) are horrible. Last I saw the CTR was about .04% …. This actually makes sense, because people go on social networks for specific purposes—they want to check out their friends profiles, pictures, videos, etc. Social network users aren’t in a shopping mindset and so aren’t likely to be looking for information about products or services. But, social networking is still a good option for increasing brand awareness as Disney found out with its MySpace page for “Step Up” and “Step Up 2 the Streets.”
It doesn’t look like ad spending on social networks will be decreasing any time soon. eMarketer says that about $2.1 billion will be spent on social networking advertising this year, with the number rising to $4.1 billion in 2011.
2) Subscription Model - This involves charging users a fee to use a site. Dating sites have been very successful with this model, but outside of this space, I’m not sure who’s operating this way. People are so used to getting things for free, that its hard to convince them to pay for social networking. There would seem to be an opportunity to offer free services and upsell people on something that includes exclusive content, access, etc…In a way, some of the college sports recruiting/news websites operate this way–gives some basic content for free and charge for premium content and message board access.
Something to think about is whether there will ever be other niche or local social networks that people will pay to be a part of…sort of like online country clubs, where membership is seen as a privilege and a status symbol. What do you think?
3) Data mining - This model involves collecting data about a group of people and selling it to an advertiser. So say Nike wants to learn more about what kind of music and movies guys 16-19 like, they would be able to purchase data from a social network that tells them what they need to know. I’m not sure if any sites are currently doing this, but it may be something to think about. Do you know any sites doing this?
4) Sponsorship - Instead of just having advertisers, it would seem to make more sense to have sponsors who are invested in helping the site grow and adding value. Sponsorship could be something as simple as giving Brand X complete ownership of a contest or section of the site, or a sponsor could take things further and partner with the site to bring users something unique and valuable.
5) Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate marketing is basically selling an outside party’s goods/services and getting a commission or fee for each sale that is made. In my opinion, this is an under-utilized method of monetization. Instead of putting up some Google ads that no one clicks on, why not offer a relevant product or service to your users? While we’ve seen that most people aren’t in a shopping mode when they’re social networking, it never hurts to test offers, especially on niche sites.
It would be pretty easy to add a “store” to the site and feature relevant products. A couple sites are currently utilizing this method:
That’s all I’ve got for now. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this stuff.
Have a great weekend. Hopefully the Heels can pull out the W against Kansas for a shot at the National Championship. Let’s go boys!
