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On Saturday, I’ll be moving to the Arlington/DC area. If we’ve spoken in the last few months, you already know this. But if not, now you know.

I’ve been in Raleigh, NC my entire life (minus college at UNC/Chapel Hill and studying abroad in Italy for a summer). I’m one of the few people I know who were born here and are still living here. Raleigh is an awesome place to live.

I love the city, the people and being around three hours away from the beach and the mountains. I’ve been fortunate to meet and know some awesome people, watch a ton of UNC football and basketball games, see Raleigh’s downtown greatly improve, go to some fun social media events, experiment with hyper-local news and work with some innovative companies.

I’ll always love Raleigh, but after 26 years, it’s time to move on.

3 Reasons I Am Moving

1) New Experiences

I’m really looking forward to doing a lot of new and cool things up there.  Arlington is great. I’m really looking forward to getting involved in the social media scene up there, going to some cool events and exploring new places. Arlington is close enough to everything where I can easily get to a lot of  bars, restaurants, sports stuff, etc. But also gives me some space, where I can afford to live in a decent size room with attached office in a great house.

2) New People

I love all the people I’ve met throughout the years in Raleigh. But I’m also excited to continue meeting new people, especially those who share my passion for social media + sports.

3) I Can Work Remotely

My current company, eWayDirect, is great when it comes to being flexible with how/where people work. While I’ve been working out of the Raleigh office for the past 10 months, the company is based in Connecticut, and most everyone I work with is up there. They’re fine with people working remotely as long as the work gets done and is quality.  I’m excited to continue working with them on our online community platform…some of the features we’re implementing and metrics we can give brands would blow your mind if you saw them. Just ask me if you’d like to see/hear more.

If there’s anyone you think I should connect with when I’m up there, please drop me a line here or at jpeck at hwy24 dot com and let me know. This month also marks my 4th year of blogging here. Thanks for sticking with me, and let me know if I can ever help you in any way.

Happy Thanksgiving. I feel very lucky to have good health, awesome family and friends and a job I really enjoy.

I also want to thank each and every one of you who reads my blog, follows me on Twitter or just happens to stop by here every once in awhile. Thank you. I really appreciate your time and attention. Please let me know if there is anything I can ever do for you or if there is anything you’d like to see more coverage of here.

HOWDY!

Hope yall are doing well. Now that the Tar Heels have started playing basketball and are still doing some exciting things in football, I couldn’t be happier as a sports fan.

I just wanted to let you know I’ll be speaking at the Triangle Social Media Club this week on Thursday night at Twine Interactive. If you live in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and are even remotely interested in social media (who isn’t these days?) you should check out this club. The Triangle Social Media Club chapter was first launched in October 2007 by Ignite Social Media. As the chapter has expanded, it has partnered with other companies and individuals to continue hosting events in the Triangle, NC region.

I’m planning on talking about purpose-driven communities and maybe even discuss some ways companies can extend the reach and engagement of their existing loyalty programs by adding a community aspect. Karlie Justus, a PR office for the NC State Fair, will also be speaking about how she helped implement the Fair’s first social media campaign. I’m really looking forward to hearing about this, and I’m sure it will be very interesting.

If you’re interested in the event, you can RSVP here. Hope to see you there!

I apologize for the lack of updates recently – I took on a new job a few weeks ago as social media manager for eWayDirect, which offers multiple marketing services  on a single platform built around a robust reporting structure. The job is definitely a challenge as I’ll be helping them 1) build their branded community platform 2)work with clients on how they can use it and 3) help build their own brand online, but it will be fun. I still plan on staying up-to-speed with things in the world of sports and providing information about the intersection of sports and social media. Please continue to feel free to contact me if there’s anything I can help you with.

I wrote this about a month or so ago- some of the numbers may not be exactly correct now, but I think the overall message is still accurate.

The Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) runs some of the most exciting and accessible events in the sports world.  If you’ve seen an event live, you know what I mean. Beach volleyball players are some of the most athletic people on the planet and the AVP’s events have a cool festival/party community atmosphere.

So, the AVP has great events, awesome athletes, cool content, passionate fans and some good sponsors  (Crocs, Barefoot Wine, Russell Athletics, Bud Light, etc). There’s a huge opportunity for the AVP to leverage social media to connect with their fans, build their brand, increase traffic to their website and extend their sponsorships. Here are some social media tools and platforms they’re using (based on some quick research), along with some opportunities for ways they can get more out of their efforts. But I really think they need goals and strategy (if they don’t already have them) to maximize their social media efforts.

Twitter

The AVP’s Twitter account is difficult to find (it’s not linked to on their main website). It appears that the AVP started their Twitter account on April 3rd, but they haven’t really utilized it much (only have 2 updates and 168 followers, and they are following zero people). The biggest benefit of Twitter is that it allows brands to show their human side and share interesting content to build trust and relationships, so the AVP has a lot of room to grow here.

Facebook

The AVP’s Facebook page has about 7500 fans and appears to be updated occasionally with pictures, videos and links to AVP content. They have done a good job at including their 2009 events in this page. However, I think they could do a better job at posting interesting content (AVP-related and other volleyball related stuff) to become a resource for all volleyball fans. And they should look at ways to reward their fans on Facebook to give them a reason to connect with them there.

YouTube

The AVP links to this YouTube account on it’s Facebook page. However, there are no videos on this YouTube account. With all the great videos and content the AVP likely has, they’re missing a big opportunity here to syndicate their content to YouTube, create original content and involve their fans and sponsors.

As we know, social media isn’t just about off-site tools and platforms. On-site elements and features can be utilized to enable audiences to easily share content with their friends and empower them to create their own content (or let them be involved in the process) to give them a stake in your brand. Here’s some of what the AVP is doing on-site.

Blog

I was excited to see that the AVP links to their blog on the front page of their site in a very visible location. However, I was disappointed to see that the blog hasn’t been updated since August 2008. The blog also lives on wordpress.com, instead of on avp.com, so the AVP doesn’t have full control over the creative design of the site and they are missing out on capturing the traffic that comes to the blog. On the plus side, it was nice to see that AVP pros such as Jake Gibb and Todd Rogers had been contributing content to the blog. But a blog needs to be updated at least weekly to be effective, and they should have a content strategy in place to ensure that what is written is relevant and engaging.

Videos

The AVP has a nice video section on its website that features a variety of videos and channels. They appear to be professionally done and they include some great content. People can share these videos on other sites such as Facebook, Digg and StumbleUpon by clicking the “share” link under each video. I’d probably look at making this more visible by including the logos directly under the video and I’d also add a few sites to this list to really give people an opportunity to share this content with their friends.

Other

The AVP has some very passionate fans, but the organization is missing out on capturing this conversation and soliciting feedback on their website. It may make sense to build a community for fans, similar to what other leagues and teams have done. This would most likely increase time spent on the site and page views. More time spent with a brand = stronger fans = more revenue. There also are ways to integrate sponsors into a fan community to add value and generate additional revenue.

If the AVP is going to be successful with any community efforts (on-site or off-site through other social media tools/platforms), they probably need to hire a community manager who is very passionate about volleyball and the AVP. This would be someone whose job is to facilitate conversations, content creation, fan evangelism and feedback and help grow the AVP’s brand and community.

Of course, the AVP really needs a strategy before doing anything. They need to figure out what their goals are, what they will measure as indicators of success, how they will achieve these goals, and what tools/platforms they will use. Once they do this, they will be in a much better position to leverage social media to help them engage fans and build business. What do you think?

I decided that it was time to update the look and feel of this website, since it hadn’t been updated since late 2007 (I think). Also, as I’ve become more interested in following the intersection of sports and social media, I’ve spent less time focused on business aspects of sports, which is what the old design emphasized.

I found this great Wordpress theme from Think Design, and modified it just a little bit. I hope the result is a cleaner/more professional look (I was tired of that giant polaroid picture of me in the middle of the site). I still have a few kinks to work out and will probably cut down on the categories some.

I’d love to hear what you think, and if there’s anything I should add. I’m not an expert coder by any means, but I’m open to suggestions.

Thanks!

Legacy Direct is a sports & entertainment technology company that helps athletes and their advisors manage their brands and discover new revenue streams. I connected with one of their employees (Andy Bailer) on Twitter recently and after we had a nice phone discussion about sports and social media, I emailed him a few questions. Here are his answers: (more…)