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On Monday, I attended Social Fresh Tampa, a social media conference that brought marketers together to discuss the business applications of social media. The conference itself was awesome, but just getting to chat with some really smart folks between sessions and at night was probably even more valuable.

If you’d like to see my notes from each panel, you can see them here. While the event and speakers focused on more than just sports, I did get some interesting sports insights. For example, I learned that MLB teams don’t have full control over their Facebook pages. The league can post things they want, which may or may not fit with what the team has in mind for its fans on Facebook. This isn’t good…teams need to have full control over their social media strategy and outreach. There has to be a balance between engagement and promotion. Teams know their fans best, so they should control this.

Enough about that. I want to share a few video interviews that I did at Social Fresh. I asked 4 guys – Marc Meyer (Director of Search and Social at Digital Response Marketing Group), Chris Barger (Director of Social Media at GM), Jeremy Hilton (VP  of Media and Technology at Mindcomet) and Chris Moody (Social Media Marketing Manager at Bandwidth) – to share their thoughts about the future of online metrics and measurement.

Check out the videos below to see what they think:

I had a great time at York College and was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak on a panel in front of about 250 sports management and business students last night as part of their first ever professional panel and charity event. Thanks to Erik Eitel for inviting me to speak (and picking me up from DC) and thanks to Madeiline Ludt for driving me to the BWI airport this morning.They both helped put together an awesome event.

I also want to thank Dr. Tim Newman, the Coordinator of the Sport Management Program at York College for recommending me to Erik and sharing some of his time with me. I met Tim early this year on Twitter, then in person at the CSRI Conference in Chapel Hill. It was good seeing Tim again and meeting his wife and one of their daughters. Here’s the video interview Tim did with me. Tim-thanks for the opportunity and hopefully, I’ll see you again soon. And have a safe trip/awesome time in Malaysia!

Last night I had the pleasure to interview George Junginger, who is working on a new startup called Group Story, along with his business partner, Geoff Hamrick. Group Story puts a new twist on photo books for groups of people who have been at the same event, on the same sports team, or share some other common bond. Instead of having one standard book for the entire group, Group Story enables people to pick and choose photos and customize pages so their books match their own experiences.

Since Group Story is an NC-based company and since I’ve known George for a little over a year now, I thought it’d be fun to do an interview with him. I also think sports fans and athletes will be a good audience for them, and you can hear George explain why in the video. This is actually the first interview George has given about Group Story–he claims he’s camera shy, but if you watch the video, you’ll see why I don’t believe it. (hint: I think he gives a good interview).

Interview With Group Story Co-Founder George Junginger from Jason Peck on Vimeo.

Group Story has been chosen to demo at the Internet Summit in Raleigh on November 4-5. Check them out and drop me a line if you’re going to be there so we can meet up.

FanFeedr is a relatively new startup that aims to provide sports fans with real-time news about their favorite sports, teams and players. Their website aggregates a ton of content, news, videos, and tweets and lets people pick and choose which news they want to see. I’m very big on the concept of aggregation and saving people time (my weak attempt at this is with Sports Biz Feed), and I think FanFeedr looks promising as a personalized sports news aggregator.

One of my favorite things about the site is that when you first visit, a helpful screen pops up to tell you what to do. When people first visit a new site, not knowing what to do is often a barrier to signing up and utilizing the site, so this really helped clarify things for me. I also love the fact that they utilize Facebook Connect to offer a simple sign up process.

The site utilizes social elements by enabling people to follow their friends and see what news they’re interested in. Fans can easily comment on, email, rate, or share any articles they read via Twitter or Facebook. This is accomplished by a nice horizontal ribbon that appears at the bottom of the screen when you click through to see an article.

FanFeedr also has an iPhone app and a robust set of APIs for publishers to take advantage of. I’m really looking forward to following this company’s growth.

When Jeff Brunelle, from Carrot Creative, said he would be happy to put me in touch with FanFeedr’s founder/CEO, Ty Ahmad-Taylor, I had to take him up on it. Please see below for some questions Ty answered via email, after we had a nice phone conversation last week.

1) Where did the basic concept of FanFeedr as a personalized, real-time sports news aggregator come from?

The core concept came from a problem I had myself: I spent far too much time hunting and pecking around for sports news and information on multiple websites. Twitter was emerging at this time last year, and I also saw some of the conceptual success my friends at FanSnap experienced with their event-ticketing vertical.

2) What kind of sports fans do you think will use FanFeedr?

We believe that we can capture most of the market, from the casual fan to the Fantasy Sports player, primarily because the consumption lens is similar to Twitter and Facebook, and much less editorially-driven. Specifically, you can get all of the news about your favorite teams, or some of it, or just bits of it (e.g. “just show me video about my team”) in an easy-to-use manner.

3) The site has a nice mix of features that are news-focused and focused on sharing/socializing. Which features do you think are most important and make FanFeedr special?

Without getting too abstract, and comparisons to Rothko are both appreciated and deflected, often at the same time, we are trying to address a user’s media consumption needs along their social graph.

4) What has surprised you the most about the sports industry since you started working on FanFeedr at the end of 2008?

I came from the music industry when I worked at MTV Networks. Pop, rock, hip-hop and country. Sports people are as passionate as music people, but the level of detailed knowledge about the game continues to astound me.

If you go see a great concert, you will hear music person say: “Minus the Bear has one of the best hooks I have heard in the last five years.”

5) What’s next for FanFeedr?

We are adding Fantasy Sports lifestreaming: right now, if you are in a Fantasy Football league, your wins, losses, player drops and adds are not exposed to anyone besides the 7, 9, or 11 other people that you play with. We want to allow you to expose your activity to your social graph (i.e. friends) on FanFeedr, Facebook and/or Twitter.

6) Where do you see real-time sports news going in the next year or so?

As more athletes get onto Twitter, you are going to see greater connections with fans, as the final barrier to sports consumption, what the athlete thinks, becomes less opaque.

7) What do you think is the biggest opportunity for teams and leagues to utilize social media?

The teams and leagues can use social media for much better CRM. The Oakland A’s don’t have the clearest picture of what their fans do online, for example, because they haven’t done a good job of painting a picture of those fans. Put another way, social media inverts the retail store paradigm: a sports brand doesn’t own the store (which is Facebook, Twitter or MySpace.) The brand is a leasing space, and has to create an pleasant experience for users in those media.

If you had $1 million to spend on FanFeedr right now, what would you do with it?

You can’t shoot, edit and distribute “Hangover II” for that amount, so focusing on the core business:

Last week I had a chance to speak with Kathy Jacobelli, whose company, 2Dogs, provides a platform to power online communities. They help with set up, promotion and ongoing management of their clients’ communities. I was interested in talking to Kathy because 2Dogs set up/manages Posting Up, the official social networking site for the Detroit Pistons. The site includes sections for typical social networking features like events, pictures, videos and blogs, but they also have integrated a schedule for upcoming games into the site to encourage fans to purchase tickets.

If it was my site, I’d want to tweak a few design elements and integrate some features to allow people to more easily invite their friends and share content with them. But the way it is now seems to work. Over 6,000 members have signed up since the site launched a few months ago, though I think there is huge potential for growth.

Here are three of the questions I asked Kathy about the site/social networking and sports.

Fans have so many outlets now to share their passion for their favorite teams. Why should fans join official team communities instead of just talking on existing fan sites, blogs, forums and groups on other social networks? How do you attract these fans to the official team sites?

An official team site offers much more. When inside the social network you can navigate back to the home page and buy tickets, merchandise and check out scores, videos and picture. With social networking at the official team site fans can express themselves and interact with blogs, videos and pictures. This does not happen with forums. The social network has grown to 6,400 people in months. People are coming over from other sites at a rapid rate.

What has surprised you most since launching the site?

How fast the site is growing and how passionate the fans are. On launch day I was in a Starbucks watching almost 200 people join in a matter of hours. During games I see people blogging and commenting with enormous passion. Someone blogged about a group of handicapped kids facing a financial challenge getting to a game. The Pistons reached out and so did others in the social netowrk. Also, we are seeing alot of social events formed inside the social network. We can see the die hard bloggers coming back often to see comments on their blogs. All and all the social network is an ongoing party!

What do you think the future holds for online fan communities in professional sports?

Social networking is a must for professional sports to meet the needs of the the next generation that has grown up on Facebook and Myspace.

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Thanks, Kathy. If any of you reading this need help with design strategy, content strategy, influencer outreach or monetization ideas when building/growing your online fan community, let me know and I’d be happy to help.

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…)