Take A Peck

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:

• If my brand was a person, who would it be, how would he/she act, etc?
• What core emotions and beliefs does my audience have when engaging in the sport/activity/interest that my social network caters to?
• How can we brand our social network/community and integrate contests/promotions/ongoing elements that evoke these emotions?

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.

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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?

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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:

• Go211- They are using their status as an Amazon Associate to sell products and get a commission off of each product sold in their “store.”
• SkiSpace - It looks like Bode Miller’s site has a partnership with Backcountry.com to sell items in the “gear” section of their website

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!

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Chris and Christian - Thank you for your comments on my last post. They’ll definitely help me in crafting future posts here and hopefully providing some more information regarding sports and social networking.

I put together this quick video to roughly outline how sites are engaging and attracting fans. The first two points are pretty basic, but it’s important not to overlook them—a site that looks awesome will still fail to become popular if it is not easy to use and has the basic features that people are looking for in a social network.

As for the specific examples about what sites are doing to engage fans…you’ll have to watch the video

In the future I’ll do a better job with these video posts, so it doesn’t sound like I’m rambling so much. And I’ll try to keep them focused to just one thing/idea to keep them short and sweet. Also there’s a bit of lag in the video…thanks YouTube…

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Hat Tip to Mashable for posting about WePlay, a social network focused on youth sports for players, coaches, parents and fans. The site features profiles from big-name athletes such as Lebron James, Brandi Chastain, Derek Jeter, Shaun Alexander and Peyton Manning.  As Mashable pointed out, it doesn’t look like these athletes are actually participating much with the site, other than having a basic profile–though they do have a few pictures and videos for people to see on their profiles. Still, this isn’t really enough to keep people coming back for more–but hopefully this will change.

According to Mashable the site recently raised $1.87 million in their first round of financing. This sort of thing is big news for sports social networks so I decided to test out the site and see what it was like.

Upon arriving at the home page, I first thought that this was a general sports social network, and was unsure if I was supposed to sign up as a player or fan. Then I noticed that it was for youth sports, and signed up as a fan. According to WePlay, I can do the following things:

After I signed up they offered me an interesting option - I could get a family account and get the kids signed up (and be able to regulate what they do, I think). No little Jason’s running around for me, so I declined the family account option. It’s a good idea though.

When I arrived at the main dashboard (like your Facebook home page) I already had a friend request from the one and only Lebron James. I’m guessing everyone who selected basketball as their favorite sport received this, but the kids will probably still think it’s cool. The design and layout of the dashboard looks pretty slick, as you can see below. I was glad to see there was only one ad, which wasn’t obtrusive or obnoxious.

From the dashboard there are links to see/join groups, view your friends’ profiles, upload pictures (video coming soon) and write on your blog. Since I don’t have any friends on the site, there really wasn’t much for me to do.

Overall I really liked the design of the site but I’m not sure how it plans to attract users–beyond just the celebrity athlete profiles and ability to “connect” with my friends and family. There are already enough sites for people to connect, in my opinion. They’re going to have to attract kids’ away from Facebook, which is probably going to be tough. Maybe by going after the coaches and parents they have a shot. From the first screenshot above, it looks like they may offer some games, so that could be a way for the site to attract kids and make the site viral. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

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I had to post this great video by Kip Bodnar, a PR/Web 2.0 professional, discussing why he prefers Twitter over Facebook. If you’re a complete newbie to Twitter, you might want to check out Caroline Middlebrook’s Big Juicy Twitter Guide to learn more.

Watch Kip’s video here.

There are a growing number of people who prefer the more personal/real-time connection that Twitter offers vs. Facebook. So how does this relate to sports? Everyone agrees that teams need to be where their fans are, and many teams are doing one or more of the following things:

• Adding social media elements (user generated content, videos, blogs, etc) to their main pages.
  • See the Washington Wizards Blog for an example of how they’re using blogging to connect with fans
• Building their own social networking sites
  • See what the Indianapolis Colts are doing with MyColts.
• Establishing presence on existing social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc)

While the Twitter audience is not nearly as large as Facebook or MySpace, it is growing and it may soon make sense for teams to test out the service. Why not let one of your most avid fans be the team’s main Twitter guy (or better yet, have a contest for people to send in video saying why they deserve this). Then let the guy (or girl) tweet team promotions, ask and answer questions, monitor what people are saying about the team, and offer fans a more personal connection than what they’d get by being “friends” with a team’s profile page on Facebook/MySpace.

Twitter is free–the only cost is time. Why not give it a try?

You can follow me on Twitter - my username is JasonPeck

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