2009 has been a breakout year for sports and social media. Athletes, teams, leagues, coaches, media and sponsors have finally started to take note of how social media impacts sports and fans. There have been some really great executions and ideas as well as some missteps.
It is my pleasure to present the ebook, Sports and [...]
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Interesting Mashups of Twitter and Sports
Posted on February 2nd, 2010
I found two excellent examples of how companies are using Twitter for specific initiatives to add value to sports fans’ experiences of events. I wanted to share them with you and would love to hear what you think.
Sony Ericcson Twitter Cup
The Sony Ericcson Twitter Cup is a really interesting mashup of Twitter and the World Cup. It’s a well-known fact that sports fans like to show pride for their teams, and like to think that they have more pride/support than fans of other teams. And soccer fans are some of the most passionate fans in the world. Sony Ericcson has created the Twitter Cup interactive website as an interesting way for fans to compete with other fans to see which World Cup team has the most support.
The concept is simple. The more tweets a specific team receives, the farther that team goes in the Twitter Cup. Fans can score points for their team in two ways.
1) Tweet team name and World Cup together (ex: England World Cup)
2) Tweet team name and World Cup with the Twitter Cup hashtag (ex: Serbia World Cup #twc)
The website includes a cool interactive stadium that automatically fills seats with fans of a given team based on the number of tweets that team receives. This is a nice effort from Sony Ericcson and one that I think fans will definitely be talking about.
Brand Bowl 2010
This one comes from Mullen and Radian6, a reputation monitoring SAAS company. According to The Lost Jacket, Mullen approached Radian6 with an idea- leverage the power of social media for one of the biggest sports events in the world.
Why do many people watch the Super Bowl? The ads.
The Brand Bowl 2010 was born from this. This site will leverage Twitter and the monitoring capabilities of Radian6 to show people what everyone is saying about each ad. In real-time. Fans will be able to see which ads are getting tweeted the most, what people are saying about them, and if it is positive or negative.
Instead of having to wait until Monday morning to see what traditional media outlets say are the “best” ads, you can follow things in real-time. Awesome.
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I’m seeing more and more examples of Twitter+sports=really interesting content and initiatives. What do you think about these mashups? What other interesting mashups have you seen that you liked?
In other news, I wanted to give a quick shoutout to Dan Beeman and his company, Sponsorship Insights Group, which just relaunched their website. Dan is a good guy and has done a great job building his network/company through blogging and using his LinkedIn group to connect sponsorship professionals around the world.
Have a great night and rest of the week!
2010 UF Sports Law Symposium
Posted on January 17th, 2010
It’s been awhile since I’ve written about any sports events, but I wanted to share this one on behalf of my friend Darren Heitner.
On January 29 sports agents, litigators, salary cap analyst and sports law students will meet at the University of Florida Levin College of Law for the 2010 UF Sports Law Symposium.
The 2010 UF Sports Law Symposium, “Discussion: Bargaining Collectively,” presented by UF’s Entertainment & Sports Law Society, will bring together sports law experts and representatives from the National Football League, National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball to discuss why CBA’s exist, how they help players and owners, and to identify contract terms that will likely be argued before the agreement expires. The free event, set to kick off at 11 a.m. at UF Law’s Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom 180, will offer CLE credits.
The keynote speaker for this year’s symposium will be Harvey W. Schiller, Ph.D., who has served as president of the International Baseball Federation since 2007 and is also chairman of the board and CEO of GlobalOptions Group, a multidisciplinary international risk management and business solutions company located in New York. Prior to joining GlobalOptions in 1994, Schiller held posts at Turner Broadcasting System, served as the executive director/secretary general of the United States Olympic Committee and was the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.
Closing the day-long symposium will be Donald Fehr who served as the general counsel of the Major League Baseball Players Association beginning in 1977, and as its executive director for 26 years from December, 1983. In his role as executive director, Fehr served as the players’ chief negotiator in collective bargaining with major league owners and was responsible for contract administration, grievance arbitration and pension and health care matters. Fehr will address the role of collective bargaining in professional team sports, and discuss his experiences in his role with the players association.
To view the symposium agenda, speaker profiles and designated CLE credits, visit http://www.ufsportslaw.com/symposium.html.
For more information regarding the symposium, contact Darren Heitner at heitner@gmail.com.
Sports and Social Media Predictions in 2010
Posted on December 14th, 2009
2009 has been a breakout year for sports and social media. Athletes, teams, leagues, coaches, media and sponsors have finally started to take note of how social media impacts sports and fans. There have been some really great executions and ideas as well as some missteps.
It is my pleasure to present the ebook, Sports and Social Media Predictions 2010, which features 16 smart people and thought-leaders who have graciously shared their opinions, thoughts and predictions for sports and social media in 2010.
Feel free to download this, read it, blog about it, and share with your friends and coworkers. I hope you find it interesting.
Sports Social Media Predictions 2010
Thank you all for your participation. It’s been great connecting with you this year!
Special thanks to Ash Read for helping with the design/layout of this.
Teams Need To Look Beyond Facebook Pages
Posted on November 18th, 2009
There’s more to creating community than Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc.
Participation and engagement are the easy parts. What you do with it is the challenge.
The free social media platforms can be great for teams, but they each have their limitations. Let’s look at Facebook pages.
I’m not trying to say teams shouldn’t have a presence on Facebook. Clearly, teams must be there, so they can reach some of the 325 million+ people there now. I’m just saying that if you care about any of the above items, you shouldn’t make Facebook your home base. You should probably be thinking about taking things in-house and creating your own community website, like the Colts have done with MyColts.net.
This applies to brands outside of sports, too.
What do you think?
Interview With FanFeedr Founder Ty Ahmad-Taylor
Posted on September 29th, 2009
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.
We don’t have any preconceived notion that you will view everything about your team, but we do think it is important that you get information around the teams and players that you are most passionate about.
People are passionate about the Yankees or the Red Sox, but much less so about Major Baseball as an organizing concept. We want to serve that passion.
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.
In a nutshell: I am explicitly a fan of the 49ers and the Warriors (unfortunately.) My friends like other teams. We all like sports. While I certainly love keeping up with my underachieving-until-recently Bay Area teams, I am also interested in what my friends are interested in, and thus the social aspects of their consumption (what they like, what they don’t, where they make comments) become a discovery vector for me for stuff I wouldn’t know about otherwise.
When you are on Facebook and Twitter, you see things from your friends that you didn’t know about. They are a social lens for your knowledge.
We are trying to serve the same need in the realm of sports.
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.”
You go to see a great game, and you will hear a sports person say: “Adrian Petersen has the best mechanics of any running back in the game. He hits the hole faster, has a higher YPC average, and has more breakaway speed than LT.”
The knowledge is just deeper, even though most of us can’t play football or a guitar, Rock Band notwithstanding.
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.
We will are also enabling live scores on the site so that you can track games wherever you are, and, more importantly, talk about them with your friends (similar to the CNN-Facebook experiment for the 2009 Presidential inauguration.)
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.
The combination of Twitter, the increasing diversity of media outlets (Bleacher Report, Yardbarker and SB Nation are smart examples), and the wider distribution of online video mean that a sports fan or junkie can get more information about their passions. This a good thing.
Sports, like news, is a perishable good: who won in week 10 of the 2003 season? Who cares? Serving up the latest information dovetails nicely with expectations of people who consume the sport already.
Getting more realtime for sports news and information serves user needs because they already expect it.
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.
The service we provide is aggregation: the totality of relevant information about your favorite team or player.
The Athletics have to figure out how to provide a service to their users on Twitter and the other platforms. That is a very big opportunity, because useful services garner useful, measurable attention, and with attention comes value that didn’t exist before.
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:
A. Hire more engineers. This would allow us to increase our already-rapid iteration cycles so that we could amend the site to customer needs in shorter timeframes. It is amazing what the four talented engineers have done on our team, and even more world-class talent would increase our effectiveness.
B. Get better computers in the office (this is not a huge cost, but prohibitive currently.) Our current laptop crop is a little long in the tooth.
C. Upgrade our infrastructure. Our material is hosted in the cloud with Amazon. Better bigger machines means that our ability to serve fast web pages increases.
What If Teams Were Using Social Media The Right Way?
Posted on September 22nd, 2009
We’ve seen that there is a whole lot more to social media than just media or marketing. Social media tools and the tenets of listening, audience participation, user-generated content, real-time news and updates, sharing and voting are revolutionizing the way companies do business. Done properly and with a purpose, social media has the ability to transform the way companies look at:
- Market research
- Product development
- Customer service
- Sales and marketing
- Employee hiring
A few businesses and teams get this, but overall we’re still not there yet. Many teams are getting involved, but not always with a purpose or clear strategy. A Facebook page that has 100k people on it is worthless, without the proper strategy behind it. If you’re a team, you don’t really want Facebook fans, you want ticket buyers.
The video below describes some ideas for ways that teams can use social media the right way and what benefits they (and their fans) can get from this.
The last idea in the video is one I look forward to exploring more, and would love your thoughts on. It’s one thing to do some basic videos occasionally and make them exclusive to Twitter or YouTube to drive awareness and engagement. But hardcore fans are always willing to consume more, in my opinion. Why aren’t teams capitalizing on this?
More and more fans now want to participate, be involved in the creation of ticket packages, get exclusive, behind-the-scenes videos, articles and real-time updates, get personalized merchandise, vote on ideas for sponsor promotions, etc. Clearly people want content in new forms as indicated by the explosion of sites like Twitter. Why aren’t more teams taking some of these concepts, creating new content areas and fan clubs and charging fans for access to drive revenue?
If you’re a die-hard Lakers fan, wouldn’t you pay for the right to see Kobe’s real-time updates right after the game, before the press get a crack at him? Wouldn’t you pay to have access to short, 30 second videos from Phil Jackson before and after practice? Wouldn’t you pay for a chance to ask a member of the Lakers staff or ownership any question you wanted once a month? I know I would.
I think teams may need to rethink a lot of the things they’re doing online. There should be a balance between using these free social media tools to expand an audience and keep a pulse on what fans want/think vs. charging people for access to really cool content and opportunities. Some of the things teams and players are doing on outside sites could be moved in-house (and on team communities, so they have a better value proposition) so they can be better monetized and packaged for hardcore fans. I think this is the only way teams will see a good ROI from their efforts and will be able to justify spending money on new opportunities that serve to engage fans in more ways.
I’m always interested in hearing what you think. Thanks for watching/reading and I look forward to your thoughts on this.
