Take A Peck

Lately I’ve stumbled upon some good blog posts about being open and transparent in business. One of the reasons why I’ve always thought blogging was good for businesses (not all, but many of them) is that it lets you showcase your knowledge and be seen as an expert by your customers. Being transparent in business takes this a few steps further and helps establish an even deeper connection with your customers. According to Court’s Internet Marketing School, being transparent has the following benefits:

• Your customers are more knowledgeable about you and your business
• You establish a sense of trust upfront by being transparent
• Others value your honesty and are drawn to you in the process

Back when I used to work for a sports agency/consultant I always wished we would blog. Many advertising agencies blog, so why are so many sports marketing agencies and businesses not doing it? We had a collection of some of the smartest individuals in the sports business industry but the fear was that blogging about what we do would give away valuable information to competitors. Now, I don’t really know any business that has a 100% transparency policy, but even if you do give away something of value, someone else still has to do the work. But blogging and showing that you can offer good insights and smart thinking can be the best form of PR or business development you can do. That said, I still understood the hesitation to jump into this, since no other competitor was really doing it, either.

So what if you’re scared that you’re giving away too many things? Social media legend Neil Patel said in a recent interview, “And the main key to my success was that I let everything out. Because sooner or later others are going to know what you know, so might as well be the one to tell them.” Also, you don’t have to always write about your business. You can write about notable events in the industry and what you see others doing right/wrong. If you don’t even want to write the blog, just hire me and I’ll write it for you - as long as we’re transparent about it

There are tons of sports blogs, but I’m still waiting for agencies in the sports business world to catch up with advertising in terms of taking advantage of blogs and social media to position an agency as an expert and spread influence. The only sports agency (that I know of) right now that is really involved with blogging is Dynasty Reps. Its founder, Darren Heitner, could probably tell you that he owes just about all of his success to blogging, being transparent, and using his blog to build his reputation.

I think there’s a huge opportunity for a sports marketing agency (or two or three) to start blogging and generate some buzz in the industry while building a reputation.

Why do you think the sports business world is behind advertising in terms of blogging? Is it just that sports marketers and agents aren’t around new technology as much as ad agency people? Do you think the lack of blogging by sports agencies will change soon? I’d love to hear what you think.

Share This

As social media continues to be a larger and more important part of a company’s marketing strategy, one thing that is a challenge for big brands is how to decide who is responsible for this stuff? Is it the PR department or agency’s job to blog, reach out to other bloggers, manage the company’s online reputation, participate in the dialogue, etc? Or is it someone else’s job?

Please Take A Peck at this survey and let me know what you think.

Share This

Stracka is a sports social network for golfers that describes itself as being “for people who love golf.” My friend Mike asked me if I’d heard about it (and I hadn’t) so I decided to check it out. I’ll walk you through the registration process and then offer some thoughts.

Registration

When you decide to register, you put in your email address, password, choose a profile picture and then tell them a little bit more about what you’re interested in (e.g., meeting other golfers, posting scores and photos, watching video fly-overs of courses, etc). Next you pick which home course/s you’d like featured on your profile. A list of courses nearby appeared automatically so I assume they’re using my IP address to figure out my location–pretty cool.

The last step is inviting your friends to the site (if you want). You can put in their email addresses and customize a message that will be sent to them. I didn’t like the fact that if you don’t want to invite friends you have to click “I don’t have any friends” in order to skip this step.

Your Profile

After registration you can choose to further customize your profile by letting people know what’s in your bag, when you can play, if you gamble, and give more details about yourself. You can also upload pictures and change your location by dragging your avatar to a different spot on Google Maps. Your default location is detected automatically.

Using the site

There are a variety of things you can do on Stracka. You can find other golfers, golf courses, see pictures, view member blogs and participate in forum discussions. The golf course directory has an interactive Google Map that looks confusing at first, because it has a 100s of golf courses in the US marked with pin-points. But when you zoom in, it’s pretty useful so you can see which golf courses are in your area, if you don’t know. One thing that was confusing about the golf course directory is for each state, Stracka lists the top 10 golf courses. It wasn’t clear who picked this top 10. Is it the site owners? Is it the users? Are courses paying to get in the top 10? It was nice that you can click on any golf course and get an overhead view of it through Google Maps.

A cool feature that Stracka offers is the ability to track your scores and handicap. You can select a course and put in your scores and advanced info like number of pars/birdies/bogies, greens in regulation and average driving distance. Then you can compare your statistics vs. an average PGA TOUR player or Tiger, Phi, Vijay, Trevor Immelman or Retief Goosen. You can also compare your stats with your friends who are on Stracka.

No video??

The one major thing that is lacking on Stracka is video. Golf offers countless opportunities for video instruction, swing analysis, putting and chipping tips, etc., but there is nothing like this on Stracka. This is unfortunate as they are missing a huge opportunity to engage users with this content, from professionally-produced video, to user-generated content.

Another thing that annoyed me was I couldn’t find a link or way to log out of the site once I was logged in.

Key Statistics (as of May 16, 2008)

• Compete.com - 9k uniques in April
• Domain age - July 18, 2001
• PR 4
• Pages indexed in Google - 42,000
• Alexa Rank - 145,492

That’s it for my review of Stracka. Do you have anything to add? Also, do you know of any other golf social networks?

Share This

American Express does a great job with its golf sponsorships, using them to obtain benefits for Cardmembers and reward them for paying an annual fee. Though they may not have Tiger Woods as a spokesperson anymore, I don’t think this has hurt them much due to the wide variety of valuable offers they have for golfers. Here are a couple things they have going right now.

Friend of a Cardmember program

• Book a lesson with a PGA professional and bring a friend free.

US Open Golf Tickets and Travel Packages (visit this site for more details)
2008 US Open

• Stay at a nice hotel for 3 nights and get 2 weekend grounds passes as well as access to the American Express Hospitality tent. $2,699 per couple

2009 US Open

• Presale now through June 15 for daily trophy club tickets, which are ONLY available to AmEx Cardmembers.

2009 PGA Championship

• Cardmembers have access to a presale (now through May 31) to purchase Wanamaker Club and Season tickets

As you can see, these are tangible, valuable benefits that American Express offers its Cardmembers. You can see more benefits at http://www.americanexpress.com/golf.

If you’re an avid golfer and have an American Express Card, are you taking advantage of these benefits?

Share This

On Friday I attended Blog Carolinas, an event for professionals who are interested how to use social media tools in ways that impact business. It was a great learning experience and I enjoyed meeting some new people, as well as others who I’d been following on Twitter. Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet everyone, but that’s how these events go.

I attended three different sessions:

• Engaging the Customer
• Citizen Journalists
• Monitoring and Measurement

I especially enjoyed the first two of these sessions. Ginny Skalski (NBC 17) did a great job leading the “Citizen Journalists” panel and Cord Silverstein (Capstrat) and Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media) presented some great info during the “Engaging the Customer” panel. Since I took the best notes during “Engaging the Customer” I wanted to share some of them with you.

Brands want to engage customers online but their main challenge is minimizing risk and protecting their brand.

Communication Trends

• 1 in 5 adults comment online
• 80% read online recommendations
• 75% do research online before making a purchase decision
• 1 out of every 30 comments in an employee discussing the company he/she works for

Case Study - Sun Microsystems

• Every employee has a blog - now there are around 90,000 blog posts
• Blogging policy: nothing is reviewed or looked at prior to publication
• Results: Their site is now ranked #1 most popular in the world (according to Alexa) and they have a ton of valuable content

Sometimes a person will blog or post a video about your company. How do you decide when to jump in and respond?

• Is the person/blogger an influencer?
• Is the blog post/video generating additional conversations?
• Does the person look approachable?
• Would you respond if the issue/comment was said at a cocktail party?

What to tell small businesses about how to use social media:

• Listen first and figure out what’s going on
• Figure out what you’re trying to accomplish
• Don’t get hung up on the tools - the message is what is important

That’s all for the highlights from my notes from the “Engaging the Consumer” session at Blog Carolinas. If anyone else out there has posted notes, let me know where they’re at. Also, if I missed any major points in these notes, please let me know.

Share This

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

Share This