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.

Thanks to Tim for having me on the call yesterday and thanks to everyone else for taking time out of your day to listen. I hope it was beneficial and please feel free to contact me with any more questions you may have. If you’re from one of the organizations from the call, thanks for checking out my blog. For everyone else. here are some points I shared today about social media marketing and six main principles.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media marketing is a huge buzz word these days, but what does it really mean? I think it really boils down to this (and I’m definitely not the only one who has said this before): Social media marketing is when companies take a human approach to marketing by participating in conversations with their audiences. It’s about engaging audiences in an authentic way to provide helpful information, solve problems and build relationships to achieve business goals and gain a leg up on the competition. In the past this was difficult (and it’s still not easy), but the tools and platforms that are available now have made this a more viable option…and a necessity in many cases, depending on your audience and goals.

6 Principles

Here are 6 principles of social media marketing that I shared with the group. These weren’t meant to be how-tos or steps to take to create a strategy, so measurement and setting goals weren’t included (though I did include those pieces in another part of the presentation). These principles are more about the actions that an organization’s audience will notice and appreciate.

1) Listen

It’s been said before but I will say it again. Research your audience first.  Figure out where they are and what they’re saying about you, your category and your competitors before attempting to insert yourself in conversations online. Spend a month and make notes of the types of conversations about you and what percentage are positive and negative. Listen. Learn the various unspoken rules, guideines and dos and don’ts of the communities you’re thinking about joining. When you do start participating, listen to your audience and figure out what they like. Involve them in idea generation and product creation. Use social media platforms and tools to provide customer service on steroids. It’s about them, not you.

2) Engage

This has a dual-meaning. Part of social media marketing is engaging your audience on their own turf. Your goal may be to get people to come to your website, but what really should matter is engaging people (they way they want to be reached) to build relationships. The other part of this is providing and creating content that is engaging. If it’s not interesting or helpful or entertaining, people aren’t going to care or pay attention to your efforts. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Is whatever content you’re producing something that is interesting and good enough to share? If not, then you should re-evaluate your efforts.

3) Enable

Based on your research and listening, you can probably identify some people who are already talking about your organization. These people are great to involve in your efforts, so you should empower them and give them the tools and content to become an even bigger advocate for you. This also includes enabling people to share your content with their friends on various websites, and maybe letting people take your content and create new content from it in the form of remixes, mashups, and videos. Give people ways to feel ownership of your brand and they’ll get closer to it. Lastly, empower and enable your employees to get involved in your efforts.

4) Share

Share interesting articles, pictures, videos, links about you and your industry. Give to get. Give some more. Give and share your time, attention, expertise, questions and insight with your audience. The more you do this, the more relationships and trust you will build. Your audience will appreciate this, and that’s good for business.

5) Reward

If people are taking the time to interact with you online, why not reward them (and in some cases, you may have to reward them). Reward your loyal and passionate fans and followers with exclusive content, access, discounts and promotions. There’s also an opportunity to involve sponsors in this piece to give your fans something of value.

6) Participate

Participate, don’t promote. If all you do is say, “Look how great I am, look how awesome my product is” people will get tired of it really quickly and stop listening. The whole point of social media marketing is to participate in conversations with your audience, not just talk at them. You don’t have to start with a huge splash; this invites a lot more scrutiny and criticism from people who might not like what you’re doing. If you start slow, there are still a lot of things you can do and learn from. Participation is the key.

Thoughts?

Photo credits:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/niclindh/1389750548/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/wooandy/220929743/

Ideally, teams, athletes and agencies should be taking a serious look at social media and discovering how they can leverage it (internally and/or externally) to achieve their goals, such as building new conversation streams, authority, trust and recognition, extending sponsor and ticket promotions, or simply improving the way they communicate and tell their stories. And that means dedicating some money/time/resources to this, and possibly hiring a community manager, if you’re a team.

But if you can’t afford to spend any money right now, here are some quick tips to engage people through free social media tools. These aren’t full-blown recommendations or necessarily the best ways to go about getting involved in social media, but if you’re looking for FREE you can’t beat this stuff. Remember, PARTICIPATE, don’t just promote.

1) Create online identities and protect your brand

Create identities on websites where your audience is and take control of your online brand. Get on Twitter, create Facebook and LinkedIn pages for your company, and if you’re a team or athlete, get a MySpace page, too. Whether you’re an athlete, team or agency, you need to make sure you have control of your name online so people know they’re getting accurate information from an official source. I’ve heard that the main reason Shaq got on Twitter at first was to take control of his name after he realized that someone was tweeting from a fake Shaq account. These online identities are places for you to tell your story and connect with people who share your interests. Plus, you can reach people through these tools that might not usually visit your website.

2) Start a blog

Doing a blog the best way requires planning and effort. But if we’re talking about free tools to save money then you can still participate. Wordpress is my choice of platform, and you can get a hosted blog on Wordpress.com or free software so you can host it yourself. Obviously, you need to decide what to share/not share based on your organization’s comfort level, but I bet you can still find something interesting to write about. After all, you’ll do whatever it takes to survive in this economy, right?

3) Reach out to sports bloggers

Do you know how many sports bloggers would kill to receive even more information about their favorite athlete or team? A LOT of them. Let them know you’ve started a blog and tell them you’d appreciate any help they can offer in getting the word out. Better yet, let them use your official blog as an outlet for their opinions and involve them in the content creation process. Save money and time by empowering others and letting them write about you. If you’re an agency, reach out to a university’s sports marketing program and see if anyone wants a blogger internship. I bet they do.

4) Put your videos on YouTube and your pictures on Flickr

I’m sure you have highlight clips, promotional videos and commercials that are just sitting around collecting dust. Put them on YouTube! Put your pictures on Flickr! Every picture, video and other piece of content is an opportunity for your brand to make an impression on someone online.

5) Promote these online identities and link to them

Link to your main website on each of your profiles and link to your profiles somewhere on your website, so people know you’re out there and can find you. Sign up for Friendfeed and pull all your pictures, blog posts, videos into your profile there. You can also get tools that make it easy to update these profiles. Twitterfeed broadcasts your recent blog posts to your audience on Twitter. The Facebook Twitter App pulls your Twitter updates into your status message there for your entire network to see and comment on. This is very powerful stuff.

6) Join groups on Facebook and LinkedIn

Joining groups is a great way to find people who might be interested in your product/service/team/athletes. It’s free, too. Another way to find people to connect with is..

7) Use Twitter search

Do a search for your name and keywords to see what people are saying about you and connect with them! To search for multiple keywords at the same time, use a service like TweetGrid. Last night, I did a search for “Lakers tickets,” and found that someone needs tickets for the game. Wouldn’t that be a great opportunity to delight and surprise someone and turn them into a stronger fan/customer?

Involve your employees

Encourage your employees to create profiles on these sites and use these social media tools. A variety of perspectives can be interesting. Set guidelines for how to use these tools, but be flexible. You don’t want them to have to come to you for approval every time they want to update their Twitter accounts. Just tell them not to be stupid. Remember, your biggest concern (for the purposes of this article) is generating free coverage/influence/relationships.

9) Participate, comment and respond

Spend a few minutes each day interacting with your fans and influencers via these tools and by leaving comments on their blogs. This shows that you care and are serious about building a relationship with them, instead of just out there to promote yourself. If someone writes something about you, thank them for it. Think of social media as customer service on steroids. Extraordinary customer service will bring results. Just look at what Zappos has done.

Like I said earlier, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive guide or the only or exact things you should be doing. Putting that kind of plan together takes a lot more than a few minutes of writing. But if you’re strapped for cash, these are some things you an pretty easily implement that can have an impact on your business. If you put in the effort/time, this can definitely start bringing in results.

As with anything, you should desire how to measure this, whether that is attention (traffic/page views), authority (technorati rank, trackbacks/links to your content), participation metrics like comments or influence (the number of followers and subscribers you have). *These things come from Peter Kim’s framework for measuring social media.

How have you used free social media tools to connect with your fans and customers?

“Just in time to keep the partnership bull raging, Singularity—sudden, unprecedented progress including breakthroughs in brain science, social media and digital data—alters the physics of sponsorship.

Sponsorship is founded on the instinctive, often subconscious, equation that together, the value of each partner is worth more than either could achieve on its own: 1+1=3.something, or Pi.”

In our economy today, it is even more vital than ever  that companies in the sports industry figure out ways to work together and use new strategies and tools to survive and generate revenue.  I’ve never attended an IEG conference before, but I’m planning on going this year, as I think there will be a lot to be learned from some very smart people. They’ve got a great lineup of keynote speakers, including:

• Peter Diamandis, X PRIZE creator
• Rolf Jensen, award-winning author of The Dream Society
• Johan Jervoe, corporate VP, global marketing for McDonald’s
• Tony Robbins, Life coach (I’m a pretty big fan, and am pretty excited to see Mr. Robbins)
• Keld Strudahl, international marketing director for Carlsberg Breweries

It looks like this conference will also feature some great presentations and worshops conducted by thought-leaders from companies such as:

• American Airlines
• Chevron
• MillerCoors
• Kodak
• P&G
• Sprint
• Visa

You can see more about the conference here. It looks like a great event and I’d love to connect with any of you who are planning on attending. It’s not cheap (individual ticket is $1,895), but I think it will be worth it, and you get a discount for purchasing multiple tickets. IEG was nice enough to get in touch with me and provide a discount code. The first 25 people who register using the code “AC2009Sports” will get 10% off the cost of their tickets.

According to their website, almost half of the 1,200 tickets have sold, so if you’re planning on attending, you might want to register soon before the tickets sell out.

Let me know if you’re coming to this event and let’s meet up!