The platform includes standard community features such as profiles, blogs, pictures, and videos, as well as a ticket marketplace (powered by AceTickets.com) that enables fans to buy and sell tickets. Very cool idea with the ticket marketplace, but I wonder about the long-term viability due to ticketing agreements teams have with the StubHubs and Ticketmasters of the world. The platform also enables the communities to have aggregation features, similar to a Digg or Reddit, so users can submit and vote on stories about their favorite teams. You can see more about the platform on TruMedia’s website.

TruFan plans to monetize via advertising, merchandising, ticketing and sponsorships.  A few weeks ago, I was able to have a conversation with TruMedia’s CEO Rafe Anderson about the platform and where they’re going with it. See below for some of my notes from the conversation.

More about TruFan

Their focus is really on the local scene, enabling fans to  keep up with their favorite teams, no matter where they live. One thing they’re doing is helping to support local media properties—for example, they have a partnership with Boston.com to power fan vs. fan debates, known as Slugfests. I think this is a great way for them to get some additional exposure while also helping local media websites stay relevant and become more engaging.

Facebook vs. TruFan

I asked Rafe something to the effect of “now that many teams are engaging fans on Facebook and MySpace, why do you think fans should join TruFan communities?” Rafe said that while Facebook is a great way for teams to communicate and market themselves, fans don’t get the full benefit of local engagement there. TruFan’s value lies in being able to provide an outlet for fans to connect around extremely niche content.

Consolidation

We discussed a little bit about the fact that there are sports communities (official team communities and individual startups) popping up everywhere. While Rafe said he thinks there is room for multiple players, he believes there will be a lot of consolidation over the next couple years. Online sports properties will be able to create a lot more value together than apart.

My Thoughts

I think TruFan is on the right track by partnering with local media and focusing on scalability. They also seem to be thinking about the right things re: monetization.

The only concern I have is that as more teams have their own official  communities and start paying more attention to them (if they can monetize successfully), will fans join these unofficial communities? Also, will sports teams themselves figure out how to partner with local media to share content? This question has been brought up before on Sports Marketing 2.0. How will this affect TruFan and other non-official team communities who want to do these types of partnerships?

There is probably room for multiple team communities in the same market (just as there is room for official and unofficial team websites, blogs, etc.).  What do you think? I certainly don’t have all the answers (I’m not sure anyone does), but certainly would like to hear your thoughts.

Special thanks to Rafe for taking the time to talk about TruFan and what they’re doing.

I wrote this about a month or so ago- some of the numbers may not be exactly correct now, but I think the overall message is still accurate.

The Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) runs some of the most exciting and accessible events in the sports world.  If you’ve seen an event live, you know what I mean. Beach volleyball players are some of the most athletic people on the planet and the AVP’s events have a cool festival/party community atmosphere.

So, the AVP has great events, awesome athletes, cool content, passionate fans and some good sponsors  (Crocs, Barefoot Wine, Russell Athletics, Bud Light, etc). There’s a huge opportunity for the AVP to leverage social media to connect with their fans, build their brand, increase traffic to their website and extend their sponsorships. Here are some social media tools and platforms they’re using (based on some quick research), along with some opportunities for ways they can get more out of their efforts. But I really think they need goals and strategy (if they don’t already have them) to maximize their social media efforts.

Twitter

The AVP’s Twitter account is difficult to find (it’s not linked to on their main website). It appears that the AVP started their Twitter account on April 3rd, but they haven’t really utilized it much (only have 2 updates and 168 followers, and they are following zero people). The biggest benefit of Twitter is that it allows brands to show their human side and share interesting content to build trust and relationships, so the AVP has a lot of room to grow here.

Facebook

The AVP’s Facebook page has about 7500 fans and appears to be updated occasionally with pictures, videos and links to AVP content. They have done a good job at including their 2009 events in this page. However, I think they could do a better job at posting interesting content (AVP-related and other volleyball related stuff) to become a resource for all volleyball fans. And they should look at ways to reward their fans on Facebook to give them a reason to connect with them there.

YouTube

The AVP links to this YouTube account on it’s Facebook page. However, there are no videos on this YouTube account. With all the great videos and content the AVP likely has, they’re missing a big opportunity here to syndicate their content to YouTube, create original content and involve their fans and sponsors.

As we know, social media isn’t just about off-site tools and platforms. On-site elements and features can be utilized to enable audiences to easily share content with their friends and empower them to create their own content (or let them be involved in the process) to give them a stake in your brand. Here’s some of what the AVP is doing on-site.

Blog

I was excited to see that the AVP links to their blog on the front page of their site in a very visible location. However, I was disappointed to see that the blog hasn’t been updated since August 2008. The blog also lives on wordpress.com, instead of on avp.com, so the AVP doesn’t have full control over the creative design of the site and they are missing out on capturing the traffic that comes to the blog. On the plus side, it was nice to see that AVP pros such as Jake Gibb and Todd Rogers had been contributing content to the blog. But a blog needs to be updated at least weekly to be effective, and they should have a content strategy in place to ensure that what is written is relevant and engaging.

Videos

The AVP has a nice video section on its website that features a variety of videos and channels. They appear to be professionally done and they include some great content. People can share these videos on other sites such as Facebook, Digg and StumbleUpon by clicking the “share” link under each video. I’d probably look at making this more visible by including the logos directly under the video and I’d also add a few sites to this list to really give people an opportunity to share this content with their friends.

Other

The AVP has some very passionate fans, but the organization is missing out on capturing this conversation and soliciting feedback on their website. It may make sense to build a community for fans, similar to what other leagues and teams have done. This would most likely increase time spent on the site and page views. More time spent with a brand = stronger fans = more revenue. There also are ways to integrate sponsors into a fan community to add value and generate additional revenue.

If the AVP is going to be successful with any community efforts (on-site or off-site through other social media tools/platforms), they probably need to hire a community manager who is very passionate about volleyball and the AVP. This would be someone whose job is to facilitate conversations, content creation, fan evangelism and feedback and help grow the AVP’s brand and community.

Of course, the AVP really needs a strategy before doing anything. They need to figure out what their goals are, what they will measure as indicators of success, how they will achieve these goals, and what tools/platforms they will use. Once they do this, they will be in a much better position to leverage social media to help them engage fans and build business. What do you think?

If social media is the tools, opportunities and conversations that enable mass two-way or multi-way communication and information sharing, then Twitter is the #1 tool right now that allows for direct, real-time interaction between people. Twitter is a very powerful connector and enabler. It enables JoeSportsFan in Philly to connect with JimSportsFan in New York and discuss the NBA Playoffs…in real-time, on their iPhones, while they’re both watching from their favorite sports bars. And then an unlimited number of fans can join the conversation or just see what is being said.

There are many, many benefits and reasons why a sports organization should be using Twitter. Here are ten of them:

1. Opportunity to provide great customer service
2. Ask questions, get feedback from fans and save money on focus groups
3. Spread news, in real-time to people who care about what you’re saying
4. Ability to address crisis situations quickly
5. Protect your brand, ensure that people are getting accurate information about you (it’s no longer about giving up control…it’s about taking back control and gaining influence)
6. Extend sponsor promotions
7. Reach a new audience that may have never visited your official website
8. Build deeper connections with existing audience
9. Connect with online influencers and learn about new ideas
10. Increased traffic back to organization’s website

**Bonus**

11. It’s MEASURABLE via the number of followers, replies, retweets, and clicks on links. Plus, you can analyze and group mentions of your organization and see how fan perceptions change over time.

I hope these reasons why sports organizations should use Twitter are helpful for you. I’ve been saying that teams should be using Twitter for over a year, so it’s good to see some of them doing this, even if they’re not taking full advantage in many cases.

If you have anything to add, feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to hear what you think.

On Thursday and Friday last week I had a great opportunity to attend the 2009 College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) Conference in Chapel Hill. The conference brought together some of the brightest sports minds, students and faculty to discuss issues facing college sports. I really enjoyed meeting Jeremy Bloom and hearing about his ordeals with the NCAA. Others such as Jay Bilas, Dick Baddour, Bernie Mullin, John Gerdy, Amy Perko and Andrew Zimbalist provided valuable insight on a wide range of issues.

I also especially enjoyed meeting Tim Newman (Coordinator of the Sport Management Program at York College)  and Steve Dittmore (teaches Sport Management at the University of Arkansas), who I’d connected with prior to the conference on Twitter. Tim can be found on Twitter @TimNATC and Steve is @SteveDittmore, if you’re interested in connecting with them there.

I found out about the CSRI Conference through Darren Heitner’s Sports Agent Blog, and he posted my notes from the conference there.

• Day 1 from the CSRI Conference
• Day 2 from the CSRI Conference

Teams and properties often include a lot of different assets in packages for sponsors. Signage, radio and TV spots, other media, experiences, tickets and more and the impressions, ratings and other metrics can be difficult to keep track of. When sponsors ask for results at the end of a season or after an event, you need to be able to tell them exactly what they got and what the results were to ensure that they are happy with what they paid for.

The Solution:

SponsorshipPRO+ presentation software

I was fortunate to speak with Tom Stipes recently about his company and its SponsorshipPRO+ presentation software tool that enables teams and properties to more easily track their sponsors’ assets so they can give them accurate and detailed post-event recap reports. These reports help properties demonstrate that they fulfilled or exceeded what they were supposed to deliver. He didn’t ask me to write about his software, but I wanted to anyway, because I was very impressed with its features and ease-of-use. Tom walked me through a demo (which he’ll happily do for you as well), but you can also see how this works online.

On the admin side, the tool allows properties and teams to create presentations for specific sponsors and catalog and identify assets. You can use some of the built in categories (radio, TV, tickets, etc) or add your own. Within each category, you can assign a description and results to specific assets and upload documents, pictures, and videos to help tell the story of what your sponsors actually received.

After you finish putting in information about each asset, you can easily turn this information into a presentation which you can put on a CD for sponsors. You can include a video intro if you’d like, and you can add any file type–including large audio/video files, spreadsheets, pictures, documents, etc. At anytime during the presentation, you can pull up these specific files to really show the aspects of the program and the results. If you or your sponsors just want to see everything together in a chart, the software enables you to do this as well.

The software isn’t cheap ($699 for the first license and $449 thereafter). However, I think it would pay for itself due to time saved, money saved (on printing costs–no need to print pages and pages of notes and put them in binders anymore) and features that enable you to track assets and results to show sponsors and keep them happy. One thing that may be interesting to develop in the future is an online version of the software, so people can access the data anywhere. But I can see the value in presenting this information in person, so sponsors really get a good picture of what they paid for. And you can always give the sponsor a copy of the presentation so they can look at the data again later.

Has anyone else used or tried this software? If so, what did you think?

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/

“We made a point to Charlie and the team that it’s nothing we ever want to happen again,” Skiles said. “You know, (we) don’t want to blow it out of proportion. But anything that gives the impression that we’re not serious and focused at all times is not the correct way we want to go about our business.”

A few days later, Shaquille O’Neal sent fans an update via Twitter hinting that he would be giving them halftime “tweet”.

“Attention all twitterers I’m a tweet at halftime and not get fined like vill a new wave a whteva his name is,” Shaq wrote. He followed through on his word, and Suns coach Alvin Gentry knew about it beforehand and didn’t care.

Using Twitter to provide real-time updates to fans during games is an awesome way to give fans access to the players they love and get them closer to the game. Fans still crave the same thing they always have–access–but teams need to make sure they’re taking advantage of new technologies to deliver this. If fans are closer to the game and players, it’s good for the teams; creating stronger fans equals more revenue.

I’m all for preserving the game and making sure players are focused, but the benefits of using Twitter outweigh any potential negatives. Besides, how much focus can you lose by sending a 140-character message? Is this really any more distracting than when players are asked to give halftime interviews?

It looks like the new Women’s Professional Soccer league also sees the value of Twitter in involving fans in the game. But they’ve taken it a step beyond just tolerating halftime tweets. During the league’s first game on March 29, players will be allowed to use Twitter to provide real-time updates throughout the game, from the sidelines. It will be interesting to see if this is a one-time-only thing or if it is something the new league will embrace throughout the season. For a league that is seeking to attract fans in any way possible (and what league isn’t?), I think this is a great move that will generate some buzz and have some of the bigger leagues watching closely. What do you think?

Though I’ve seen a number of Tony Robbins videos online and think he’s a great guy, I was wondering the same thing before I heard him speak last Monday.

For four hours, Tony had everyone listening, engaged, and, at times, on their feet and dancing (see end of video below). I’ve never seen someone who can control a crowd as well as Tony. He had the crowd fired up and gave people some things they can apply to their own life and businesses. His main focus is getting people to understand what things drive them to do what they do, and how they can use this knowledge to focus on the things they want. I came away with some good ideas about what I should focus on, and his speech energized me for the rest of the conference.

If you really focus on whatever it is you want to accomplish and attack it with an insane amount of energy, then good things will happen. This message can apply to anyone, so even though it wasn’t directly focused on sponsorship, I thought it was a great message for people to hear, especially considering that things have been difficult for many people lately.

Here’s a short clip of Tony’s speech. At the end you can see how fired up everyone was.

From a Twitter search, it looks like the NCAA is being mentioned on Twitter at least every minute, if not more.

Topics such as the NCAA, March Madness and Big East are ranked as the top trends on Twitter right now.

You can see some of the most popular NCAA-related links on Twackle.

If you’re a brand targeting NCAA basketball fans, do you think it might be a good idea to monitor the conversation here and maybe get involved to build relationships?

People such as life coach Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis (XPrize Foundation) and Rick Jones (Fishbait Marketing) and Sam Hill (FTI Helios Consulting) gave thought-provoking and motivating speeches. It was also great to have to have the opportunity to hear from people from brands such as Lee Jeans, McDonald’s, Carlsberg Breweries, the NBA Nets, the NHL, Kodak and meet some of the people who work with IEG. I also had a nice chat with Evander Holyfield on Monday night at the House of Blues.

You can find some detailed conference notes on IEG’s blog, but here are a few thoughts I wanted to share.

The Economy and Sponsorship Industry

Obviously, the economy was a hot topic at the conference. There was a good amount of discussion about what people think will happen over the next year. While this is tough to predict, the dominant view seemed to be that we aren’t anywhere near where we were in the 1930s, but it will take at least a few years for us to recover.

There was also a lot of discussion about the image of the sponsorship industry as a whole.  Most everyone was  upset by the recent attacks by congressmen and media on the sponsorship industry. While it’s not fair that sponsorship was thrown under the bus, perception matters, and it’s up to us to educate the public on the benefits of sponsorship–and how it actually is used to build business. More than ever, it’s important that people measure their efforts and link them to business objectives.

Social Media

Another hot topic was right up my alley - social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc) and new forms of marketing that can be used by properties and brands to save money, connect with their audiences, and add value to their sponsorships. Liz Cahill from Lee Jeans gave a great presentation about how they use social media to promote their cause marketing efforts around Lee National Denim Day, which helps raise money to fight breast cancer. Tom Green spoke about how he uses social media to promote his music festival, D Fest, and how he integrates his sponsors into these efforts.

In one of the more interesting examples of new media/marketing campaigns, Johan Jervoe from McDonald’s talked about their unbranded Alternate Reality Game, “The Lost Ring,” which was launched around the 2008 Olympics to target the advertising-adverse Gen Y audience. The game generated 430 million measured media impressions over six months, and five million people participated. Johan said brand favorability and future visit intent increased 45% and 67%, respectively, among people who played the game. It’s still hard for me to understand alternate-reality gaming, and even Johan admitted that McDonald’s still doesn’t understand exactly how/why it worked so well. But this stuff is definitely something to keep an eye on for the future.

Other Thoughts

I was able to use Twitter to find a few other folks who were at the conference and meet them. The ability to find others who share your interests is one very valuable benefit of using Twitter. I’m JasonPeck on there if you want to follow me.

During the presentations, I was one of the only people there taking notes on my laptop. I wish I could have gotten the wireless internet to work in the big conference rooms. The ability to be online and use Twitter during some of the speeches would have brought an added level of interaction to the conference. You may think that this would cause people to feel disconnected from the speakers, but I disagree. Twitter allows for real-time dialogue and discussion to take place during an event. When you know you’re going to share something with your network, you actually are more likely to focus on what is being said, so you share the right information. Twitter also allows for new information to be brought into the conversation. It certainly doesn’t replace the experience of actually being there, but it can help introduce other people to the content. And maybe they’ll see that there are valuable ideas being discussed and will decide to come to the conference next time. That’s a win for the speaker and conference organizers.

I hope some of these notes/ideas from the conference were beneficial. I had a great time in Chicago and look forward to building on some of the relationships that were started there.

Little did I know how much this blog would change my life.

This blog has influenced/contributed to everything I’ve ever done professionally. And it’s been great from a personal learning/networking standpoint as well.

I think the thing that may have got me my first job at a sports marketing/consulting agency was the fact that I had a blog and was very curious about new media/online opportunities.

I got my first consulting project because of this blog. The guy found my blog and contacted me to do some research on sports and social networking websites.

Every other project I’ve had or client I’ve worked with since then has been because of this blog–directly or indirectly (someone I met through the blog made an introduction for me).

Along the way, I’ve met and been in touch with some brilliant people who I would have probably never connected with if I hadn’t started this blog. Guys like Darren Heitner, Dan Beeman, Pat Coyle, Brian Gainor, Lewis Howes, Russell Scibetti…very smart people in the sports marketing world.

Having a blog has forced me to keep learning and writing, and that’s a good thing. And just because you start a blog and decide to write about something you’re passionate about doesn’t mean you can’t change. I started out writing about marketing/advertising in general, then moved to more sports business news, and now I write about sports and social media–two of my biggest interests and what I know the most about.

I would encourage any of you who don’t have a blog or personal website to seriously consider it. At least grab a domain name with your name in it, before someone else does. The future of the resume is your presence online. Do you want potential employers, partners or clients  to find your name, your accomplishments and easily get an accurate picture of what you do when they Google your name? Or do you want to be someone that people can’t find online and lose a chance to make an impact on them?

Having a blog has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. If you’d like to see how my writing has changed over the past three years, here are some posts from each year:

2006-2007

• Book Review - Emotional Branding
• Wikinomics
• P&G’s Social Networking
• Sports in Movie Theaters

2007-2008

• Guy Grocery Store Shoppers and Caveman Essentials
• Twitter - The New Stalker Tool
  
• 50 Sports Social Networking Websites
• Crown Plaza On Target With Golf Ads
• Is Fun The New Value That Will Drive Online Communities

2008-2009

• 5 Questions Teams Should Ask About Social Media
• Why Teams Should Get Involved With Social Media
• Using Free Social Media Tools To Connect With Fans And Save Money
• Social Networks Need To Provide Value Beyond Connecting

Blogging and connecting with people via social media are incredibly valuable if you put in the effort and time. They have changed my life for the better. Do you have a story on how blogging has changed your life? I’d love to hear it.

Speaking of LinkedIn, there will be a meetup for members of the Sponsorship Insights LinkedIn Group on Sunday, March 8 at 6 PM at Kitty O’Sheas Pub in the basement of the Hilton Hotel in Chicago.  This will be the first official gathering for the group, which Dan Beeman has built up to about 3,000 sports marketing and sponsorship professionals. LinkedIn is a great way to network with professionals and form new relationships, so if you’re in this industry, I highly recommend joining this group. Dan also has a great blog (Sponsorship Insights) that you should check out if you’re interested in this stuff.

Dan asked me to help host this meetup, and I’m excited about discussing sports marketing and social media with anyone who is interested. Please let me know if you’ll be able to make it. If you can’t make this meeting, but will still be attending the conference, I’d still love to meet up. Drop me a line if you’re interested!

Win a Suite (22 tix) against the Blazers tomorrow night. Respond #Timberwolvesgiveaway by Noon tomorrow to be entered. (1 winner @ random)

The Minnesota Timberwolves sent this out from their Twitter account as a way to reward people for following them on Twitter and surprise/delight a fan. The T-wolves only have a little over 150 followers now on Twitter, but I’m sure this will help them grow that number and give an amazing experience to one lucky fan. It’s great to see an NBA team embracing Twitter like this!

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?

Twackle joins the ranks of StatTweets and SportyTweets as aggregators of sports content on Twitter, though Twackle goes a step further by integrating content and conversations from all fans, instead of just accounts that were created to post team updates and stats. So far, Twackle has sections for all the major leagues, and other sports such as MMA, horse racing and action sports. If you have a Twitter account, you can sign in to Twackle using your existing information and contribute to the conversation by posting under each individual league/team/player section there. If you’re not on Twitter yet, don’t worry; you can still see what is being said about their favorite sport or team (and certain players). They also have a Facebook App if you’d like to use this while you’re on Facebook.

The site is currently monetized via Google ads, but according to SBJ, Octagon plans to monetize the service by selling ad-based tweets that are occasionally inserted into the data streams. I think this could work, as long as the ads aren’t too intrusive and are for promotions that sports fans would care about. But I’m still not completely convinced, as I know that most Twitter users hate feeling like they’re being marketed to. What do you think?

Overall, I really like this initiative from Octagon. You could just create your own feeds and searches using Twitter’s search tool or another service to monitor keywords you’re interested in, but Twackle makes it easy to see various sports content from Twitter all in one place. I messaged their VP, Jim DeLorenzo, today on Twitter and he called me to discuss Twackle less than 5 minutes later (great example of how companies can use Twitter for awesome customer service and engagement). He was very helpful at explaining everything and mentioned that they will soon release a feature so fans will be able to see the top 10 most popular URLs currently being passed around Twitter for each sport. One thing I would suggest would be to create a video tutorial for the home page to walk people through Twackle’s features and show people exactly how to use it.

So what does this all mean? People in sports are realizing how powerful Twitter can be in communicating with fans/customers and seeing what fans are interested in. More and more athletes, teams and organizations are using Twitter to share news, connect with fans and strengthen their brands. Fans often share and discuss breaking news on Twitter, before it hits mainstream media (I found out about A-Rod and steroids on Twitter, and other sports/non-sports stories, such as the attacks in Mumbai, “broke” on Twitter).

Twitter has grown about 900% since last year and recently received an additional $35 million in funding. It isn’t going away anytime soon. Teams and athletes should at least establish a listening presence here and an official account to protect their brands and make sure people are receiving accurate information. Then, depending on the organization’s goals, comfort level and available resources, it can start publishing updates, participating in conversations and doing some other meaningful things to engage fans.

P.S. - If you don’t know what Twitter is, watch this video.

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.

Facebook/All-Star Game Live Streaming

Facebook, TNT and the NBA teamed up to live stream the NBA All-Star Game online and pull in fan conversations in the same page via Facebook Connect. Fans could watch the activities last night live on TNT’s website and choose from any of the four different camera angles available. While they were watching online, all the conversations from Facebook from the other people who were watching were pulled in to the page on the right side. Fans could see the conversations as a whole, or just what their friends were saying. Fans could also vote on which players they wanted to see via the Player Cams. The live streams were presented by Sprite, and this was a good way to tie in a sponsor to something that provides value/entertainment for fans. This was a very cool mashup of live streaming and Facebook, and one that I think complements/enhances TV viewing. In the future, I bet we’ll see more of this and the ability to segment the conversation even further, so you could break it down and see what people were saying by city/state/age/etc.

Adidas/Dwight Howard Videos and Live Updates

Adidas created a section for fans to follow Dwight Howard during the All-Star Game. Here they could find YouTube videos, his posts on Twitter and pictures from Flickr, which were updated in real-time via RSS feeds. Adidas did a good job promoting this  section–they branded their YouTube channel with Dwight Howard imagery and encouraged people to follow Dwight live on their website.This gave fans unprecented access to Dwight Howard and enabled them to see a side of him that they might not see during games–he’s a HUGE jokester and goofball. The key to this initiative was that it wasn’t forced or scripted (I don’t think). It was just Dwight being himself. The videos include footage of Dwight pulling pranks on some of the other players, and they’ve all received a few thousand views on YouTube. I hope adidas leaves them up, as they’ll continue to get more views over time. The semi-commercial that shows Dwight getting ready for a game to the beat of drums was uploaded on February 12 and already has over 2 million views! (see video below).

OTHER - Shaq Is A Dancing Machine

Shaq + Mask + Dancing + All-Star Game = guaranteed viral hit. The video of Shaq’s intro dance was quickly uploaded to YouTube by a blogger and it already has over 76,000 views. There are at least 10 other people who uploaded the same video, and their videos also have thousands of views collectively. I’m not sure if Shaq Daddy just really wanted to dance or if this was orchestrated by his PR team, but the exposure he’s getting/will continue to get from this is awesome. Shaq has really become an internet celebrity via his hilarious posts/quotes on Twitter. Check out the video below to see Shaq’ s intro dance from the All Star Game last night.

All of this stuff produced a lot of conversation on Twitter, blogs and other communities online, in addition to all the offline conversations that people have. It’s great to see the NBA and a brand like adidas taking advantage of social media in a ways that are valuable for fans. What do you think about these initiatives?

• Jeff Feinstein - Marketing Director, SFX Baseball Group
• Derrick Heggans - GM, AOL Sports
• Tim McGee - Director of National Sponsorships, AT&T
• Barbara Silva - Director of Community Relations, Washington Nationals

For more info, check out the official conference website.

I’m not planning on attending this event (heading to IEG’s conference on March 8), but wanted to at least help them get the word out about the event. Has anyone attended a SINC conference? If so, what did you think?

Sports

Does Michael Phelps Need a Blog Strategy

Jonesin’ For Some A-Rod

Raptors Play “Spin the Smirnoff” Bottle

USA/Mexico Sets Record on ESPN2

Partnership Between the MLB and NHL

Wall: A King in Search of a Court

Social Media

Tracking Twitter Links

You’re on Twitter. Now What?

The Future of Social Networks

Social Media Marketing Takeaways from JP Morgan’s Nothing But Net Report

Google Can’t Do Old Media; Pulls Plug on Radio Ads

NBA Partners with Facebook for All-Star Coverage (promo below)

Hope yall have a great weekend/Valentine’s Day with your main squeeze/crush/special someone. I’m looking forward to relaxing and watching the NBA All-Star festivities.