The Sports Info Business

If you thought that you are seeing every post from your friend’s list on Facebook,  think again.  Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to determine what is seen and what gets lost in translation when it comes to your news feed.

I knew this was happening a long time ago, but was reminded of it last weekend when a friend of mine casually mentioned to me, that she did not know about my passion for photography.

“I post samples of my photographs with links to my photo website in Facebook all the time,” I told her.  You must not be getting my feed within your Facebook homepage.

Apparently, she does not see my feed since she has not commented or liked past photographs.  I had to send this friend a direct link to my photography web site for her to see my work.

Stat of the day.  On average, only 16% of your fans will see your posts.  That means, if my 745 friends, nearly 525 folks will miss my latest blog or landscape photo.

Apparently, EdgeRank uses three variables to determine what you see and what you don’t. They are:  Affinity, Weight and time decay.  Once you understand these three items, you will understand your Facebook feed much better.

The following Infographic helps to illustrate how this works.

©Charles Harris Photography

Like many other professionals, I have invested a lot of time and energy into LinkedIn.  There are many tools we can use to help us in our jobs.

In today’s lean marketplace, everyone is in sales.  Now, while I provide training classes for employees where I work, I thought I knew most of what LinkedIn had to offer, both on the free and paid subscription side.  Just last week, the company celebrated its 200 millionth member.

Over the weekend though, I stumbled across a new function, at least for me, which I did not know existed.  I checked with a few other active users of this platform, showed them what I found and it surprised them as well.

Let me make one assumption before I play show and tell.  Like many other executives, I am always looking outward when it comes to cultivating my network.  Just last week, I spoke on a CMO panel at the 2013 Argyle Leadership Forum in Los Angeles.  The one-day event was an excellent way to learn from peers while also sharing my relevant work experience.  Naturally, I wanted to connect with people I interacted with during the conference.  I was either invited or reached out to some of these folks and connected on LinkedIn.  This is what many of us do when we meet new business people.

Now, there is apparently a new resource for connecting with people that are closer than you think on LinkedIn ~ via your educational background.

I stumbled into this new feature (for me at least) over the weekend.  Maybe it will be new for you too.  I was looking at my profile and, for some reason clicked on my University, UC Irvine.  Yes, I am an Anteater but that is a topic for another day. (See below).

To my surprise, here is what was displayed within my college link (See Below).

This new data showed me much more details about the Alums that attended UC Irvine.  As you can see from the photo above, it shows where more than 10,000 alumni live, where they work and what kinds of work they do to make a living.

But wait, there’s more.

If you highlight a section, as I did for this example by pushing the New York button in the first column, (its in bold), the list drilled down even further to show me that in New York, there are Anteater alums working for Siemens, Merck, Deutsche Bank, Citi Bank and more (see screen shot below).

I can only image this information might put a damper on Alumni offices around the country as their paid memberships provide access to these same alums.   However, from a sales, networking or business development perspective, this option is extremely valuable for all users.

Important note to this, you can customize the year for search.  Return to the middle photo I posted.  Look to the left of the black bar near the top and it shows the years students attended the University.  This can be customized to when you attended the school.

By the way, you can also perform the search if people entered their high school as well.  I added my high school, tried this out and the search process came up with positive results as well.

To connect with me, you can always comment here, locate me on LinkedIn, or become a Facebook Fan of sportsinfo101.com

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Photo of the Day

©Charles Harris Photography

Welcome to the first full weekend of college football, 2012 style.

For those that enjoy the sport, fall is the best time of year.  The temperatures, hopefully, wil begin cooling in the next 30 days and trees will begin changing colors.

One of the big games during the opening weekend has to be the University of Alabama vs the University of Michigan.  ABC thought it was a big enough game to feature the two teams tonight, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time, 5 p.m, on the West Coast.  With all of the football writers providing previews of what is taking place on the field, I thought I would review what the two teams are doing on the web, ahead of today’s contest.

First off, I went to the Alabama’s athletic website and this is the landing page that popped up.

In the past, we have looked at how many of the professional teams have used technology and the online platforms so today it was time to compare some of the college programs.

First, let’s look at the University of Alabama.

Alabama has many touch points above the fold on this landing page, including links to a football sponsor, a link continuing to the main athletics website, an embedded ABC commercial previewing the game as well as links to ESPN in Dallas and the school’s blog.  What the school missed is in the upper half of the page, you do not see the Facebook nor the Twitter links for the school.  If you scroll down the page just a bit more, they social media platforms become apparent.

Michigan’s site takes a very different approach.  The splash page was much smaller and the goal is clearly on customer acquisition and online interaction.  Two photos allow you to either link to the Wolverines football page or the on lie Facebook application.  Three links at the bottom encourage visitors to tag photos with #GoBlue on Instagram, heeling to generate school related content, follow the sport on Twitter or join its Facebook Fan page.

I understand both approaches.  One is geared towards the overall brand while the other is on acquiring new users. 

The Alabama Athletics Facebook page has more than 700,00 people engaged on it and the University did a great job by adding a phone number for tickets, a link to its Twitter account and also links for photos and rewards.

This page is specific to Michigan football and it has a larger audience than the Alabama page (both links to Facebook were reached via the school’s websites).  However, Michigan does not provide the same resources as the Alabama site does.

When you look at a Twitter account these days, like most people, we tend to see what kind of following the person or business has, right?  How influential are they when it comes talking about their product, their pricing or their passion.

Did you know that you can easily buy friends and appear more influential than you really are?  Perceptions, unfortunately are everything in this world and I want to expose you to the dark side of buying friends in social media.  I have learned in the tech press that you can now check the status of these fake friends within your own account, which I will address below.

A quick search on Google today will provide you with several companies claiming that you can “add” thousands of Twitter and Facebook followers for as low as $50.  Sounds like a Ginsu knives commercial from the 1970′s.  If you don’t believe me, go to Google and look up buying friends for Facebook and Twitter.  I have seen services in the last few months that have made this offer but have never actually down it.  I listened to my gut feeling and stayed away from this.

If you are at all interested in protecting your online reputation, which most should be interested, then you may want to use this free too to learn how many of your twitter follows are fake, how many are inactive and how many are good.  Now, others can see how authentic you are as well.

Obviously, no one is worried about a good ranking and it appears the inactive accounts are from people that either have become distracted, bored or forgotten about their accounts.  It is the percentage of fake accounts that might become alarming to those that are not buying their popularity.

So, in the interest of knowing where I stand, I typed in one of my twitter handles, the sportsinfo101.com real account.  It is managed by me, produced by me and last I pinched, I am still real so I am not fake and either is my account.  Here is what I found:

If you’d like to give this a try for yourself, you can either go http://statuspeople.com/ or just click here and give it a test drive.

The only downside of this app is that, although I learned that, according to status people 2% of my friends are fake, there was no way to view and evaluate the 2%.  Maybe next version of their program.

When you combine technology and sports related business, you have my ear.  Or in this case my eyes.  In this case, uh, maybe my legs too.

Yesterday, as I was writing and researching my first blog post for 2012, I came across a start up company called, Gympact.

The concept is simple.  Gym-Pact uses its site as a motivational tool to help get people who pay gym memberships to actually use it.  The concept of GymPact came from a Harvard behavioral economics class, and their pilot in Boston had a 90% success at getting people to the gym when they committed.

Via a free downloadable app, Gym-Pact lets you set the financial stakes of not getting to the gym, plus earn cash rewards and real prizes for fulfilling your Pact.  All you need is an iPhone.   In order to make money from this venture, you have to sign up and meet or exceed your commitment to going to the the gym.

As for getting paid to stay healthy, each Sunday night, the company calculates how much was paid by those who didn’t get to the gym that week. The money is then divided among those who made their Pact, based on the number of days committed (i.e. 3 days Pact = 3 portions).

Do I think this is type of tool can make a difference in motivating people to work out.  Yes, I do.

It reminds me of a story I heard last week, of a family member who joked that they might be thebest customer for a Los Angeles based gym.

This unnamed family member has been paying her gym membership for years and never goes.  I do think this grand mother would get there more often if she knew she might be losing more money but not going. 

As for company co-founders and  Harvard classmates Yifan Zhang and  Geoff Oberhofer,  If they practice what they preach, this dynamic duo is either very healthy or proceeds from their company will help pay for their lack of exercise.

Last Weekend, while researching future Question and answer candidate profiles for this blog, I learned that you can now add a Twitter Button on your LinkedIn profile.  I had not seen it before but I quickly learned how you can easily add this link to your profile to possibly connect with new folks as well as push current contacts to this Twitter stream.  I took a picture of my LinkedIn profile so you can see where it appears today.  If you can scan below, I have highlighted this in red.

So the question is how do you do add this?

I am here to show you that now.

** First log into your LinkedIn page.

** Once logged in, click on the blue “Home” button to return to the main page.

** Now click on the “More” tab

** Once there, I clicked on the “More applications” tab

** Now I clicked on the Twitter option after I scrolled down a bit and installed it wit the setting that I wanted to show.  I have more than one Twitter account but chose my main personal feed, @sportsinfo101

Hope this helps you better market yourself.

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Don’t forget if you use Facebook, add the Sports Info 101 page and never miss a future blog post.

I think it is about time this morning we go back to basics.

Let’s re-examine some of the items and trends people look for on the internet.

When it comes to sports, what are some of the most popular searches going on right now and how do we find what is trending in popular search engines like Google?

Easy.  

Our first stop naturally shoild be to Google Trends.

This site proves insight into the most popular searches, by day on the intenrnet.  So as a little experiment, I wanted to see what was trending on Google this morning.

Not surprising, several sports terms are dotted among the top 20 this morning.  If you look to the right, you’ll see Reggie Bush ranked number one at the moment this morning, Sidney Rice (#4), Carlos Beltran (#10), the Minnesota Vikings (#16) and Kyle Orton (#18).  Each has hit the radar for very different reasons.  However, you can get a quick glimpse of what interests the internet world at the moment.

Click on the search terms and Google provides tyou with more indepth statistics and links to why these are hot searches.

Now, I wanted to take a closer look to see, which of the major sports has been searched for the most and Google certainly allows you to cusomize your search.  My first search term was baseball, since it is is the only major sport currently “in season” meaning the Major League baseball teams are playing meaningful games.

Now that the NFL lockout has ended, I added football as a search term.

To no one’s surprise, footnball searches passed baseball this week as fans want to know the latest information on the most popular sport in America right now.

You can see this below as the blue and red lines cross during the month of July.

The data above is searches, in the United States only for 2011.  Why didn’t I include the rest of the world for this?  Well, much of the world refers to American soccer as football so it could have been a confusing term so I limited the search to the United States only for now.

Next, I added Basketball and Hockey, wanting to see from January to July where the other two major sports teams fell in terms of popular search terms.

Keep in mind, these searches can include anything relates to each sport.

What do I mean?  This could include hockey practice, hockey leagues, and hockey sticks, not necessarily the National Hockey League.  As you can see from above, the search term basketball, outlined in green, received a nice spike in late March and April.

The kletters refer to major stories and links to them which could have influenced a spike.  I did not link those for the use of this blog post.

Lastly, I wanted to show you a full year’s worth of search for the major sports terms so I looked back at 2010.

Certainly from July to December, there is no question which search and probably sport is the most popular in America today.

Don’t forget you can get updates on all sportsinfo101.com posts by liking the page on facebook.  Just click here and like us.

Video has become one of the most popular ways for sharing content over the Internet.  Its no wonder that YouTube has become the second largest search engine on the planet.

Here are a few select videos that show a few different stories.  They are all worth a few moments of your time.

The first story involves two boys attending a baseball game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Milwaukee Brewers.  They jostle for a foul ball and one boy walks away with a souvenir while the second one is left empty handed.  Then, the unthinkable happens.  The one boy hands the prize over to the other.

In the end, they are both rewarded.  Watch it here.

Telling good stories never gets old and Showtime has done a tremendous job with its docu-series on the 2011 World Series champion San Francisco.  It’s called The Franchise:  A Season with the San Francisco Giants.  An entire one hour special was recently uploaded you YouTube.  Here is how it is described on the site:  “Episode one follows the team’s biggest players Buster Posey, Matt Cain, Brian Wilson, Freddy Sanchez, Tim Lincecum, and Pablo Sandoval through the early days of the season.

The piece is really well done in telling the team’s story through first half of the 2011 Major League Baseball season.

I leave you with this, um interesting pre-race prayer, provider by pastor Joe Nelms over the weekend, where he paid tribute, among other things, to “his smoking hot wife.”

The unusual tribute before the NASCAR Nationwide Series race in Nashville was also good for corporate sponsors including Toyota, Dodge, Ford, GM Performance Technology, Goodyear Tires. 

Priceless.

Yesterday, I previewed the 82nd Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

Today, I invite you to watch this time lapse photography of a mamjor monsoon that hit the Phoenix area yesterday.  I must say, this is amazing photography and I am sure something that the TV folks broadcasting the all-star game will certainly show at some point next week.

Props has to go out to photographer Mike Olbinski, an accomplished photographer and the creator of the video.  His still shot from flickr wasn’t too bad either.

The fact that this baseball showcase event happens so close to this massive monsoon might put a small damper on the Phoenix Visitor and Convention Bureau’s plan to paint a picture perfect photo of the town for a national audience.

However, with the way mother nature has treated many parts of America this year, its just one surprise after another.