The Sports Info Business

Take your hands off the computer and raise them if you have ever heard of Felipe Coimbra.  Are they in the air?  No? I hadn’t heard of him either until Davidlano, whom I follow on Twitter introduced me to twtpoll.  This is a cool little app Coimbra developed that allows you to conduct your own one question survey.  I decided to give it a try.

Here is the question I asked:  Have you ever considered a career in sports? —  With Professional Teams, Colleges, or related businesses? I posted the survey at 5:00 Thursday evening.  In order to drive people to drive traffic and have people to take the poll, I put on my marketing hat.  I thought, ‘How would I promote it, quickly?’  I was able to easily post a link to it on Facebook as well as LinkedIn.  The link was created under the section “What are you doing now” so any friend on Facebook who saw my profile or anyone checking out my profile on LinkedIn can easily find it.  I did not want to sample an active database, just friends and colleagues who happened to see it online.  If you want to join in and answer the question, click HERE

The Good and the Bad 

I always deal with the bad issues first.  The bad as it relates to this tool is that it currently allows you to ask only one question at a time, so it has limitations.

 ….and the good?  Think about the simple immediate impact this survey can have on your business.  Sure, you can go to Survey Monkey and develop a survey and send it out to people.  But it is not transparent and it takes a lot more work.  Give this site a try and see how simple it is.

Applications

Think about the power of the simple application.   Here are a few examples.  Want to ask a company question and be able to show all employees results in a transparent, real-time way?  My wife is thinking about starting a Montessori school in our community.  She quickly grasped that she could contact a targeted list with a simple question to see if a new, niche school has interest to move forward.

As for sports, you can deliver a sample questions to season ticket holders, test a new advertising campaign or gage sponsorship penetration with a simple, direct question.

The opportunities are endless.  Want to see what people might pay for a special event ticket?  Why not start here.

Once you fill out the question and options, you will want to have people to click on the link and respond.  Here are the ways the applications allows you to do so.

The first option on the page is to “Share This”

Look at the list of social media applications.  They are all here.  Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Buzz Up.  They are all here.

The second option is to post and there are nine options here including My Space, Friendster and Blogger.

The last option is by email.  Here you can add specific email addresses at the site.

Expectations

My expectations were not very high for this experiment in terms of response time as it posted only 12 hours before this entry was finished.  However, I will continue to watch it and hope you will as well.

As a sports administrator you need to quickly adopt to changing technology.  Consider it as part of your plan moving forward to tweak the current approach to changing fan needs.

One of the most popular internet buzzwords of 2008 was social media.  Corporate America has been trying to figure out how to develop a business voice in this space.  While companies like Zappos.com has instilled it as part of their their culture, most businesses still struggle.  

Sports teams have web site sections dedicated to discussion boards or an online community, but creating online buzz and breaking through the clutter to reach fans is getting more difficult.  Unless you are in the Super Bowl, World Series or Stanley Cup every year, take time to think how you are responding to developing fans needs and communication.

One of the first companies that changed the way we communicate online was an Israeli technology company called ICQ or I-Seek-You.  They were the first to brand and sell an instant messaging tool that has now been integrated into so many different online communication platforms.  ICQ however, was developed prior to the current trend to social media.

I would bet a few social media web sites you have probably heard of today include facebook and my space which many millions of people use to connect, communicate and promote themselves, their music, clothes business, whatever.  

Sports teams and brands need to develop a voice and communicate with their fans and consumers in new ways.  How many teams and organizations have dedicated staff to engage and monitor postings on  Twitter, Digg or de.licious?   I asked my father, as a measuring stick, if he knew or used any of these tools.  Okay, he is retired and struggles to go beyond email, so he has never heard or used them.  How about you?  Here is a list of my baker’s dozen of popular social media tools.  Beyond number one, how many have you heard of and how many do you use, monitor or engage?  

1. youtube.com

2. twitter.com

3. flickr.com

4. digg.com

5. del.icio.us

6. stumbleupon.com

7. metacafe.com

8. technorati.com

9. scribd.com

10. blogcatalog.com

11. mybloglog.com

12. kaboodle.com

13. reddit.com

The shoe companies often move the fastest in this space.  Nike and Reebok, I think it is Reebok since I see athletes wearing their jerseys in the video have developed viral forms of fun comunication to create the buzz online via facebook.

This Kobe Bryant video, which you probably will never see as a whole TV commercial  since it is 2 minutes, is called  – Ankle Insurance — and produced by Nike.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPnRFkPWyDM

More than 3 million people have already viewed what I believe is a fun Reebok take on Fantasy Football – http://tinyurl.com/9zo3hy  As one comment on this YouTube post said “Fake or not its GREAT!!!!!”  Do you have fun, edgy video being viewed by 3 million of your fans and customers?  Players from the Lakers, Saints and Chargers are in the videos.  Not for their teams however, but for a shoe company.  

Teams need to be investing more and more in technology.  You need to know how to drive online ticket sales from organized GEO targeting and a better plan to reach local fans.  Do you monitor open rates on emails, are you buying internet traffic for ticket sales or are you just posting your web site and rely on fans to Google your default web site address.  

Just as important, how are you responding to fans who post a comment on Twitter?

If you are not currently a sports executive and want to get into the game, then develop an expertise in this area and show teams how this can impact their business.  Smart executives will understand and hire you to implement a program for their organization.