Take A Peck

I recently read an interesting white paper from IBM called “The Corporate Newsletter Goes Social: IBM and Employee-Centered Media.” It’s a great read about how IBM is utilizing social media to improve connections between employees, increase productivity and leverage knowledge across the organization.

One thing that caught my attention was the company’s effort called “The Greater IBM Connection.” According to the white paper, the goal of this program is to “build a professional network for current and former IBMers to network, collaborate and leverage social computing inside and ouside the corporation.” Greater IBM has established a presence on multiple social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc) so people can choose how they want to stay connected to the organization. Since the days of having a job with one company for 50 years and then retiring are pretty much over, this is a great way for current and past employees to stay connected and share ideas.

I’m not sure if many other companies are doing something like this but I think it’s a great idea. I started thinking about how something like this could work in sports.

If they aren’t doing this already, I think it would make sense for leagues to start something similar (or bring the program online, if it already exists). Once you’re a professional athlete, it becomes part of who you are. This will always be part of your identity, even when you retire. For example, an NBA player should be part of the NBA family for life, and should want to give back to the game and help younger players succeed. Establishing a network like Greater IBM would be very beneficial for a number of reasons:

• Help former players stay in touch with each other so they can:
  •  share financial advice
  • explore business opportunities
  • talk about life after being a Pro
• Help connect former players with current players so they can help and give advice
• Help former players stay connected to the league so they can help in community service efforts and give something back to the game that gave them so much

I’d be willing to bet something like this already exists in some form for most leagues. But a program like this could be improved by taking advantage of social media tools to provide even more opportunities for connection.

What do you think?

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If this is your first time visiting my blog, welcome! Yesterday, Take A Peck was added to Alltop’s social media section. For readers who may not be familiar with Alltop, it’s essentially a site that aggregates major blogs/news sources for a variety of topics. It’s a great way to quickly scan through headlines in topics that you’re interested in.

For those of you who are new readers, this blog focuses on the intersection of social media and sports. Here are some posts that I hope you find interesting:

Social Networks Should Provide Value Beyond Connecting

Five Ways to Monetize a Social Network

Social Networking and Emotional Branding

Transparency and Blogging in the Business of Sports

50 Sports Social Networking Websites

I hope you enjoy this blog and find it interesting. If you’d like to know more about me, check out the More About Me page. Feel free to contact me with any thoughts, questions or comments you may have.

If you like what you see here you may want to subscribe via email or RSS so you don’t miss anything. Thanks for stopping by!

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Everyone wants to start their own social network these days. And it makes sense that brands and companies want to jump on the social networking bandwagon. According to the recent Consumer Internet Barometer, one out of every four people online visits a social networking website.

But the competition for people’s attention is increasing rapidly. People only have time to participate in a certain number of sites. My guess is the average social network user may be involved with one to three sites. Chances are that their main involvement will be on Facebook or MySpace and then they MIGHT spend some time on a niche site that caters more to something they’re very passionate about. They use the Facebook/MySpaces to connect with people and keep in touch and the niche sites to read about breaking news and share opinions, and participate in more in-depth conversations.

So everyone’s thinking they need to start a social network and get rich. But there’s already enough places for people to “connect” and share their profile, pictures, videos, etc. How are you going to stand out from the other sites? Even in sports, there are a good number of websites with social networking features–at least in the general sports space. Just offering the ability to connect isn’t good enough anymore, in my humble opinion.

If you’re starting a social network, you should be thinking about things like:

• Can this site help solve a problem for people who join?
• How am I going to differentiate this from the others out there?
• How am I going to attract users?
• How am I going to reward users for participating?
• How am I going to make money off this-besides banner advertising?

If you can’t answer these questions, you still may have a social network. But I don’t think you have a good business model.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is providing the opportunity to “connect” still enough of a benefit to get people to join and keep coming back?

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I recently enjoyed reading Jeremiah Owyang’s post about the five questions companies ask about social media. This inspired me to put my own spin on this and apply it to the world of sports. While Jeremiah discussed the questions from his experience about what companies actually ask him, I decided to write the questions that I think teams should be asking about social media.

What is Social Media?

Common Craft does a great job at explaining complex things in simple ways. Here’s there video about social media that makes it pretty easy to understand, in my opinion. Obviously there is a lot more to it than this but the video makes it easy to grasp the basic concept of social media and why it is so powerful.

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Why Does It Matter?

Social media and related tools allow people to easily connect around common interests, form close bonds and make their opinions heard. Sports generates a huge amount of passion in people, and social media has made it easier for people to display and share their passion for their favorite players, teams and sports. People are now consuming information about your team in new ways, instead of just reading about you in the newspaper or watching ESPN. Fans write their own news and can reach a large amount of people through simple blogging and social media tools. If you’re winning, people are talking about you. If you’re losing, people are talking about you. Just know that even if you choose not to get involved, the conversation is still happening. You might as well monitor it and participate, don’t you think?

What Does It Mean For Fans?

Sports fans love talking. If you give them an opportunity to react to stories and videos, share them and submit their own stories, you’re providing a way for them to become even more engaged with your team. Instead of having the conversation take place only on outside message boards because your team website isn’t relevant, why not open the site up for conversations, or start a new site (ex: MyColts.net) to provide an outlet for fans to connect and communicate?

Another part of this is that social media tools have given fans who don’t live in your team’s city a way to keep up with what’s going on and connect with other like-minded fans.

What Does It Mean For Sponsors?

Building a team community website and/or participating in other social media sites gives sponsors a way to extend their connection to the team and provide relevant content or exclusives to fans online. Sponsors can get more impressions and have the opportunity to engage fans in new ways through content, communities, blogs, groups and widgets.

How Can Social Media Help Generate Revenue?

Social media tools can help teams reach more fans and deepen their connection with current fans. More engaged fans means more ticket sales, merchandise sales and increased revenues. Teams can also take advantage of social media tools to provide new ways for sponsors to activate. New activation ideas and more options for sponsors should help teams generate more revenue.

That’s all I’ve got for now. What else should teams be thinking about in the social media space? If you’ve had experience working with teams on their social media initiatives, what questions have they asked you?

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I thought it would be fun to use the dnScoop tool to get valuations for 50 sports social networks and community sites. I ran 72 sites through the tool, which values sites based on domain age, PageRank, inbound links, Alexa Rank, and Link Value. It doesn’t include two key factors that are usually used to value sites like this - monthly revenue and number of members - not to mention countless other factors that affect a site’s valuation.

It’s important to remember that this is in no way meant to be an accurate picture of a site’s value; this is just one benchmark and it’s not really accurate. In fact, most of these values are really low/off. For example at the end of 2006, FanNation was valued at approximately $60 million, but dnScoop says it’s only worth $11.9 million.

Here are the top 50 sports social networking websites and communities according to dnScoop. This only includes sites that are hosted on their own domain, since the tool values sites based on entire domains. Some of these may not be true social networks (ex: Deadspin) and I could have probably been more thorough with the categories. Remember this is just for fun. Feel free to comments about what you think, but please refrain from trying to start nasty arguments about the valuations–I know they’re not accurate.

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Takkle is a social network for athletes and fans of high school sports. Athletes can create a profile, upload videos and pictures, participate on forums, see key stats, participate in contests and show their passion for their favorite sports. It’s backed by Sports Illustrated and features some innovative opportunities for sponsors to connect with this audience.

Basics

Takkle features a nice profile that can be filled with a variety of information, such as hometown, school, graduation year, height, weight, favorite music, books, sports memory, etc.

Photos and videos can be tagged, rated, commented on, and easily embedded and shared on blogs, Facebook and MySpace. Photos and videos can also be sorted by most popular, most recent and highest rated. Based on my research, the most popular pictures are of cheerleaders. Takkle lets the community self-police itself, so members can flag photos if they are inappropriate, and I didn’t see any that would fall into this category.

People can create and/or join groups on Takkle, to connect with others who share their interests. Some of the most popular groups are Takkle Recruits, Footballers and Stretching. There are also forums on Takkle, where people can discuss all things relating to high school sports.

Key Differentiators

There are a few things that differentiate Takkle from some other sports social networks out there. They have a very tight focus, so that gives them an advantage over other sites that may just be focused on many different ages/levels of sports.

1) Takkle taps into the basic human desire to be noticed, a characteristic that is especially strong among athletes and high schoolers. They have a section for featured athletes, where the most popular people (for each sport) can be seen each week. There is a section for rankings (top 25s and top 100 players for various sports (voted on by the community). Sports Illustrated also gets into the mix, giving athletes the chance to try to get featured in SI’s “Faces in the Crowd,” by uploading highlight videos and getting your friends to vote on your profile.

2) Takkle offers incentives to encourage engagement. People can get trophies for reaching various milestones (adding 500 friends, uploading 250 pictures, etc). The trophies are featured on people’s profiles, and this is another way people on the site can show off and get noticed.

3) The site taps into competitive nature of sports fans with a feature called “Throwdowns.” These are user-created challenges, such as who “Who will win the Eastern Conference Finals?” Or “Basketball: Best Dunk.” If you’re creating your own Throwdown, you pick an opponent (from your friends or an established champion) and upload a video or picture that people can vote on. The person with the most votes wins, and Takkle keeps track of your Throwdown win-loss record. Throwdowns can easily be shared on Facebook or MySpace, increasing the exposure they get to exisiting and potential Takkle members.

Sponsor Integration

Takkle does a pretty good job at integrating its advertisers and sponsors into the site’s features. An example of this is the Takkle 25, a list of the top 25 best high school basketball players (voted by the community) that is presented by New Balance.

Sponsors are also involved in Takkle Battles, which are sponsored competitions where athletes videotape themselves showing off their skills. The winner of these Battles is determined by the community. Past battles include the Wendy’s High School Heisman, Three Point Battle sponsored by Spalding and Bench Press Battle sponsored by Met-Rx.

Final Thoughts

Takkle is a very user-friendly and sponsor-friendly niche social network. I think it will continue to be successful in this space. My only question is what happens when people graduate high school. Does Takkle lose these members or have they found that they still keep coming back to the site?

If you want to check out Takkle for yourself you can join here.

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