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Since it’s the end of the year, it’s time to start looking ahead (if you haven’t been already) to see what’s in store for next year. The last few months we’ve definitely seen an increase in discussions about how teams, leagues, athletes and agencies can take advantage of social media tools and communities to reach their audiences and increase engagement. I believe social media is only going to become more important in reaching fans in 2009. But before I start with my predictions I want to share a few articles I wrote this year about sports and social media:

• Five Questions Teams Should Ask About Social Media
• Transparency and Blogging in the Business of Sports
• Social Networks Need to Provide Value Beyond Connecting
• Why Teams Should Get Involved With Social Media

On to the good stuff. Here are a few predictions I have about what’s going to happen in this space in 2009. Keep in mind these are just my own predictions. I’m sure I’ve left out a few things and haven’t covered everything in depth, so feel free to agree, disagree and/or discuss as you’d like, either on your own blog or by leaving a comment here. I’d love to hear what you think.

More Athletes Will Get Involved

As we’ve seen with Gilbert Arenas, who was pretty much the first sports superstar to have a very popular blog, and now with Shaquille O’Neal, who is on Twitter and has over 21,000 followers, social media tools can be effective at connecting athletes with fans, generating buzz and helping fans really get to know athletes.  The funny thing is, I bet a lot of Shaq’s followers on Twitter aren’t even die-hard Shaq or NBA fans. But it’s just really cool to be able to see quotes and updates from a celebrity, and some people who probably didn’t care much about him before, now have a reason to keep up with him because they see he’s a genuine, caring person (and he’s got some hilarious quotes, too). YardBarker also does a good job with its pro athlete blogs. I enjoy reading what Donovan McNabb and Rajon Rondo have to say there. Overall, I think more athletes will start blogging (note: it has to be the actual athlete for it to be authentic) and using social media tools like Twitter in 2009.

Pro Teams Will Get More Involved

Many pro teams have already gotten involved with social media and blogging, as there are many benefits to be had (increase fan engagement, drive ticket sales, learn about your fans, increase reach of sponsor promotions, etc). If you don’t believe that social media tools such as Twitter can help you, think about this: Dell has said that Twitter has helped them generate over $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half. In 2009, even more teams will start Twitter accounts and become active on Facebook and fan communities. More teams may hire bloggers and people who will reach out to fans online for them. The key here is to actually interact with fans–don’t just promote your own content. You wouldn’t go to a party where you don’t know anyone and start shouting, would you? I’m a little worried that social media will become such a buzz word that people will think it is a quick fix for everything. That’s not true, and it definitely takes time and resources to utilize these tools the right way.

Sports Agencies Will Start Being More Transparent and Blogging

This may be more of a wish than a prediction. Sports agencies haven’t caught up to agencies in the advertising and media world in sharing their ideas and being open/honest on their websites. Many agency websites are currently static and boring–not something that people want to come back to. Sports agencies seem to be more protective of their ideas than ad agenices. To those who are worried about giving away ideas, I offer this quote from Neil Patel: “Sooner or later others are going to know what you know, so you might as well be the one to tell them.” I think that with the rise of information-sharing communities such as Sports Marketing 2.0 and LinkedIn Groups for people in the sports industry, agencies will realize that blogging and being open can be extremely valuable in helping position themselves as experts.

A great case study here is Darren Heitner’s Sports Agent Blog, which does a great job at highlighting issues in the athlete representation business and  discussing news relating to his agency, Dynasty Reps. Earlier this year, Darren left a comment here, saying, “If it were not for the creation of SportsAgentBlog.com, Dynasty Athlete Representation would probably not yet exist today.” That shows just how effective blogging can be in helping a business build a reputation, gain influence and get new clients.

Sports Communities Online - Many Will Fail, A Few Will Be Very Successful

I don’t like ending on a negative note but I think this should be said. Some people think that starting a sports community or social network is easy because there are X millions of sports fans out there who are passionate about their favorite sports, teams and players. The market is huge, right? This is much easier said than done. The bottom line is that there are already tons and tons of places for fans to interact online–message boards, team sites, fan blogs, and existing communties…plus sites like Facebook and MySpace, where there are tons of sports groups for fans to debate and interact. To be successful, a community must offer something besides the benefit of connecting–that can be exclusive content, videos, access to star players, etc. And then you still need to have partners who can drive traffic to your site. If you want a great example of how to build a community the right way, look no further than BallisLife.com, which is developing into a great community for basketball fans and players. I’ll write something up about them soon, but the bottom line is that when I want to talk about basketball, that’s where I go now. I don’t go to ESPN, or Sports Illustrated or Yahoo.

Those are a few of my predictions for this space in 2009. I’d love to hear what you think. If there are enough people interested, I’ll write a separate article with some of YOUR predictions. If you’d like to be included, leave a comment here or write a response on your own blog and I’ll try to include it in the article.

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Usually I don’t post much about what I’m working on but for those of you who are interested in the high school sports and recruiting space, I publish a weekly high school sports/recruiting digest every Friday on the PrepChamps blog. This week’s edition (the 16th overall) includes stories about basketball signings, lacrosse recruiting, and some interesting tactics that certain college coaches have used to get around rules in basketball recruiting. These legal yet questionable practices are changing the nature of how the recruiting process works in college basketball and the article from ESPN does a great job in shedding some light on these practices. Here’s the link to this week’s digest at PrepChamps.

I don’t usually post links to blogs I write for PrepChamps, but just wanted to let you know about this one, in case you’re interested. Have a great weekend!

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SportsVids.com is a free sports video sharing website/community that was founded in August 2007 by  Wayde Marsico, Ron Marsico and Elaine Marsico. The goal of the site is “to provide a vehicle for sports enthusiasts of all ages to share their favorite highlights and videos with friends and family everywhere.” Wayde approached me about doing a review so I wanted to share a few thoughts about the site.

Overview

SportsVids.com enables people to create a profile and upload videos of themselves and their favorite teams and players. I like how the site enables people to search through the videos by a variety of categories (type of video, sport, level and country). Videos sorted nicely into three overall categories—featured, most popular and most recent. Members can also rate videos and leave comments on them and user profile pages. The site also includes a news section, blog and forums. It is monetized via advertising across the site (Google and others).

Contests

One unique feature of the site is that it rewards users for bringing new visitors to the site via contests and prizes. They do this a little differently than most sites. From what I’ve seen, most sites reward people who get new users to sign-up; In its most recent contest, SportsVids rewarded the users who brought the most unique visitors to their site, and first prize was an XBOX 360. Their contest page features a leaderboard, which is nice in that it taps into the competitive element of sports—people love competing to win.

Uploading Videos

I really like that SportsVids lets you embed videos, instead of just forcing you to upload them. Overall, the upload process is good, though I would like to see a few changes. I’d move the upload button to the very right of the horizontal navigation bar on the site and feature it in a different color so it stand out a little more. The goal of the site is to get users to share videos, so the more you can emphasize this, the better. I’d also give people the option to choose multiple cities/states for their videos to be categorized in; let people be as specific or general as they want.

News Section

SportsVids has an interesting news section, which aggregates the latest sports articles from the AP, videos from ESPN and scores from CBS Sportsline. I like that people can sort the news articles/videos/scores according to league. This news section is beneficial for regular users of the site, since it allows them to keep up with what’s going on with their favorite sport without leaving. However, people may be more likely to get general sports news from other sources, such as a league/team website or ESPN. It would be interesting to have some more unique articles and maybe an orginal/daily video here each day to complement what is there already.

Watching Videos

I like the fact that people can watch featured, most popular, and most recent videos. One thing I might suggest would be to show the full list of sports on the videos page above these categories (featured, most popular, etc), instead of only showing them when people mouse-over “Videos” from other sections of the site. I do like the fact that you can sort videos by sport, but would still list all the sports again at the top. I’d also have “Sport” listed as the top category since I think that’s the first criteria that many people would sort videos by.

When watching videos, the related videos section is useful and full screen mode is good. I also like how you can email videos to a friend or share via Facebook, MySpace or Digg. I would add a few other sports-related sites such as BallHype and Yardbarker. I also might give people the option to post a video response, if they would rather utilize video over text comments.

Blog and Forums

I like the idea of having a blog and forums that allow for people to engage in deeper discussions than comments sometimes allow. These are new features for SportsVids, so they’re not as busy yet as they will be in the future.

Final Thoughts

SportsVids.com is an interesting video site (a YouTube for sports) that has potential if it can get some more users. It could be a good place for sports content producers to put their videos if they find that their content is getting lost in the crowd at YouTube and other sites. SportsVids.com is similar to a few other sites, such as Sports Fananza and SportZu.tv (though SportZu.tv is more focused on youth sports and partnering with organizations to have a mix of user-generated and professionally-produced content). None of these sites is currently dominating the space, so there is probably an opportunity for growth here. The challenge is convincing people that they can be a good alternative to YouTube and other more established video-sharing sites, which may not be sports-specific, but still have a good number of sports videos.

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Back in September, I wrote an article called Why Teams Should Get Involved With Social Media that outlined a few whys and hows for teams to get started. One way that teams can participate in conversations and deepen their engagement with fans is through Twitter, which is a micro-blogging platform that allows you to build a community of followers, see what people care about and interact directly with people who share your interests. The easiest implementation of Twitter for a team would be to simply broadcast ticket discounts whenever there are extra tickets left before a game. This is just one example of how a team could use Twitter, and there are plenty of articles around now that spell out why corporate brands should be involved on Twitter (here’s one of them), so I won’t get into that now.

Since the NBA season has started, I thought it would be interesting to see which teams are using Twitter to post team news and engage with fans. To identify teams that are on Twitter, I used a combination of Twellow, Twitter Search and my own investigation to identify “official” Twitter accounts of teams (ones that looked official and had links back to the official NBA team site). In many cases, a blogger or other website (ex: sportytweets.com) has established a team Twitter account to post scores and news and links back to his/her blog. I didn’t include this stuff in my investigation, since this does not count as something that is coordinated by the team itself. I haven’t spent an eternity on this and have probably missed a few things, so feel free to correct me if I have.

 NBA Teams on Twitter (official accounts)

Detroit Pistons

Chicago Bulls

Miami Heat

**update **

Philadelphia 76ers (thanks to Russell Scribetti for the find)

Portland Trailblazers (thanks to Lauren Beyer and Kelsey Thompson)

Memphis Grizzlies (thanks Lauren)

I didn’t think every team would be involved with Twitter, but I’m surprised how few are. Other teams are missing a huge opportunity for community relations. They could be providing fans with official news, updates and discounts and learning about what their fans like. Instead, they are absent from the conversation. Instead of finding Twitter updates from official team sources, fans are finding them from other bloggers and websites, and teams are missing out on the opportunity to use Twitter to drive traffic to their own websites. I wonder if the NBA’s rule that restricts teams’ marketing territories has anything to do with the lack of teams on Twitter?

Do you think teams should be on Twitter? Would you want to see updates, news and ticket discounts from your favorite team (NBA or other league) there?

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I had a great time at the Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit in New York last week meeting new people and discussing new ideas. We had some great discussions on how the internet, social media and new technologies are affecting sports, and how to take advantage of some of these things. Panel topics included measuring sports fans online, engagement, widgets and social networking/user generated content.

One main theme of the day was access–giving fans exclusive content and making them feel like they’re getting something unique/special. Some sponsors/teams are already doing a good job of this, but others should think about this more. I took a decent amount of notes so I won’t make you read through all of them. But I do want to share some key points on widgets that I made note of.

Widgets can be a powerful way to reach people and spread content, though I think the majority of people still don’t know what one is, so it’s not easy to create a widget that spreads easily. People are lazy, and as content creators, we should think about ways to go to them, instead of asking them to come to us. The NBA has over 700 widgets (player stats, pictures, videos, etc) and monetizes by selling ads/sponsorship across units. The Washington Wizards Playoff widget was successful in generating ticket revenue last year.

Widget best practices
1) content needs to be exclusive
2) Individuality- let people take what they want and customize it

Thanks to Pat Coyle for organizing this conference. You can see some pictures from the event in the widget below.

Find more photos like this on Sports Marketing 2.0

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