What business are we in?

Yesterday I found myself explaining to a colleague that our football team has actually become a PUBLISHER without realizing it. We gather content, attract an audience and monetize that audience through advertising and E commerce. In a sense, we’ve discovered that the news created by the team has a direct value to the team, rather than simply a PR value, and this value can be maximized if we develop and package and distribute our news ourselves, rather than “outsourcing” the distribution of our message to traditional media.

Before the Web, we had no means of accomplishing this. Now we wake up to realize that we’re in a strange and fortunate position. We can deliver our product (news about our team) directly to our customers (fans). Whether they live in Indianapolis or Bangalore, India, it costs nothing extra to publish our content globally. Now, what if we really started thinking like a publisher instead of thinking like a football team? If we did, we might start saying things like…

“It has become essential for publishers to use their brands to turn passive audiences into active communities. It’s really, really hard but necessary if you want to be trusted and viable in ten years’ time.

- “None of us has a divine right to success. We have to lose money to make money in the future, and if you have a normal board with a normal mindset that’s a difficult transition to make. But digital revenues are what the future will have to be made up of.” (from Guardian Media Group CE Carolyn McCall speaking at the Association of Online Publishers conference in the U.K). (Full story from Paidcontent.org).

This is precisely what we’re after with the Colts Fan Network. There are 6 million Americans who say the Colts are their favorite team, and thousands more fans around the world. Truly, thanks to the Internet, you don’t have to live in Indy to be a Colts fan anymore.

Until recently, we had no way of interacting with this throng of far-flung fans. The Colts Fan Net will provide a platform to allow the team and its fans to connect in new ways. Moreoever, it will allow fans to connect with each other. which is perhaps more important since, at times, the fans’ connections with eachother will be more “real” and hence more valuable (to the fan) than their connection to the team itself. Yet as fans connect with each other in community, they will FEEL more connected to the team, and that relationship is what we’re after. It will lead to loyalty and profits for the fan and the team.

As a football team, we care deeply about our fan base – especially our season ticket holders (local fans) and our local sponsors. As a publisher, we have and opportunity to think about our global audience, which far exceeds our local fan base. Only 280,000 people get to attend Colts games each season. (There simply isn’t room in the stadium for any more). Yet just this past Sunday, our Website welcomed 250,000 unique individuals. This audience is invisible to us, but it represents the Long Tail of our fan base. I’ll write more about this in the future. My 9 month old son has just joined me for an early morning conference. To be continued…