From “fan forum” to “social network”

If we build it, will they come? That’s the million dollar question. Some outside observers believe that our current Fan Forum is the best place to look when trying to determine if there’s a “market” for a Colts Fan (social) Network. I would agree. The Forum is the one and only place where we see Colts fan (currently) creating their own content and community on our site. The Fan Forum is certainly the precursor to the social network, but I would submit that the social network is a different animal altogether. We expect that by bringing the networking and content creation system out into the open, with a graphical interface and a lot more stuff to do, we will see more “main stream” fan adoption.

For the record, our Fan Forum is the #1 most visited section (after the Home page)on our site (Colts.com), about 20% of visitors to our site go to the Forum. It generates about 11 page views per visit and users spend over 8 minutes in the Forum each time they visit. These numbers far exceed almost every other area of our site – and since the content in the Forum is user generated, the page views are highly profitable to the team as well.

But who are the Forum participants? What makes them tick? Are there other Colts fans out there who might want to express themselves and interact, but simply don’t prefer the Forum format? Myspace and other social networks seem to indicate that people will create content in a context that makes sense for them. It may be that our younger fans adopt the Fan Network functionality more readily. We shall see.