Survey says…My Colts Network

We sent out a survey yesterday to fans who have pre-registered for My Colts Network. We have received 150 responses so far. I can’t claim statistical validity yet, but I thought it would be fun to take a sneak peak at some of the raw data.

One of the main things we want to know is whether or not fans who sign up for My Colts Network are already active inside other social networks. We feel like this will be a key indicator of participation inside our network. So we asked…and found that just about half (56%) of fans who have registered for our social network have at least some experience with other networks.

Have you ever set up a profile page on a social network (like MySpace)?

I expected this number to be higher, and indeed the percentage of fans who indicate experience with social networks may grow as we get more surveys back. On the other hand, it’s possible that My Colts Network will be the first (and only) social network for 50% of members. Perhaps that shows that these fans were waiting for a personally relevant network to emerge – and the Colts network is it. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Also, notice we didn’t ask fans whether they had experience browsing social networks. We purposefully asked if they’d built a personal profile. We’ve seen that there seems to be a big difference between the number of people who read social content versus the people who create it. We are really trying to measure (and predict) participation and content creation rather than just browsing.

Of the fans that have previous experience with social networks, we asked…

In which social network are you the most active?

Not surprisingly, MySpace leads the way as the on-line community where most fans seem to have cut their social networking teeth, so it will make sense to continue studying and testing things within the MySpace community as we look to grow our own.

I haven’t dug in to the data to examine ages of respondents, but I can tell you that 71% are male. 23% say they are season ticket holders. And 81% rank their fan passion as “10″ on a scale of 1 to 10. We hope to continue developing this data as more fans sign up for the network. We also plan to establish a “control” group of sorts by gathering responses from a group of fans who have not pre-registered for My Colts Network. Over time we hope to compare these responses to the actual fan activity inside the network.

We asked as many questions as we could think of that would indicate whether or not a person is active on-line. Here’s a quick snap shot:

- Of the respondents who said they have social networking experience, 75% say they have posted to their own pages within the past week.

- 26% of respondents say they have started their own blog (at some point), but only 43% have updated their blog within the past week

- 97% of respondents say they visit Colts.com at least once each week

- 58% indicate that they have visited colts.com while simultaneously watching a Colts game broadcast on TV (this season)

- 24% have never visited the Fan Forum on Colts.com (and 50% of those who have visited the forum have never posted a comment in the forum)

- 45% of respondents are involved in fantasy football this season

- 71% have text messaging service on their cell phones

- 45% have downloaded video or music to their phones

- 85% have more than 1 active E mail account (many have more than 4)

- 72% use at least one Web based E mail service (Yahoo is most popular)

- 65% play video games (like Madden NFL) at least once in a while

- 36% of video game players have participated in massively multi-player games on-line

- 51% own an iPod or similar device – and nearly 100% of those have purchased music from iTunes or similar on-line music store

- 29% prefer Blockbuster stores versus 27% who prefer on-line movie rental services

- Amazon is the most popular book store with 24% of respondents

We aren’t really sure what we’re looking for here. We’re simply following a hunch, looking for leading indicators and trying to get a handle on the profile of fans that will be active inside the network. We also will need to compare these responses to national averages to see if the percentages of text messaging, iPod use, etc. compare with general U.S. population. If anyone out there has these stats handy – please shoot em over! That would really help. More to come in future posts…

Method: We sent the survey via E mail to approximately 500 fans who had registered for My Colts Network. We offered no incentive. Approximately 28% of the recipients have opened the E mail so far, and of those approximately (63%) have submitted completed surveys.