Maybe we're not (that) crazy afterall? | Sports Marketing 2.0

Maybe we’re not (that) crazy afterall?

Posted January 11th, 2007 by Pat Coyle • No Comments

Myspace is fetching nearly $1 million per day for ads on its home page. That figure is all about traffic. Volume. Eyeballs. My space gets tons of traffic and therefore can charge a lot for ads. While Myspace has my respect, I hope we (as an industry) can do better. Even as Myspace continues to build it’s audience and its bank account, I believe the real value for advertisers and social network platforms is in the niches. This isn’t mass media.

Two news items that came across my desk recently have encouraged me that perhaps our vision for NFL-wide social networking platform is not too far off the track:

First, my friend, Wayne Bartel, sent me an article from WSJ that announced Proctor & Gamble’s foray into the world of social networks. I don’t believe I’m allowed to share the WSJ article (since it is “pay per view”) so here’s another version from Clevanland.com I found on-line.

The gist of the story is that P & G sees research as the primary value in its social nets.

From Cleveland: “This is not about selling products. It’s about better understanding of consumers and learning about their needs and habits,” P&G spokeswoman Robyn Schroeder said Monday of the two social networking sites. “The more we learn about these consumers, the more it will allow us to create better products for their needs.”

While I’m sure P & G wants to drive sales from its on-line endeavor, and touting the research value of this initiative could be viewed as a “hedge” play, I believe that research can and should be a primary value of activity in this arena. I’ve said before – where NFL team sites are concerned – sponsors like P & G should consider partnering with us and using our on-line communities to learn more about how fans interact (emotionally, virtually and physically) with their brands.

Big brands like P & G and GM seem to be more and more interested in in social nets

Here’s a quote from a Business Week Blog along this line:

“Two of the biggest marketers in the world showed up at the Supernova conference in San Francisco today and sounded more like Web 2.0 zealots than brand giants. Michael Wiley, director of new media, GM Communications, at General Motors, who’s responsible for GM blogs, sounded the most radical: “The existing advertising paradigm sucks,” he said. “It’s woefully inefficient. We give consumers virtually no information.”

He and colleague Curt Hecht, executive VP and chief digital officer at GM, have been meeting with social networking and media companies in the area the last couple of days, and Wiley sounds like a fan: “We see the new social media space as a place we can become engaged,” he said.

Likewise, Stan Joosten, Procter & Gamble’s innovation manager for holistic customer communication (how’s that for a title?), said P&G needs to experiment more with social media–carefully. “We have to stay out of some places” where people don’t want to see ads, he noted. But he says P&G wants to engage with customers wherever they are online. “People want to talk about things they care about and you give them a platform to do that.”

Interesting stuff from companies that have helped define mass-market advertising for decades

So, do we need any more evidence? Is it not time to launch social nets in sports? Of course it is. And interestingly, the strategy we’ve adopted here in Indianapolis (relative to build or buy) seems to be confirmed by another major brand, NBCU.

Thanks to Paid Content dot org, I stumbled on Sab Kanaujia’s blog and discovered NBC Universal’s social net strategy to be similar to ours. Sab is Vice President, Digital Innovation at NBC Universal.

Here’s an excerpt from his blog:

It won’t surprise anyone that my team at NBC Universal Digital Media is currently leading a major social networking initiative. I guess every online media firm is doing something in this area. We know we’re already late. But unlike Fox, our approach has been different.

Instead of buying an existing social networking destination (Digital Media evaluated some candidates back in the summer before I joined the team), the decision was made to internally build the platform grounds up – we do have a few 3rd party partners to give us a jump start. The decision not to buy was mainly due to integration challenges and the inability of most of 3rd party social networking destinations to scale, a key aspect for a large media firm like ours.

Social networking became a platform long back (it started as a product), in which several products can be plugged in to enhance the overall functionality and user experience.

NBCU is building a core social networking platform that will provide various tools and functionality on all our major properties to enable users to self-express and find, interact and share with other like-minded users. We’re not launching separate stand-alone destination(s), ala MySpace, Facebook, etc. We’ll have the first launch on one of our biggest properties early next year, and then roll-out on all remaining major properties (over 12) in a phased manner before the end of Q3.

We’re building our own social networking platform too, and we believe this platform could and should grow to include all 32 NFL clubs, and the NFL itself. Like NBCU, we see this platform should not try to compete or kill other sites like Myspace. Instead we should look to collobarate. Our fans use other systems, but they have a special need for our community too. So we are looking for ways to add value to the fans’ lives as they roam the Web, create content, and participate in community. Nice to see NBCU’s strategy SEEMs to confirm what we’re thinking. Although, as I read Mr. Kanaugi’s comments, it would appear that NBCU probably would have bought Myspace if they had thought of it before Rupert Murcoch did. That’s typically the fastest way to get into most games after all.