The top 50 this, top 50 that, we’ve all seen different ratings of the best custom Facebook Fan pages. I recently came across a great one, highlighting the 50 most prominent custom Facebook pages that featured no sports teams, so why not do one just for sports?

As it turns out after putting in a few hours of research, utilising a custom landing page is something that only the more savy sports marketers do. I thought I’d be struggling to narrow down my list from 50 to 10, instead I was struggling to narrow down my list from the 20 to 10.

As with any new marketing tool, there are some tricks to the trade. Some pages I came across from teams had a fantastic looking tab, but didn’t make it their landing page, it was simply another tab to search through – which really hurts the page. It’s all about first impressions!

Your unique landing page is a great way to separate you from the pack. Let’s take a look through the best ten customised landing pages in the sports world.

The top 10

Manchester United
Why: Simplicity, I absolutely love how simple their page is. If you take a look through some of the best 50 business pages, there are some great looking pages with videos and twitter pages, but ultimately as a sports marketer what are you trying to do? Grow your database. If a new fan comes to your page they might get distracted by video and start clicking away before you even win them over.

All Manchester United want you to do is click ‘like’. A simple but effective strategy.

Once you do click like, you get a new image displaying the history of the club.

The landing page for their Facebook Page

What you see once you click 'like'

New York Jets
Why: I liked the simplicity of Manchester United because of their strategy and I like the Jets page for the exact opposite reason, the level of content is great. When you click play on the video, you get two Jets players telling you thanks for being a fan. Uploading a video to your fan page and making it Facebook specific content, like the Jets have done, is a great way to make your community feel special.

Great interactive landing page

Los Angeles Galaxy
Why: Try and tell me this page doesn’t look cool. Plenty of activity, linking to all of their social network and some great action shots gives you all the details you need. This would be hard for a baseball or basketball team to do, as it would require updating your landing page nearly every two days, but for MLS and football this would be great.

Fun way to promote the next game, might require a lot of updating though

Adelaide Crows
Why: Props to the only Aussie entry on this list. This is a landing page that is fully interactive with the players. You can select any player from the playing roster from this landing page, and then view their profile all with-in the page. All while still giving the call to action of its fans to ‘like’ the club.

Select your favourite player and view their profile

Milwaukee Bucks
Why: Comes back to that theory of simplicity. A star player asking you to become a fan, why wouldn’t I? Nice, simple, clean looking page that doesn’t ask for much. Great wording by saying you “must become a fan!”.

Nice and simple, no fuss and effective

Washington Redskins
Why: Become a fan! Become a fan! Get the message?

Little bit heavy on the info, but still good

Miami Dolphins
Why: This is an interesting tact, and the only team I could find who do this. The team has obviously invested a large amount of money in their mobile apps, and are pushing them so hard that they are the first thing a new fan sees when they land on their Facebook page. A great way to attempt to monetize your social media efforts.

Pushing their mobile apps

Everton
Why: With over 70,000 fans they’re doing something right. Everton seems to want to push people back to their website, which seems odd seeing as the fans are communicating on their Facebook page. Which begs a great question, do you want fans to primarily visit your homepage or your Facebook page?

Pushing back to their homepage?

Miami Heat
Why: The photo might be a bit busy with an overload of images, but it gets the message across. With such a big season coming up for the Heat, I might have expected something more grand, but it makes the point.

Post. Share, Tag, Tweet, Like. Great tag line

Pittsburgh Penguins
Why: Interesting tactic of showing something that is distinctly Penguin, the home ice, and use that as an incentive to add fans to the page by offering a free download once you become a fan.

Only team to involve their home arena onto their page

Similarities

A few little weird things popped up as I was researching. I was searching some teams that I thought were going to be socially savvy from MLB. I liked the Dodgers page at first and immediately put that in as one of my top ten, but the more I kept searching, the more these pages began to look alike. Read all the text in each box below. At least the Dodgers is ‘exclusive’!

Nice and clean

Layout looks familiar...

Serious deja vu

Recent Facebook changes

Last month, Facebook reduce the width of its panel for it’s fan pages. Formerly 720 pixels wide, it became 520 pixels wide…apparently some teams didn’t get the memo.

Missing a few pixels there

The most Facebook fans?

Turkish soccer club Galatasaray is the most liked sports team on Facebook, with over 4.4 million fans. Amazingly another Turkish soccer team Fenerbace, is in the top five worldwide and has nearly three million fans. What do they put in the water over there? I’d like to know. To check out live social media stats of both Facebook and Twitter, click here for a graph from Coyle Media. Or see this graph with data taken from last month, most supported teams on Facebook.

The most fans on Twitter!

Interesting notes

Some of the biggest sporting teams in the world; the Los Angeles Lakers with 2.7 million fans, Yankees with 1.9 million fans don’t have a landing page at all. Are these teams that big they don’t feel the need to spend extra time and money by creating a landing page? As you can see above Galatasary the team with the most fans, has decided not to add anything extra to their site as well.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret here, Manchester United probably put in less money compared to some other teams on this list. From the outside it appears all they have done is get a graphic designer to do a mock-up and they have uploaded an image, but in this case simplicity is key. All they are asking their fans to do is become a fan. They are not asking you to buy a ticket, or tell your friends, they just want you to become a fan – and they will take care of the rest.

I know you will disagree with this list, which team did I leave out? Leave a comment and let me know!

Geolocation has been the smash hit in the social media scene of 2010. Coming from relative obscurity in early 2010, Foursquare alone now boasts over 3 million users. With the NYC start up recently breaking it’s own record for most new users in one day, the social media darling has recently took funding to the tune of $20m while reportedly also turning down a buyout offer from Yahoo.

With Foursquare beginning to assert its authority in geolocation, one of it’s biggest possible rivals decided to step in. Earlier this month Facebook announced ‘Facebook Places’, the social networking heavyweight with over 500 million users took geolocation from niche into the mainstream overnight.

Where as location based services Foursquare, Gowalla, Hot Potato, Yelp and others relied on social networking to spread their message, Facebook turned the tables and are now trying to stamp its authority in the geolocation game by creating its own platform.

With all these recent developments, let’s look at the big players in the game right now, what they currently offer, what they may offer in the future and how sports marketers should be trying to take advantage of geolocation.

Thought geolocation was just for geeks? This billboard in Times Square begs to differ.

Facebook Places

So far Facebook Places is yet to really show its hand, while currently only available to users in the United States, the social media giant hasn’t actually released full details on how businesses can take advantage of the platform, but let’s start with a few titbits from what we know so far.

You can claim your location: Whether it’s your ball park, your front office or your training facility, you can now claim it and anything else you own. If it’s not already there, feel free to create it yourself.

You can link your Fan Page to your ‘Place’: You are able to link your Facebook ‘Place’ to your Fan Page, so do that ASAP.

Yep, that’s about all we really know so far.

For more info on Facebook Places, check out the slide below for a full introduction.

Why Use Facebook Places?
This is one for the future. With very few features available so far, it is very hard to tell you to focus on Facebook Places – as being in such an early phase of its development it’s impossible to tell where it will go – but once the platform finds it’s feet, it will be crucial to your digital marketing plan.

Possible additions?

• Facebook Places ads: Ads that target you due to your location
• More game aspects: Features similar to mayorships, rewards, etc
• Hot Potato features (which are covered further down) this includes in-venue messaging

Foursquare

Currently the number one place for all your geolocation needs. It has the most exposure, has the biggest userbase (specifically for geolocation) and also allows you to take control of your venue. Not only these factors, but we have case studies. Manchester City, from the English Premier League, was the first team in all of professional sports to have an official presence on Foursquare. They had their own sub-page on the foursquare.com website, as well as the ability to let their fans “follow” them on Foursquare and become fans.

The foursquare.com/mcfc page

What that actually cost I’m not sure but it wouldn’t have been cheap – as Foursquare badges alone reportedly around ten thousand dollars a month – so I wouldn’t tell you to run to your boss and ask for an official presence on Foursquare. What can you do? Similar to Facebook:

Create or claim your venue:
Once you do this, then you can start serving ads or messages to people that check in to your arena/front office/tail-gate, etc

Serve Ads
You want to start making some money off geolocation? Serve ads. When you claim your venue and you are then an owner of it on Foursquare, you then able to send a message to anyone who checks in to your venue. Let’s say you own your venue, have tens of thousands of fans coming to your venue every week, and want to start promoting on Foursquare. You could have a special on hot dogs that day, or maybe you have a piece of merchandise you want to get rid of quickly, serve the ad accordingly. You can change the ads as often as you like, but make sure you give a call to action with a discount or offering to the end user to increase the uptake of your ad.

Use Analytics
We’ve all heard of Google Anayltics, well Foursquare has their own analytics system. It allows you to see who comes to your venue, , what time of day/week they check in and if they haves shared their check-in on platforms like Facebook or Twitter. A great an easy way to reward fans could be through giving away a jersey/cap/pair of tickets to your “Top Visitor”.

Foursquare Analytics

Why Use Foursquare?
Right now, Foursquare is the best place to market your sport in geolocation. It is the most popular platform and has the most active user base but most importantly, it allows you to monetize your marketing efforts.

Possible additions?

• Pay per listing: With so many venues in short proximity of one another, businesses should be allowed to out-bid one another for priority listings
• More interactivity: Being able to take photos/videos and tag them in your check-in
• Social gaming: Similar to Facebook creating currency, Foursquare may offer virtual goods down the track that have real world currency

Gowalla

Gowalla can sometimes be forgotten when it comes to sports marketing, as it is a lesser known entity when compared to its main rival Foursquare. Right now Gowalla has a smaller user base, but allows for a far greater check-in experience. The interactive platform Gowalla can offer with its graphic artwork and the ability for users to take their own images takes the check-in experience to a whole new level. Userss can also pick up virtual goods like Livestrong bands, books, pieces of fruit, etc, creating a game for the users.

In sports marketing however, Gowalla recently gave us one of the most amazing social media case studies we have seen. Gowalla teamed up with the New Jersey Nets and offered virtual goods, in the form of virtual tickets to their fans. The tickets were placed virtually in Gowalla venues around relevant areas like basketball courts, gyms or hotels throughout New Jersey. The users were then able to pick up the virtual tickets with in Gowalla and trade them in for real tickets at the stadium. Check out the slideshare below for the full case study.

Why Use Gowalla?
If the service that the Nets used ever becomes mainstream in Gowalla, this is a must use platform. By giving away virtual goods such as tickets or jerseys, geolocation can open up a whole new ‘fan engagement’ sports marketing has never seen before.

When compared to Foursquare the experience for the fan is a whole lot richer, and allows them to share their own special moment,whether it’s a picture of their son at the ball game, or the view from their seat. Although on the flip side, what if a user is to take a negative image, with abusive language, graffiti or simply something you don’t want to be seen at your venue, there is not much you can do about it except report it to Gowalla and wait.

When combined with the relatively small user base and there aren’t yet and ways for teams or leagues to claim venues, so from a marketing perspective, the platform is limited.

Possible additions?

• While their monetization plans have been kept mainly for big business, expect more business aspects for small businesses such as ads and priority listings
• Claim a venue: Allows businesses to claim their own venue and then control them

The End-User Experience: Foursquare vs Gowalla

The following image is a screenshot of the difference the user experiences for Foursquare and Gowalla. The top half is the Foursquare page for Yankee Stadium;  it a fairly bland experience for the user, nothing really stands out or makes it unique as this page is no different to any other. (Side note: It appears the Yankees haven’t claimed their venue and no staff are listed)

The user experience is vastly different

In the bottom half we have the homepage for Yankee Stadium on Gowalla. A completely unique experience with the stadium having its own individual icon, each check-in listed (with status/photo if they have one) and the page also has over 50 user generated images.

What amazes me though is the number of check-in’s. Foursquare has over 21,000, with 12,000 unique users whilst Gowalla has 600 total check-ins and only 300 unique users.

Even though the numbers show a 35:1 ratio of users, I really like what Gowalla has to offer.

With their virtual goods, unique artwork and the ability for users to take their own images, Gowalla definitely wins in the battle of check-in experience.

Hot Potato

You may not have heard of Hot Potato and that’s fine, but you may soon be seeing it’s functionality. Facebook recently purchased the start-up which means you may start seeing a few of its feature popping in Facebook Places sooner rather than later.

One of the major selling points of Hot Potato is that it allows instant messaging between users that have checked in to the same venue. Let’s say for example you’re at a game, and five other people check-in to the same game on Hot Potato, you can now chat to them, just like you were at home on MSN. Where as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook will simply list the people, Hot Potato actually allows you to chat with them, taking that check-in experience to a whole new level. While not commonly used for sports, its mainly popularity so far has been  at concerts or similar live events

Check out the video on Hot Potato below

Possible editions?

• The future of the company is not clear. They will either be allowed to continue as is, be swallowed completely and become apart of Facebook or a combination of both

Summary

There is no doubt that right now Foursquare is the place to be in geolocation. With the large user base, ability to claim your own venue and serve ads, it wins this battle.

While the experience Gowalla can offer for the end user is the best out there, for sports marketers it is extremely limited and you are relying on the users to generate the content for you, and you may experience the dangers that come with that.

Any competitor who has a user base of over 500 million will always be a threat, and once Facebook Places is released to all countries and goes through a few minor tweaks it will be a dominant force in geolocation and sports marketing, but not just yet.

Doesn’t it just feel like yesterday? July 7 2010, a mere few hours before he “decided” to take his talents elsewhere, Lebron joined the Twitter movement. It seems like he’d had enough of his good buddy Chris Paul trying to get him on Twitter, that he finally relented and joined. One of his first tweets was that during “the decision” he would answer some Twitter questions on the ESPN special…

…he didn’t. But he did answer one Facebook question during the live special.

One of the most common questions post “LeCision” has been people asking what kind of PR team Lebron had  hired to help make his decisions. In fact if you were to google “Lebron PR disaster” there are nearly 25,000 search results (“lebron james disaster” has nearly 570,000). Has Lebron taken to social media to repair a now damaged image?

Today Lebron launched his first social media campaign, of sorts. He, like Shaq before him, offered a scavenger hunt competition for one of his Twitter followers to win a signed pair of shoes.

There was no flash or extravagance to the promotion, he simply told his fans exactly where the pair of shoes were and had a rep standing with the shoes when the first person was to arrive. The lucky winner Sean sent in a pic of himself with the shoes and shortly after Lebron sent out a congratulations tweet that mentioned him (without actually replying to him, which we will get to shortly).

This is the first step in an effort to win back his fan base. He didn’t have to do this, but its a cool gesture that won some brownie points with Shaq nearly a year ago. Through the competitions Lebron, with his 550,000 followers, is beginning to engage his community. Players like Kevin Durant are fantastic on Twitter, as he will often answer his followers’ questions, or even a simple “whats up?” to get a reaction from his followers. Kevin even retweets the best ones, like where his fans bet him that he won’t retweet their messages. He just made an easy $25

This kind of social media treasure hunt was nowhere near the level of Rajon Rondo, who with the help of Active8 social launched a fully integrated scavenger hunt across three social media platforms, with the grand prize being two tickets to Game 4 of the Finals. Promoting the event on Twitter and as the landing page of his Facebook Fan Page (see below) the team from Activ8 ensured that anyone interacting with Rajon on social media would be across the new competition.

A fantastic social media campaign for #TeamRondo

Team Rondo took the latest trend in social media, FourSquare, and pushed the boundaries of athlete interaction with social media. Shaq had a consultant working with him in Phoenix who has since gone on to work with the UFC and Chicago White Sox, Red Bull has hired a digital media firm especially for it’s athletes (who have also worked with Reggie Bush and Jimmy Rollins).

It begs the question, should LeBron even be on Twitter at all? With social media now more than ever about a conversation and “engagement” Lebron averages nearly one “@” mention per minute on Twitter, but hasn’t responded to one yet. When compared to other NBA stars like Shaq, Kevin Durant and even Andrew Bogut who all regularly engage their Twitter audience, LeBron I think is actually hurting his image by not responding to anyone. I saw a tweet about him today which said “Hey great competition Lebron, next step is replying to a few people” but to me that highlighted the problem, replying to his fans shouldn’t be the next step, it should be the first step. He is fantastic with his camps and raising money for charity, but when it comes to social media you have to know your platform, and I don’t think he or his team knows Twitter just yet.

If this were a discussion about a Facebook Fan Page it would be unrealistic for him to reply to everyone, and he probably wouldn’t be updating that himself anyway. However on this platform Twitter, he is giving the perception that it is him behind the account – he has the verification tick after all – so we can only believe that he is the one choosing to not respond to his fans, which is the ultimate fail whale.

What can he do differently? Is Lebron better suited to a less interactive platform like Facebook? Leave a comment below and lets continue the conversation.

Update: We have our first “@” tweet from Lebron, it’s to another celebrity, but it’s still a step in the right direction.

Todays news that the NRL’s Penrith Panthers were electing to block the use of Facebook by its players came as a bit of a shock. Not only is society as a whole moving towards embracing social media platforms, sports team in particular have really started to embrace the potential benefits that social media can bring to their club.

Athletes are by default celebrities and nearly every kind of celebrity has impersonators, celebrity impersonations is an industry of itself. As long as you are famous, there is always going to be people out there that want to mimic your likeness. Celebrities from all walks of life like Apple CEO, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal have all had impersonators on Twitter. When it comes to Facebook, as was the warning today from the Australian Federal Police, there will always be people in the community who want to take advantage of celebrity. Recently Richmond utility Daniel Jackson had one of his Facebook “friends” copy paste a comment from his private Facebook profile and send it to the media.

Imtage taken from Daily Telegraph

So why the jump now to restrict the access to players?

“It hasn’t happened to a rugby league player yet but it has happened to members of the general public.” said Australian Federal Police national manager of hi-tech crime operations Neil Gaughan. Facebook has been in Australia for over three years, and we have seen no high profile cases of identity theft and fraud, but that doesn’t seem to phase the Australian Federal Police.

There obviously are some measures to help protect your identity if you are a player on Facebook:

• Only accept friends, do not accept anybody on Facebook that you don’t know. Do you really know all 300 of your friends? Or are there some hangers on?
• Don’t be afraid to change your identity. Some players have even created accounts under fake names to go un-noticed, but still let their close friends know the details of the fake account.
• Create a fan page, and then make it known that is the official fan page for you. If you can’t do this, tell the club you would like to create one
• Make sure your profile is on full security via your profile settings

Social media training should be a basic part of any player welfare course held at clubs and at rookie inductions across all our codes. Is the sky falling? No. It is part of the responsibility of the Australian Federal Police to preach caution, as I would hope they do in the rest of society, but I would suggest players and teams in this case don’t fear the worst.

Players need to learn that Facebook and Twitter whilst both popular social media platforms, serve two totally different purposes. Facebook accounts should be set up for full privacy, and only close friends should be granted access as friends. Twitter is a 100% public platform, players should know that whatever they say on there will be treated as if they were talking to the media. Both great platforms, but with two distinct uses. As you can see on my NRL players Twitter list both retired and active players are on Twitter, and getting plenty of use for it. I don’t have a list of Facebook accounts, because they should be private, I shouldn’t know their private details.

How far will this go? Will players in the future not want to sign with the Panthers because they believe their social media profiles are too important? There can be a wide variety of implications of this in the future.

The following three videos are Collingwood Defender Harry O’Briens presentation at Digital Sport Summit on “Social Media from an athlete perspective”. He tells his story that started off with 5,000 friends on Facebook and having issues of overbearing fans, to how he created a fan page and ended up having amazing experiences on Twitter.

So after reading all this if you still don’t believe me that there is potential for athletes and social media, hear it from the horses mouth himself.

So you finally convinced management to allow you to get into social media, you’ve set up your Facebook and your Twitter account (hopefully a few others too) and the people are flocking to your accounts. Now what? How do you find out what people are saying about you and then get into the conversation yourself?

Social Media Monitoring

The conversation is happening out there on the internet, with or without you, so it only makes sense for you to get involved. There are plenty of places that your sports brand gets talked about not just on Facebook or Twitter, there are blogs, podcasts, message boards etc. It’s up to you and go and find them. Not only is it up to you to find them, but you must decide if it is worth intersecting in the conversation.

Eliminate the noise

There are two types of tracking going online right now. Generic brand monitoring, where the brand mention is found and catalogued in a database, but the latest trend is now in sentiment tracking. They track the brand mention but then analyse whether they are being talked about in a positive or negative light.

What are some useful tools to get you started in monitoring your brand?

Brand Monitoring

Twitter Search

Yep, simple right? Twitter Search is the easiest and most effective way to start out when monitoring your brand on Twitter only. You can type in usernames to catch all the @ mentions, specific words or phrases or #hashtags to monitor as well. They used to index up to seven days worth of tweets but with Twitter now hitting up to 3000 tweets per second there just became too many tweets, and now they only index around four days worth of tweets. Why is it extra awesome? You can save your searches on to your twitter.com homepage and never have to come back to the search site.

SocialMention

Probably the best way to start. SocialMention is a great way for you to punch in your brand and see how its being talked about on social media platforms, blogs, videos, audio, events, comments you name it you can track it. Not only does it list all your brand mentions but it does also give a little taste of sentiment tracking, but we’ll touch on that later.

TweetReach

TweetReach allows you to track anything; phrases, websites addresses, usernames, whatever you want. It’s a great service to track the status of a campaign you’ve recently launched or an event you’ve just had. Say you’re a local cycling federation and you want to track the conversation around the Tour De France hashtag #tdf simply type in #tdf and voila. You can track the total amount of impressions the hashtag had, who has the most followers that are engaging in the conversation and from there you can use a service like Klout to follow up the influential ones (we’ll touch on that later as well). But remember, just because they have the most followers on Twitter doesn’t mean they are the most influential.

We love infographs

TweetReach will give you an example size of 50 impressions, and from there you can purchase the full report for $20. For example, the screenshot above only showed 50 tweets out of a total of 1500.

Sentiment Tracking

Yep, they can now track how you feel. No longer is just capturing the tweet good enough, there are now automated systems to track the sentiment of your tweet, is your brand being talked about in a positive or negative light? Here are some of the best free sites to use for sentiment tracking.

Twitter Sentiment

It says exactly what it is, it shows the positive or negative sentiment of tweets about your brand. While still in beta testing, Twitter Sentiment allows you to save your searches, shows you a pie chart and also bar chart graph in % and total tweets and allows you to register for an account.

Twitrratr

This is easily the most visually appealing of the bunch that I could find. Twitrratr allows you to ‘view’ each individual tweet and then follow up and identify the influence of that person. It also highlights the words that they feel are key to identifying them as positive, neutral or negative tweets.

Tweetfeel

Tweetfeel is a really simple service. You type in your key word and then it comes up with a green smiley face or a red sad face, pretty simple really. Apart from that there’s not much to say, it’s very easy on the eyes and lets you follow the individual tweets.

Monitor their influence

Social media influence is becoming a real barometer of the importance of the online persona of individuals. Let’s say you had ten people commenting negatively about your brand, is it realistic that you would reply to all ten? Probably not. But what you can do is do some quick research on all ten and find out who has the most influence online (a great way to do this is via a Twitter influence tracking site Klout -want to find out your influence? Simply go to www.klout.com/yourusername).

We can’t spend our day online from 9-5 on social media, so staff can reduce their time spent on social media platforms by highlighting the influential people and respond to them, as their voice and opinion counts for more in the online space than the others.

You’ve contacted them, but you still can’t convince them? Offer them something that others cant. If you’re a team, offer them a VIP experience or the chance to meet their favourite player, if you’re a sports apparel brand, give them a discount at your store or a behind the scenes tour of your factory. Win them over, and your brand will reap the benefit online. Sports is a unique entity compared to regular businesses, so leverage that when you’re trying to influence the influencers.

Conclusion

Being a part of the conversation where all social media is trending, no longer can brands get away with having their head in the sand while the conversation goes on around them, and without them. These simple tools in brand monitoring will allow you to at least monitor the conversation, even if you don’t want to get involved. Now, with  these new services like sentiment tracking still being new, they won’t deliver perfect results everytime, but it does allow you to get a general overview of how your brand is being talked about.

Need help monitoring your brand? Drop me a line or hit me up on LinkedIn

I was part of a team of three who hosted the Digital Sport Summit on July 7 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. We had a great turn out of 160 people; we have since received some pretty amazing feedback and have already had people ask about how to be involved next year.

For that success I have to thank this blog, to be honest. Without this blog, Digital Sport Summit probably would never have happened. It started for me when in February I did a blog post ranking the Twitter use of  AFL clubs and I highlighted that post to a few people I thought might be interested in it. From that post I was able to make some great contacts in the sports industry here in Melbourne, they were the ones who were willing to share their experience and knowledge with me, and I called upon them as speakers and luckily for us they agreed to be involved very early on in the piece. You don’t hold an event like that, and not learn a few things:

You have to take a risk

As a group, we’d never run our own businesses, especially a conference, which takes a lot of logistical planning. We all put up our own money for a deposit on the venue, and took the gamble that the event would succeed. Not only that, but our professional reputations at stake. If we succeeded, of course it would be great, but if we were to fail and put on an event for the industry that wasn’t well received it would have been professional suicide.

You have to get lucky

I say you have to get lucky because you need people to have a little bit of faith in you. By having the first few speakers on board, we were then  able to leverage their reputation, which made it easier for us to then approach other speakers and say  “X and Y on board as speakers, are you interested?” and that was important to us early on. We certainly rode their coat tails and to those speakers I am greatful, but it wasn’t all plain sailing. As we were an unproven entity, in the early planning phases without a reputation, website and only two speakers on board, we definitely had problems getting in contact with potential speakers, so we got very lucky that some people had faith in us.

You must get yourself noticed

I’m a social media guy, that’s my thing, and you have to get noticed online of course, which we were fairly comfortable with, but getting offline recognition from your peers is the real key to success of getting noticed. It only made it harder that we were trying to get noticed in two industries, tech as well as sports.

I wish I’d kept all the petrol receipts and public transport tickets for my tax return, because there were plenty of kilometres covered along this journey to meet speakers, sponsors and people that might have been interested in the event. I was the mouth piece for this event, and I tried to make myself heard…sorry if I was too loud

I had a motto for those 6 months, “I’ll meet anyone, anywhere”. It was that simple.

Not only did I hit the road I also tried to make the event be known online, putting a banner on SportSpiel as a way to drive traffic to the Digital Sport Summit website, and in the early days that banner drove nearly 40% of all traffic to our conference website.

That's me taking the stage. Make yourself noticed, even if public speaking isn't your thing

We were also very lucky to have a fantastic MC who is well connected within the sports industry, and he had enough faith in me to put me on his radio show, so to Ed Wyatt I must say a big thank you.

You need a drawcard

Like any sports team you need a star, you need something that draws people in. We knew Collingwood defender Harry O’Brien would be a fantastic speaker, he is a personable, funny guy who we believed would be able to cap the day off really well – and he didn’t disappoint! There is no doubt also that once we had Jeramie McPeek from the Phoenix Suns on board as our keynote speaker, that the interest in our event certainly took off. We had selected a diverse range of speakers from a variety of Australian sports and media, as well as blogging/twitter superstar Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse.

You have to want it

I can’t stress this enough, you have to really want it. I don’t want to imagine the amount of hours that we as a group put into this event, and then to just have it fly by on the day because we were so busy, it almost felt unfair. As a group we lost any sense of a social life for three months due to hours of website building, meeting speakers and stakeholders, writing content and holding agenda meetings. But we all really wanted it to succeed, and we put in the hours accordingly.

If you really want it, you can achieve it, and I’ve never believed that more.

So as we finish now with #dss10 I want to say a big thank you to everyone who came along, the success couldn’t have happened without you.

Especially our speakers

• Jeramie McPeek
• Harry O’Brien
• Jonathon Simpson
• Anthony Harrison
• Peter Jankuolvski
• Finn Bradshaw
• Alana Fisher
• Nick Marvin
• Darren Rowse

If you have any further questions, comments or queries please shoot me an email anthony@sportspiel.com.au or to the team info@digitalsport.com.au

We’ll see you for #dss11

Do you want to sponsor #dss11? Do you want to speak at #dss11? Do you want to just connect with me? Add me on LinkedIn http://au.linkedin.com/in/anthonyalsop

Whether it be on or off the field in sports, we’re all trying to out do one another. Let’s face it, we wouldn’t be in business if we weren’t, we’re here to compete and to win.

One of the most competitive parts of sports is the marketing behind the teams. How can fans be reached, without feeling like they’re being put under a full court press of advertising? “Selling your ideas, not your tickets” is a blog post that tries to encourage those in the business of sports, and in particular ticket sales, to focus on events or trends in the greater community, and less on the ticket you are selling. In the article Josh talks about how we can sell ideas first, and then tickets. I’m going to take it one step further, I’m going to try and tell you can we can sell trends first, and then tickets.

Ask around the general populous of the web, and what do people want? Multimedia. Whether it’s a podcast, a video or a flickr stream, people want to interact with things, they’re done with words. Aside from Google, YouTube is the world’s largest search engine and data taken from March of this year shows that there is now 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

The tribe has spoken, they want video.

So, getting back to sports, can we now sell our tickets via video? The video below is about Australian rugby player James O’Connor. James is an up and coming star in the game of rugby, so much so I highlighted him as Rugby’s player to watch this decade. The video is essentially a two minute profile video, but whenever you interact with the video and click within it you are able to choose from either A) A bio of James or B) Purchase tickets to an upcoming series of games the Australian team is playing in.

To start, click the video below. Some ad blocking services such as AdBlock Plus will block the following video, you may need to open Internet Explorer to view it

We’ve long tried to figure out the most effective way to sell tickets to fans. In the early 2000’s, StubHub completely changed the way the US sports fan purchased tickets, as it gave them the power to fans to sell their own tickets to other fans. StubHub were so popular, eBay quickly swooped in and snapped up the company. With their success, StubHub quickly saw copy-cats enter the industry and now the fan has a wide variety of options where they can buy their tickets from.

For James O’Connor and rugby fans alike, this video could certainly go viral, leading to further sales. I wrote an earlier post on viral video as this seems to be another trend for businesses in raising awareness of their brand, whilst allowing consumers not feel like they’re constantly being pitched.

As we look to new ways to innovate the industry, and try and outdo one another, could in-video ticket sales be the new answer?

I was sitting in the office last week getting some work done when I saw a tweet pop up in my Twitter stream. The tweet went along the lines of “who would like to go to the football tonight? Let me know”. I saw it and thought, I wouldn’t mind going to the footy tonight, sure why not.

What was my connection to that person?

• I follow them on Twitter…. tick
• I……… nope, that’s it

So we exchanged details via DM and email on the proviso that I had to meet him with-in an hour in the city, which I was able to do (sadly for my afternoon laziness, there was a dress code). I headed in to meet-up and as a nice surprise, a part of the ticket included a pre-game speech from two ex sporting legends in a corporate boardroom, where some classic sports stories were told. From there we then were ‘wined and dined’ in a super box of a major company and I was then able to chat with one of the sporting legends for a large portion of the match.

Please don’t take this as a brag post as it may come across as one, but it’s not. This post is just trying to get you to try something new, step out from your comfort zone. I could very easily have seen that tweet and thought “I don’t know the person, I won’t reply” but instead I took the “why not?” approach, and ended up having a great night. Great company, great food and all I had to do was talk football all night, easy.

This is the great thing about social media, it connects you with people you don’t normally have a chance to meet , and by turning Twitter into ‘real life’ you can truly get the most out of it. Adding a football game into the mix doesn’t hurt either.

So, what’s stopping you? Get out there!

With the new financial year upon us, it was time to freshen up the place and also to introduce the new SportSpiel logo.

Hope you all enjoy the new look, and would love your feedback for future changes to the site.

While we’re at it, have you read any of my posts for sportsnetworker.com? There’s some great material like

How to get a job via YouTube: How Collingwood recruit Shae McNamara used YouTube to get his spot on their rookie list.

NBA Shoe Wars: What is happening in the NBA shoe industry, and is there brand loyalty in sports apparel?

Jeeks: What do you get when you cross a sports jock and a geek? A jeek

Sachin: What happens when Indians embrace Twitter

Hope you can have a read of them.

Please leave a comment below in regards to any feedback. Thanks a lot!

Michael Warren is the managing editor of sport for the Dubbo Weekender news magazine, a new magazine that is launching this weekend (26/06). In this latest Q & A, he tells us how he’s putting a new spin on ‘old’ sports media, by introducing social media as a lead source for news and opinion pieces.

SportSpiel: Michael, tell us about the Dubbo Weekender?

Michael Warren: The Dubbo Weekender is a new, 48 page news magazine which comes out each Saturday in the Central West NSW city of Dubbo and its surrounds. The news magazine will have lifestyle and sport sections and also a range of columnists copy that will focus on a range of topics.

There will also be a combination of stories written by well respected Australian and overseas journalists who will file material including but not limited to news analysis, opinion, features and Q and As. We are also very excited by the confirmation a leading Australian sports journalist – best selling author will have a weekly spread as well. Who is he? You’ll have to read it to find out.

The sport section will cover local, national and international sport in a variety of ways. There will be a weekly in-depth sport feature on a local or well known sporting identity.

There will also be an issue piece which covers a major topic of the moment in sport from both a national and local perspective.

It will also include sports gossip – interesting titbits – section at the back of the sports section which will be a quick combination of sports draw, things to do and see and some local sport issue observations.

The debut edition

SS: You have put an emphasis on social media during the launch of the magazine, what social media platforms are you focusing on, and how will this let you involve the readers in the news making process?

MW: We plan on not only making the Dubbo Weekender interactive by use of social media platforms, but also, in my case, the sports section. How will we do that? The world of social media is moving fast.

You would be both ignorant and a fool not to move with the times and provide opportunities for your readership to be interactive, proactive and responsive to stories you cover in your publication.

With that said, from a sports point of view, I plan on using Twitter and Facebook a lot, in both a proactive and reactive way to initially gather an online social presence with our readers. Secondly as a way for our readership to drive and determine the types of issues and stories we cover in my department.

That is, I’ve seen across Australia and around the world how sports journalists and sport editors be relevant to their audience by filing content and covering the issues which matters to their readership. They do this by consistently providing opportunities for this stakeholder to determine the stories and types of content they wish to read about.

SS: How can the readers help you as a sports editor determine what stories they want to read about in the sports section of a magazine?

MW: Easy. Firstly through Twitter, for example, if there is a story or an issue that might be worth following up by me as a sports editor, they can mention it to me on our Twitter page or Facebook pages.  If I see a trend where other followers’ are saying the same thing that is, commenting that a particular issue or angle needs to be covered in our publication, then obviously it is something to take notice of and respond to.

Twitter and Facebook will be a forum where our readership can leave their story tips, ideas, reactions, comments and feedback as well, regarding the stories we are covering, the types of content in our publication and what they want more or less of in my section of sport, or as a total publication as well.

I believe being relevant to your readership is paramount in gaining credibility and respect. If you are not producing copy which your customers want to read, than, well, you are on the fast way to the scrap heap.

If you give your readership a chance to be interactive and involved in what they see in such a publication, than at least they feel involved in the process and have been given every opportunity to read what they want to see every Saturday.

That way, we can’t be seen to be a publication which is not community and region orientated, who has the ‘blinkers on’ and is not respecting, or caring about what our readership thinks about what we do.

It would be neglectful and ignorant for me as a news maker not to include our readers in our news gathering process. It’s 2010 and social media is here in a big way. You either find strategies and processes on how to make it work for you as a news making business or, you become very, very irrelevant to your reading audience.

By constantly updating both our Twitter and Facebook sites, I want to engage our audiences to contribute to want they want to read every Saturday. Our readers have every chance to follow what we are doing here at Dubbo Weekender by viewing, reacting, commenting or leaving stories ideas and feedback on both of these platforms.

The sport section

SS: Why the change to involve social media in this process?

MW: These are exciting days and from my point of view, I’m really excited at involving our audiences through the use of Twitter and Facebook. While naturally phone calls, emails and old fashioned leg work is still key in identifying and generating stories the use of social media should never be underestimated.

When stories break around the world these days, those social media minded don’t turn to their local paper, or news website. They turn to Twitter, which, through the use of its millions, upon millions of instant users, stories break through analysing and following up on, the trends by which people talk about on the right hand side of the home page.

It’s immediacy as a both a news making and news breaking forum is something news websites and hard copy newspapers can only dream about.

SS: Where do you see the future of the news headed with new technologies as the iPad and increasing capabilities of smart phones?

MW: We as a news making business are always looking at processes and systems no how we can provide better business for our advertisers and all our customers. There might be a time you can read Dubbo Weekender on your ipad or mobile device.

As a new, news magazine, that time is still a little bit away, but it is always something we are thinking about, considering and structuring. If there is a demand there for this material via these platforms and both our readers and advertisers can win, than we would be both unprofessional and neglectful not to consider these ideas going forward.

SS: Where can we find the Dubbo Weekender online?

MW: You follow the Dubbo Weekender on Twitter or be a friend or fan of ours on Facebook.

Just type in Dubbo Weekender in the search engine of your profile page once you are signed in on Facebook to find us. There is also an appreciation group you can join which will also come up in the search. If you are interested in advertising with us or even sending a news or sport tip you can call us on (02) 6885 4433 or email sportsdesk@panscott.com.au.