Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

OK I admit it. I’m a bit of a geek. Last night at the dinner table I was telling my wife how excited I was about the survey results we’re getting. “I’ve got data,” I exclaimed to her as if I were an 8 year old on Christmas morning.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure what geeks me more. Having the data to pour over, or watching the response rates and seeing that 65% of the people who opened my Email survey actually completed 31 questions and sent them back to us. I love generating response! I’ve got chills!!

Anyway, after dinner and after getting the kids to bed, I went looking for statistics to compare with our survey data, and I re-discovered the Pew Internet & American Life Project. I found some good stuff including an article that does a nice job of illustrating the distinctive aspects of Web 2.0.

I found a few top level stats that are relevant to our research:

- According to Pew, 3% of American Internet users have used a social networking site “yesterday”. Among Colts respondents, 7% said they updated their profile pages “today” and another 23% did so in the past week. The questions are different, but both seem to be trying to get at habitual behavior rather than random, sporadic behavior.

- According to Pew, 11% of American Internet users have used a social network at some point, versus 54% of Colts survey respondents.

- 2% of Americans updated their blog yesterday. Likewise, just 2% of Colts fans updated theirs today, but another 9% have done so in the past week.

- Pew reports that 8% of American adult Internet users have blogged at one time or another, versus 26% for Colts respondents.

I expected to find that Colts survey respondent would skew much higher than averages in terms of Web 2.0 activity. This make sense to me. But I’m wondering what it will take to get these fans to engage with My Colts Network - both initially as well as over time.

What does the system need to offer in order to attract and retain loyal users? Why does MySpace work? I expect we’ll find that technology and features have less to do with it than culture and community. Human nature will be a bigger driver than zeros and ones. But ever bit of data helps. So I will keep digging…

Pew is a very useful tool for those of us interested in measuring American on-line behavior. The article I mentioned above has some cool graphs which show how things like on-line photo developing, wikipedia and myspace are growing. But the research also shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Even in a “Web 2.0″ world, people are still doing what they’ve “always” done. And E mail is a great illustration of this fact.

Here are a few highlights from Pew:

- 66% of American adult Internet users (about 97 million people) use the Internet on any given day

- The king of all applications is still E mail. 53% of Internet users send or read E mail on any given day. That’s more than instant messaging, blogging and shopping combined. And by comparison, only 38% use search. So E mail remains the killer app.

Before you yell “duh!” and me, let me share with you why this catches my eye. We are planning to offer a Web based E mail service that allows fans to have personalized E mail addresses at a Colts domain (example: your name@mycolts.net). We’re not offering this right away because we’re a bit over budget and it will take a bit of money to write the application, but clearly E mail could be the foundation of the system we’re creating. I’m glad for the reminder.

Alexa ranks Yahoo.com as the number one traffic site on the Web

What is driving the most page views at yahoo.com?

mail.yahoo.com - 50%
search.yahoo.com - 10%
bid.yahoo.com - 4%
news.yahoo.com - 3%
login.yahoo.com - 2%
yahoo.com - 2%
auctions.yahoo.com - 2%
knowledge.yahoo.com - 2%
finance.yahoo.com - 1%
groups.yahoo.com - 1%
sports.yahoo.com - 1%
fantasysports.yahoo.com - 1%
360.yahoo.com - 1%
photos.yahoo.com - 1%
stock.yahoo.com - 1%
music.yahoo.com - 1%
wrs.yahoo.com - 1%
dictionary.yahoo.com - 1%
myblog.yahoo.com - 1%
club.yahoo.com - 1%
tw.yahoo.com - 1%
games.yahoo.com - 1%
match.yahoo.com - 1%
my.yahoo.com - 1%
buy.yahoo.com.tw - 1%
answers.yahoo.com - 1%
Other websites - 7%

On the one hand I’m thinking “of course! Offer E mail and we too will drive lots of traffic!” On the other hand, I look at our survey results and see that 85% of respondents already have at least 2 active E mail accounts, 70% have Web based E mail service and in fact, 35% use Yahoo Mail. So why would anyone add another E mail service? My concern is that fans would get an account for the vanity factor (much like the Colts credit card I carry but never use), but few will use it since Yahoo and G mail will be better overall products and fan are already in the habit of using them.

Somewhere in the midst of all this data there may be an answer, but in the end we won’t really know what people will do until we release the platform and let people use it. I know this. It’s why I didn’t ask very many questions asking “would you use” or “what if”? People will always say “sure, I’ll use that,” but their behavior tells another story. That’s why we asked about what they are doing or what they have done. This data is likely more realistic.

Starting a sustaining a social networking platform for the Colts is not a simple thing. The technology is complex and expensive. The stakes are high. The completion is stiff. And all the data in the world won’t help us as much as winning football games. But we’ll keep digging into the data looking for key indicators and looking for the drivers.

Stay with us. And drop me a line once in a while. The purpose of this blog is to inspire COLLABORATION. Please, join the conversation. Add your data. Challenge me with tough questions. I don’t HAVE the answers. I SEEK the answers.