Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

I recently wrote a piece for the “Team Marketing Report” newsletter. Here is part 3 of 5

3. How does creating a Myspace-model Web site help a team generate revenue?

I will tell you in about 6 months. We are about to launch a social networking platform which we’re calling My Colts Network (www.mycolts.net). We believe there are a couple keys to making money with this type of thing. The first is pretty straightforward.

In a social network, the users create most of the content. That means the team has very little expense beyond the cost of creating and maintaining the platform. As users post photos, blog and interact with other users, they are creating valuable content which will attract other users to the site and cause those users to consume more pages. That all sounds pretty cold, but that’s the economic opportunity. In the process, we’ll generate millions of impressions, which we will monetize as I explained before by selling sponsorships and advertising around the content that the fans create. Of course the more visitors we welcome to the site the greater our chance to sell merchandise as well, but that’s another subject altogether.

On the human side, we believe that our fans will use this platform to connect with each other and as a result they will feel closer to the team. As a team, we will be forced to “join the conversation” as never before, which will be a challenge which will require us to learn new behaviors. Plus, there are considerable risks any time you let fans post content freely to your site, so we’ll be actively monitoring and trying to establish appropriate decorum. Issues will emerge, but the significant upside potential of this system combined with the realization that fans are going to do this anyway were enough to push us forward into going for it.

MySpace is one of the top sites that refer traffic to Colts.Com, and it is one of the top sites people visit after visiting Colts.com, so we have to have a strategy to leverage its popularity. A few weeks back I wrote a more detailed post about our “MySpace’ strategy. We’re currently working on a MySpace page for the Colts. It’s not posted yet, but it will be soon.