Mashable reported today that Sports Illustrated is partnering with new H.S. Sports social network, Takkle.
Apparently Takkle will carry a video version of S.I.’s “Faces in the Crowd”.
I haven’t read S.I. in years. Not even the swim suit issue. But I do remember faces in the crowd. It was my favorite part of S.I. when I was a kid.
Surely this partnership will help Takkle’s burgeoning brand AND drive significant traffic to the site. Look for deeper partnerships with S.I.’s other youth focused titles.
If I remember correctly, the age for first interest in NFL for boys is around 11 or 12 years old. It’s slightly older for girls. Here at the Colts we have distinct plans to pursue both high school and youth football. These plans will include both on-line and off-line aspects. I can’t really give the details right now, but if anyone from the NFL is reading this, drop me a line and I’ll share. As I’ve been saying in this blog all along, we’re better off if we co-develop this kind of stuff.
One other thought that’s been lingering in my mind. Kids today are growing up with more sports and entertainment choices than ever before. These choices include games they can play with their bodies (like football, lacrosse or crew), and games that they play with their thumbs (video games).
Bottom line: kids are participating rather than spectating. And sites like Takkle aim to make the kids the stars, rather than driving their eyeballs to watch the pros. I still think the NFL will be popular with these kids as they mature, but I firmly believe we better be prepared to engage this audience in fresh ways. The age of passive consumption of NFL is over. We gotta get interactive and we need to invent new ways for the fans to become the stars.
Youth inititatives like these are crucial for the NFL and its teams. Our future season ticket holders and other fans are growing up playing sports and (hopefully) watching NFL with their families. Anything we can do to encourage them to build ritual around NFL is a good thing.
We’re designing our social networking platform with the following features:
1. Personal profiles - this is the most obvious since it’s widely adopted in just about every social network. For good reason. The site must have a place where users can publish their stuff to the community.
2. Personal dashboard - this is new twist (we think). The personal dashboard is a control panel where users can organize all the content they want to see - at a glance. If they want to keep track of their friends’ photos, or blogs or events they can set up their dashboard to notify them when new things have been added.
3. Points system - this may be the killer app. We will award points for positive behavior in the community, and subtract points for negative behavior, all for the purpose of giving fans ways to compare themselves to each other. IN addition to being a yardstick, the points system will also let us create badges of honor for members to wear inside the network - and outside the network - on their myspace pages, for example. This one feature gives fans one of the main things they want: visibility. They want to be noticed, and they want to MATTER inside the community.
4. Newsletter - We haven’t fleshed this out fully yet, but I think we’re going to need to keep track of activity inside the network and publish news reports. Who are the new members? Who are the up and comers? Who are the top bloggers? Where are fans getting together offline? The newsletter will be by the fan and for the fans and it will feed the fire in terms of activity within the community. I think.
