Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

Let the games begin! As the football team prepares for the a big game this Sunday in Baltimore, the team Website will be launching two new games for fans to play on-line.

The games themselves are from Bunchball, an Internet game developer whose mission is to provide “private label” games for social networking sites. The company has a long list of games to choose from. The first two games on Colts.com will be a matching game and a trivia game.

Here’s a sneak peek at the opening interface for the “matching” game

The matching game is already set up here. Check it out here.

As you can see, the games will be customized with Colts graphics and will appear within the pages of colts.com, but game content area will be served directly from Bunchball. Bunchball will also handle ad serving into the game area.

Colts fans who come to the site can invite their friends to play these games with them, or they can choose “match me” and they’ll be connected with other fans on-line who want to play. As they compete, they can chat with eachother live, right through the game interface.

The trivia game will be a bit more complex than the matching game, and will allow fans to write their own questions, judge questions that other fans write, and flag questions as “offensive”. Once a fan judges a few questions, he or she will be invited to compete to answer the “approved ” questions.

Here’s the “judging” screen

We’ll be working today to get both games set up to go live here.

From a business perspective

These games should attract visitors, drive page views, and increase time spent on site and thereby give us opportunity to make money through in-game ads as well as game section sponsorship. We’ll use the first few months of operation as a test to see if fans use the game, then begin to approach potential sponsors once we have a measureable following.

Meanwhile, the social nature of the games will provide a nice way for us to promote our upcoming social networking site. And we may add more games inside the fan network, which will provide more incentive for fans to register.

It will be interesting to see how fans react. There are always lots of people on our main site. In fact, the simultaneous user count is especially high on (football) game days. Will all these fans find the game? Will they find each other? Will they begin to play together? Will community begin to form? I sure hope so. If it does it will give us even more confidence that our social networking initiative has a chance to succeed.