I read a good post over at the Viral Garden describing why Infield Parking might be the best sports social network site out there. Mack Collier’s reasoning is simple: Infield Parking is founded by one of the sport’s most popular drivers, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., and other drivers are getting actively involved. Drivers attract fans.
Allowing fans to feel like they’re getting access to the drivers themselves is clearly HUGE. Earnhardt, Jr. already has over 15,000 comments on his blog - and he’s only posted 6 times!!
I cruised around to various drivers’ pages and found more of the same, albeit not quite as fanatical. Tony Stewart hadn’t even posted anything in his blog, yet he already has 58 comments waiting for him. Some other young driver I never heard of has only 1 comment in his blog (and no posts from him), but he’s got over 2,100 friends.
Clearly, getting the drivers involved is “driving” much of the site’s early success. And while I would love for our (Colts) players to get involved with our social net, I’m not sure player involvement (on its own) would assure the long term success of our fan network.
At some point the fans need to own the environment. A sports social net needs to become about the fans, and about their opinions and their popularity. Drivers, players and celebrities will NEVER be able to let fans as close as they want to get - and certainly they won’t be as consistent as fans in terms of updating their sites and adding to the conversation. Fans will move forward with or without them. My only hope is that they don’t go running back to MySpace. But I don’t think they will.
Team sites and driver sites have a big advantage over larger, more general social nets and portals. Go to Yahoo! and look for Colts groups. They’re there, but they’re very small and lost in the magnitude of Yahoo’s user base. At MyColts.net, fans can form groups - and connect those groups much more easily to more fans just like themselves. The Colts site will give these far flung groups of fans a power source to draw from…and more groups will form…and community will be established (I HOPE!).
I believe this because we’ve already seen this fan behavior with our fan forums. NFL team forums are VERY popular, and have been for years. Wisely, Infield Parking offers fan forums and they seem to be getting healthy traffic too, which is to be expected. I wouldn’t be surprised if the forums become the most popular area on the site.
Interesting to note that Infield Parking has 20,000 users and just over 43,000 photos posted. This kind of data is helpful to us as we try to figure out what kind of hardware we’re going to need when we go live with our site later this Spring.
Careful… that’s not NASCAR showing you the way, it’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. And if there’s one thing the Earnhardts have mastered, it’s maximizing the marketing potential of their name. Since NASCAR itself is also rumored to be starting their own social networking site, I would think that Infield Parking would be seen as competition, though this particular market is turning out to be so huge I’m sure there will be room for at least a few large sites. But my point is that Infield Parking is more like Peyton Manning launching a social network and recruiting other big-name NFL players to join him. How would that be viewed by the Colts and/or the NFL? (note that I know nothing about various contractual arrangements between the league, teams, and players that might preclude any of this… NASCAR is organized differently)
Longer term though, I think your point about social nets needing to be about the fans is correct, as I alluded to in this post about Infield Parking at IndianaRacing.net. It will be interesting to see what role teams and corporations will ultimately play.