Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

If you’re reading this sentence, you were probably lured by the headline. Wouldn’t it be great if someone could write a brief, 10-step method for guaranteed success? Sorry to let you down, but I don’t have the secret forumula.

I do believe that our social network will succeed if we keep our eye on the ball. In the case of social nets, the “ball” is the user of the system. In our case, the user is a Colts fan.

We’ve spent the last year designing a building a social networking application for Colts fans. My hope is that we never get so focused on buiding great software that we forget about the people. After all, this application is meant to be a tool for fans to enhance their experiences around the Colts. If we build it right, the fans will use it and we’ll find new ways to make money. If we think just about the money part, I think we’ll be in trouble.

As we prepare to launch our Beta on April 30, I want to make every effort to refocus our engeries where they should be focused: user experience.

Found a really good site today called Bokardo. Bokardo is part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup, an aggregator of blogs focused on social web applications. This network of sites has a lot of great stuff that will help me stay focused on the users. Thought I’d share a bit with you today:

Software Models Human Behavior

The innovation in these applications is not that they let us do something new, but that they allow us to do what we already do better, more often, in more places, and more quickly. It’s in how they model human behavior.

What do fans do? How can we help them do IT easier, faster, cheaper…?

Here’s my answer: fans like to SHARE the experience. After screaming and yelling and jumping up and down, what’s the first thing you do when your team makes a big play? You look for someone to share it with. You hug, you high five, you call em on the phone, you send E mail. You’ll do anything to participate in post-big-play frenetic bursts of tribal reinforcement

So where can we help?

- High fives - how many times have you gone to high five someone and missed? You get all excited, you reach back and swing your hand forward, looking for that satisfying “SMACK” sound, and all you get is “whiff”. You try it again, and your hand glances off the other guy’s thumb…argh! oh, well…we’re still happy, but the high five could have been better. (Software can’t fix high-five challenged. My advice would be to slow down, set your feet, and use two hands for best results).

- Cell phones - I see people calling people inside the stadium ALL THE TIME and I don’t know how they do it. It’s too loud in the stadium. How can they hear the guy on the other end? This could be a job for text messaging…in fact, this could be an interesting use for TWITTER, couldn’t it?

I don’t have time to go any further this morning. The bottom line is simple: watch how fans interact with eachother around the game, and find ways to give them more of what they want: camaraderie, consistency, visibility and access.

And remember, this social behavior happens all through the week, not just after big plays. It happens Monday through Friday at the “water cooler”. It happense pre-game (”where are you watching the game), it happens at the stadium (”you’ll never guess where I am now”), it happens at home (”sit down, I can’t see the TV!”).

More and more fans are jumping on NFL team sites during the game. Speaking candidly, there’s very little to DO on colts.com during the game. We have scoring updates, but presumably our fans are watching the game on TV or listening on radio, so they really don’t need to come to our site for the score. So why do they come?

I think they’re looking for their tribe.