Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

I can see my search engine rankings climbing already. Just add the words “how to” to your headline and the spiders come a crawlin…add “social nets” and the V.C.’s can’t be far behind.

We’ve built a fairly robust social networking platform, and now we’re in the process of “monetizing” it. In this process we’re considering all the various ways we might make money from the system. We can sell ads and make money through sponsorship. We can sell licenses to other companies, and make money by allowing others to use our software. We can bring ad sense into and make money from search…

My dad always used to say, “…in a gold rush, you want to be the one selling the shovels…”

I’m wondering what is the shovel in this case? Even as I write this post, more networks are forming, each one smaller than the others…in fact, I’m thinking of forming a social net for me, myself and I!

(As an aside, I’m reading a really good book right now called Deep Economy. It’s all about the breakdown of community as society pursues GROWTH at all costs. It examines the trend toward HYPER INDIVIDUALISM and uncovers the irony inherent in our society: we are pursuing economic growth in the name of progress, but the rat race is causing challenges to our planet and NOT leading to personal satisfaction. Something to think about).

Myspace has built a behemoth and is making money through aggregating traffic. Lots of people are chasing that model.

Facebook has grown its channel by leveraging pre-existing communities.

Dogster has created a site for niche enthusiasts

Ning.com and me.com are trying to give individuals the power to create their own networks, and share the revenue back with the people - kinda like the google revenue model.

Then there are companies that make tools for social nets. Companies like FanRocket for video, Bunchball for games and Userplane for chat, IM, presence, video chat and more.

Traditional advertisers have a harder time as networks get smaller. So an entire class of companies has emerged to put the traffic back together in order to give the advertisers something to buy.

MSN, Yahoo!, Google and AOL are obviously the 800 pound gorillas in term so of advertising distribution.

Below them there are dozens of players large and small that can deliver ads to your website or social net; and their more than happy to share the revenue.

Federated Media is gathering allstar bloggers together in hopes of gaining scale for advertisers. And there are lots of other companies, includng all the big media firms, who will actively sell ads JUST for your site(s) if you’re big enough.

At the end of the day, all these options can be a distraction. At the top of this post I confessed that we’re thinking about how we can make money from our social net. With that as the primary thought, it’s easy to be lead down a path that might ultimately cause us to neglect our very biggest asset - the people who make up the community we’re trying to “monetize”. Our fans.

Whatever we do with technology is irrelevant if we don’t focus our efforts on adding value to the lives of our fans. If the experiences they have around our core product (football games) is not improved in significant ways by all of this technology, then we should not do it.

I do believe that we have a lot of interesting avenues to pursue now that we’ve built this technology. But as I watch the feeding frenzy around social media, I think it’s healthy to step back and seek perspective…remember where our bread is buttered…stick to our knitting…dance with the one we brung…etc.