Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

No, this post is not about games like football. It is about games like World of Warcraft. Computer games. Video Games. Massively Multi-player Online games. Social games. Nano games. There is a deluge of games coming onto the market and we’re experimenting to see which (if any) might be of interest to our visitors.

We’re keen on leveraging some of them to drive traffic and build community on our site(s).

Social Games. We’ve been running 2 “social” games on our Website for several months. One game is a trivia game where players can create their own questions, and compete with other players to answer other questions. The other is a simple matching game.

Social games are played “one-on-one”. Players can invite specific friends to play, or they can get into a “pick up” game with whomever happens to be online at the time. Very cool stuff. We get our “social” games from Bunchball

Our site is focused on football news and is not known as a game destination, but we’re pleased with the uptake of social games. The games generate about 1% of our total page views, and tend to keep people engaged slightly longer than average. Plus, the games tend to generate traffic on our site during “non peak” periods, so I think these are page views we would not have otherwise had.

Still, I can’t help think that there’s more we could be doing with games, especially with the explosion of game choices on the market and the launching of our social network. So we’ll be testing the Bunchball games inside our social network, and we’ll be experimenting with new games as well.

Nano Games. Nano games are designed to be played by multiple people who are online and watching the same TV program simultaneously. This model is tailor made for reality TV and live sports. Nano games - We’re planning to introduce a “prediction” game this season through a new gaming partner, LiveHive Systems, . I’m not sure about this, but I think the phrase “nano game” comes from LiveHive. Given the high volume of traffic we see on game day, we expect this game to be fairly popular.

Both of these companies (LiveHive and Bunchball) offer fairly turnkey services. They skin the games to match our site design. They offer flash code to embed in our pages, or could also offer the games as pop ups. They’ll both integrate points earned in the games into our overall “Colts Cred” points system. Both offer us ways to enhance visitors’ experiences while on our site(s), and both offer ways to generate new revenue streams.

In other online sports game news: Soccer game, Power Challenge, gets $8 million in venture funding (read story here)