Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

My first job out of college was selling newspaper advertising. I still remember a meeting with one of my bigger customers who told me, “…I wouldn’t wrap fish in that newsaper…”, which was his way of expressing frustration with the fact that he didn’t read it, but he knew that his customers did, so he had to spend money with me.

I remember another customer telling me that “…nobody reads those stupid free standing inserts…” to which all I could do was point out the volume of weekly inserts, the companies sponsoring them and asking if he thought they’d be spending all that money of nobody read or responded?

Why this trip down memory lane?

These are two example from early in my career that taught me an important lesson. People are different, and we each consume media differently. Some people read the table of contents before they read a magazine. Others simply leaf through. Some people use the “scan” button on their car radios, other pre-set their favorite stations. Some people TiVo their TV shows, others watch in real time…

We are ramping up to launch our social net, and as we do I’m growing more and more concerned that we don’t have the User Interface designed for ease of use. Don’t get me wrong, the UI is OK, but I think it could be much better.

So why don’t we change it?

Well, our master site designer has very strong opinions. He has a lot more experience than I do (as far as creating Websites) and is also a much heavier user of social nets that I am, so I can’t just step in and say “I don’t like it”. I feel l need some data to back up my growing sense that this thing needs to be changed.

“Older’ users (like me) tend to have similar reactions. I’ve had a few conversations with folks in the beta who agree that they don’t like certain things about the design. They lose their way. Trouble is, I can’t definitively say that these experiences will be common among folks who use the site because I don’t really know who will use the site!!

I think that our younger fans will dive in and use it, and for them I’m guessing the current design will be sufficient. They’ll figure it out. But for older or more casual fans, and for fans with little or no experience inside other social networking systems, there may be some disconnects.

So this morning I’m taking a step back.

The good news is we’ve got 30 days before we plan to launch this puppy, and even then we don’t have to set the world on fire. We can do a soft launch and keep working to improve the site until the season hits in mid July.

And it’s not just graphic design that I’m thinking about. I believe we have an unprecedented opportunity to learn about online fan behavior. We’ve taken great pains in our design to collect data about our users’ behaviors. Nobody has a system like the one we’ve built. As we bring users into the system, I want to make sure we’ve got the right analytics strategy so that we can understand better who is using the system, why they’re using the system, and how we can imporove the system so that they will use it more.

Social nets are relatively new, and they’re very different than e-commerce sites or standard media sites. People go to social sites to communicate, not necessarily to buy or just read. So how do you design a site to maximize communication? And why would you bother?

I have a theory that avid sports fans who participate in teams social nets will prove very attractive targets for our sponsors. I want to gather the data so we can make that case convincingly. We’ll need to make sure the site is designed well so that people use it, otherwise we’ll never collect the data and the whole thing falls short.

I was surfing around this morning, looking for people or companies with experience in areas like ethnography, UI design, behavioral targeting and persona development. I found Frank Spillers blog, and found it helpful.