Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

I spent some time crusing around Facebook this morning, and I must say I’m very impressed. Everything is so clean and it works so well. The search tool in particular works amazingly well, especially compared with the experience I’ve had with MySpace.

Anyway, as I browsed through Facebook, I began to get a vision for MyColts. MySpace is obviously the most populated network and has done a phenomenal job creating a market for other networks. But the feedback I get from users is that after a while, MySpace grows old. It’s too chaotic, too noisy, too slow, and ultimately, to “anything goes”.

So I can see how users might “graduate” from MySpace to Facebook. Facebook is much quieter. It started as a semi-private network, although it’s open to anyone now. Still, Facebook does an incredible job of facilitating links between people based on school, geography and your personal address books. Facebook makes very relevant suggestions for you to connect with new people, or re-connect with people from your “past lives”.

And as I looked through Facebook, I realized there may be a point when it’s time to move on from that system to another system that is more relevant for a new stage in life. For me, it took only a couple of years after college until I realized that I had lost touch with most of my college pals. I had new work friends. These were the people I partied with…them, and my FAMILY.

That’s right, the older I got, the more I tended to hang out with my older brothers and sisters and my folks. And you know the one thing (other than holidays) that brought us together most? You guessed it! NFL Football games. And now that I have my own wife and kids, I’ve brought them into the NFL ritual.

So here’s what I’m NOT thinking.

I’m not thinking we’re going to surpass either MySpace or Facebook in membership or traffic. I AM thinking that we need to learn from what both communities do well. Specifically, we need to focusing on adding value to family units and groups of work friends.

I see our position in the market somewhere between Facebook and LinkedIn. But my experience with LinkedIn (so far at least) is that it spends most of its time out of site, out of mind. LinkedIn can do a lot of stuff, but I’ve not become an habitual user, so I forget it’s there.

The advantage we (will) have over any other social or business network is that Colts fans already visit our Website frequently during the season, so we have a built in reason for them to stay in touch with friends online. Plus, as I think about it, if MyColts is adopted by families, then we have a chance to extend our useful lifecycle. What I mean is that family members young and old may want to connect. So a high schooler may be hitting the pages of his family group along with a grandma. And since that high schooler (and his family) will probably remain Colts fans, and their family group will grow to include new members and new memories, then that high schooler may stay involved in the group all the way through into adult hood, even as he joins or leaves MySpace or Facebook or LinkedIn.

NFL is a ritual for many people. Research shows that people tend to watch games with their families and close friends. It’s not that we don’t enjoy the games around people that we don’t know, and certainly we make new friends by meeting people at games, or game viewing parties, but when you’re watching the game and your favorite team scores, you don’t whip out your cell phone can call a stranger. You call your dad, or your brother or your best friend and say, “did you see that??”

We’ve built MyColts for fans, and we’re hoping they’ll use it to enhance their experiences around the team. But we also built it with enough functionality that it could support their social networking / family networking activities year round. Who knows if that will happen?

We’re in the memory business. We help people make great memories. In the end, MyColts may prove to be the living repository for all the great memories people collect over the years. While we may struggle for traffic during the offseason, I’m hopeful that we’ll get “dusted off” every Fall as people gear up for the coming season. If we can reach the point where the season just wouldn’t be the same without MyColts, then we’ve succeeded.