As the football, basketball and hockey seasons are fast approaching, teams and leagues across the country are preparing to welcome back fans not only to their stadiums and arenas, but to their websites. Online and off, sports entities are increasingly looking for ways to consolidate consumers around their brands by providing more engaging and participatory experiences.
Social Media is a natural fit for sports. Millions of vocal, passionate fans organized into large existing communities built around their favorite leagues, teams, and players. So it’s no surprise that the meteoric rise of MySpace has thrust it into the role of intermediary between the leagues and many of their fans. According to Hitwise (via OMMA Magazine), in January 8.58% of traffic to NFL.com came from MySpace. The figure was 13% for NBA.com.
Whatever one thinks of MySpace, it’s a powerful force that’s not going anywhere (at least for the foreseeable future). The smartest sports properties have recognized the momentum behind Social Media and employed techniques like the following to drive traffic to their websites and keep fans engaged when they get there:
- Enabling fans to submit videos, audio, photos and blog posts about their favorite topics, and leveraging that traffic to actively promote ticket sales, merchandise sales and linear viewership.
- Launching a contest that allows users to submit videos (for instance, national anthem auditions), letting their peers vote on the best, and giving the winner the opportunity to perform at a home game.
- Encouraging fans to submit video or photos around their pre-game rituals (i.e. tailgating) and mining the data for relevant market intelligence.
- Placing contextually relevant user generated video and blogs alongside official team/player articles to create a more interactive and personal experience.
- Giving away team-branded web cams in connection with a contest/promotion that involves user generated video submission.
The KickApps platform is incredibly well-suited to the sports industry because it gives leagues and teams the ability to integrate robust Social Media experiences seamlessly into their websites. Moreover, it can be deployed within a week, allowing immediate opportunities for short term campaigns, promotions and contests, and also providing a scalable foundation for long term community-building.
Developing Social Media community applications is our only business – we’ve built a rock-solid platform with a full feature set – and we’re constantly innovating so our partners can stay on the leading edge.
I hope some of this has got you thinking. If you’re a sports entity considering how Social Media can help you achieve your goals, contact Matt Bijur, KickApps’ VP Business Development, at mbijur@kickapps.com.
2 Comments
Great review in TechCrunch in which KickApps goes head-to-head with several other players in the “white label” social media space. It’s an extensive piece that’s well worth taking the time to read, and a positive, insightful view into our platform and its key differentiators.
Overall, it cements KickApps’ reputation as the leader of the pack in what we do, calling us “the best platform for integrating social networking components into existing websites,” citing the high level of control we offer to both developers and designers and commending our widget-building tools as “the most robust” in the group.
It also highlights another key difference between us and some of our competitors–the fact that every KickApps-powered site has its own discrete member base. So when someone signs up to become a member of your community, that’s exactly what they’ll become, not a member of some sort of broader network of communities. In other words, we believe in giving our customers the highest level of control and ownership possible.
Check out the full TechCrunch piece after the jump.
2 Comments
We made a couple of pretty big announcements today: the first being a strategic partnership with Akamai that has helped us a great deal in serving several major media customers, including BET, Scripps, HBO-Cinemax, and VIBE Magazine (now at 50K members). This story was covered today by our friends at Mashable.
The second, and equally exciting announcement, is a close partnership with Autobytel. They’ve launched a beta of the first in a series of KickApps-powered communities at MyRide.com. Mixing both editorial and user-generated content, MyRide is poised to become the best place online to find and share info about all things automotive.
We’re thrilled to be involved with these partners and projects, and look forward to announcing more like them. If you’re interested in learning about how KickApps can power your online community and drive sustained audience growth and engagement, contact us at info@kickapps.com.
1 Comment
Check out the video clip below. I am selling my Nikon D100 on eBay because I bought a Nikon D200 a few months ago and I love it. The D100 has been sitting in a box on a shelf in my basement. It will be interesting to see what kind of impact this video has on the final bid price.
I wasn’t sure if eBay would allow me to embed the video clip into my description, but to my delight the KickApps platform is perfectly compatible with eBay.
Click here to see my D100 up for bidding on eBay, and good luck!
tx
m
Be the first to comment on this post!
Some of our affiliates have contacted us asking for more time to make the appropriate changes to their custom CSS in preparation for our upcoming version 2.2 update. Therefore, we have decided to delay the release of 2.2 until Tuesday, July 17.
If you’ve customized the CSS on your KickApps-powered pages, please read the latest CSS update tutorial on KickDeveloper before Tuesday, July 17th.
In addition to these CSS updates, there are some great new features in this release, and we look forward to telling you more about them as we approach the launch date.
Be the first to comment on this post!
Blog 
