Great piece by Eric over at his blog, Community in Context. He cites a recent deal between Yahoo and social network site Bebo, in which the mega-portal bought the right to place ad units on their pages. A novel strategy, but ultimately expensive and non-scalable, says Eric. Hosted applications, on the other hand, present a logical and cost-effective alternative for the portal looking to increase ad revenue beyond the confines of its domain name. Check out the below quote and read the whole thing after the jump.
Think of the way NBC earns the right to insert ads on 3rd party television stations by providing them television shows. Imagine if NBC provided only ads to television stations (e.g. no television shows). Clearly the “adsense model” would not work for television networks and it won’t work indefinitely on the Web. And so it won’t be long before Google (and others) begin to think about packaging hosted applications with their ad programs to earn publisher loyalty.
Read more.
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As we wrote yesterday, social media is a good vehicle for engaging the sports fan. SkiNet’s community site launched this week. As you can see, it’s a very cool deployment that proves that even with a small amount of design resource affiliates can get a fully customized social media site that integrates into an existing website (the site was built by a single designer in a few days).
In this case, SkiNet chose to buy-out the advertising inventory from us (we offer the platform at no cost if affiliates join our ad network and a performance based ad buy-out option for affiliates who want to control the ad slots to monetize the site themselves). This enables SkiNet’s ad sales team to offer the incremental inventory created from the site’s social media activity to advertisers seeking to reach the skiing enthusiasts.
Check out the custom work on the pages:
With winter just around the corner [ALREADY?!!!] the community is launching at just the right time. So, if you enjoy skiing, sign up and share your passion with other skiers.
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Alex participated on the “Enhancing the Sports Fan Experience using Virtual Environments, Social Networking and User Generated Content” panel during the New York: Media Information Exchange Group’s breakfast this morning. He joined Lou Borrelli, NEP Broadcasting (moderator), Glenn Adamo, VP Media Operations/The National Football League & The NFL Network, Tom Buffalano, Vice President & GM of Digital Media/CSTV and Bill Rasmussen, Founder of ESPN and currently CEO/Collegefanz, in a lively discussion about social media’s place in the sports industry.
Here’s a write up about the event on Les Blatt’s blog.
Social media is a powerful channel for sports teams, leagues and media companies to engage with their audiences beyond a game or event (leading to new revenue opportunities from advertising and ecommerce). What better way to engage sports fans than to provide them with the ability to share their passion through user-generated content, social networking (have you ever met a fan who doesn’t really have much to say about their favorite or least favorite team?) and content syndication.
Teams and leagues have an unparalleled opportunity to create compelling and very sticky experiences by integrating ‘unique’ content that fans wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else with the user-generated videos or photos. For example, having exclusive interviews with coaches and players about an upcoming game alongside video commentary from fans about the game and opposition, with coaches commenting back.
Great examples of KickApps sports affiliates include:
- The Arena Football Leagues’s MyAFL community
- KWCH 12 in Kansas’ high school sports community, Catch it Kansas
- Cycling TV’s community, The Innertube
- Bunkershot.com’s golf community
- Mixed Martial Arts community, Training for Warriors
- RodeoUP, the video community of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Associations
- Animated sportscast, Flash Sports Tonight
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At KickApps, we believe that social media (social networking, user-generated content and Widget for syndicating content) and programmable video are the cornerstone of growing and increasing audience engagement. Back in August, Forrester published some new research on engagement (you can download the report here). This is really important from the point of view that the industry is starting to define how social media is measured. The business reasons for this are obvious.
Here’s how Forrester breaks down the four components of engagement:
“Involvement—Includes web analytics like site traffic, page views, time spent, etc. This essentially is the component that measures if a person is present.
Interaction—This component addresses the more robust actions people take, such as buying a product, requesting a catalog, signing up for an email, posting a comment on a blog, uploading a photo or video, etc. These metrics come from e-commerce or social media platforms.
Intimacy—The sentiment or affinity that a person exhibits in the things they say or the actions they take, such as the meaning behind a blog post or comment, a product review, etc. Services such as brand monitoring help track these types of conversations.
Influence—Addresses the likelihood that a person will recommend your product or service to someone else. It can manifest itself through brand loyalty or through recommendations to friends, family, or acquaintances. These metrics mostly come from surveys (both qualitative and quantitative).”
I really like the way Forrester created these buckets and I think it has interesting implications for those looking at creating business cases for social media. As Brian Haven noted in his blog, my immediate take away is that there’s no straight forward approach. If anything, it calls for a tight integration between your social media initiatives and your overall marketing and product development efforts (in most cases there isn’t a more effective and efficient feedback loop than an online community).
We talk about the importance of this with our affiliate partners as they plan out their social media projects. Many of our affiliate implementations include technical discussions about the platform and also the non-technical success factors, i.e. community programming, marketing, community leadership, business model, etc. Involving business and marketing teams early to plan how they’re going to seed and promote their communities is critical to the success of an online community.
We’re also starting to see the formation of specialist consultants that have developed deep expertise in social media creation, viral community marketing and promotion. Jim Kerr, VP of New Media at the Pollack Media Group, puts it perfectly in an interview with FMQB, a radio industry trade this week. He talks about how he works with radio stations to think implement their social media initiatives:
“Much of what I’m doing now is taking radio stations and helping them integrate their current site to the KickApps platform. While KickApps is flexible enough to be quickly launched as a plug-and-play solution, we work closely with stations to make sure that there is a strategic framework to build around. You don’t just build a social network because it’s the hip thing to do.
So we look at a station’s website, its listener database, its airstaff, its current online revenue strategy, and how they all currently work together. We then work together with the station to give its large broadcast community a home on the Internet. Again, this is not just “build it and they will come.” I work to make sure that the execution at the station level includes plenty of interaction and content originating with the jocks, the on-air content of the station, and the needs of the sales staff.
Beyond individual station integration, we work with corporate and market managers at creating the ability for a specific radio station social network to eventually flow into a market-wide or national network. Luckily, this ability is built into the KickApps platform, so you can build a comprehensive individual station solution with the knowledge that a wider national or market-wide implementation can easily be grown from it.”
For those customers of ours who are executing well in this area it’s translating into real impact on their business through increased audience size, time spent on the site, and increased advertising revenues.
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The KickApps Affiliate Center (AC) is ‘mission control’ for creating, deploying and managing the KickApps platform. Using the AC, you’re able to create the elements of your social media site, deploy Widgets, manage media and members, get reports on your site’s performance, etc.
The following video tutorial takes you through the various sections of the AC that allow you to customize your KickApps pages, define member profile pages, implement DNS masking, create Widgets, enable groups, and so much more…
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