A New Season For Sports & Social Media

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.