Over the holidays, Pat Coyle’s IT marketing team released a new widget for the Indianapolis Colts. Members of MySpace, Facebook and other social software are expected to plant the content on their web pages and spread the word about the team. Not long after launching a promotional contest to win Super Bowl tickets, the Colts started calling it a “photo slideshow” (widget wasn’t easy to understand). Into the first two weeks of the effort, tracking showed over 19,000 views of the campaign and 6,200 new registrants … all of whom completed the 10-question demographic survey. Yesterday — on the eve of the the Colts second-round playoff game — the team followed with a third release, two new social games for the website.
All of this is an effort to gear up for the real focus: a MySpace kind of site specifically for Colts fans.
Pat Coyle has invested a lot of resources in a website redesign for the football organization. In trying to launch a new social networking site — MyColts Fan Network — Coyle is putting the Colts in a good position to become the most widely recognized NFL team in the world. This is a byproduct of appropriating the Web 2.0 perspective.
The MyColts Fan Network is free (with registration) for Colts fans. Members can create profiles, arrange page content, and make connections with other fans. The site will allow members to blog, send email, manage personal fan calendars, and tie-ins to the existing fan forum. In addition to the promtional campaigns described above, member referrals will help spread the word. One interesting twist is that built into the network is a product review feature allowing members to express opinions on goods and services. I can imagine this creates potential buzz for sponsors and turns the site into a direct-marketing gold mine. Maybe Pat will blog about this at some point.
Most (if not all) social sites are built around the idea of the network. Nodes = personal page. Links = friendship connections (not always mutual). The currency is designed to be the in-degree links. Traditional forums, on the other hand, are built around the topic. Nodes = Posts. Links = replies (almost always restricted to one thread at a time). The currency is designed to be the posting activity.
The problem with these systems, as built, is the lack of intimate conversation space. In both cases, the conversation is node-specific. The former has it tied to the personal page, and the latter to the massive topic domain. There isn’t any place to welcome new entries while strengthening small niches through shared conversation.
Maybe it is a hard sell to design a forum that seems to keep people split up. From the organization’s perspective, it might seem better to view the forum as one big system. But from the participant’s perspective, the strength of the connection to a small, accessible group of people is what is desired. I’m not sure yet what MyColts.net is going to be. The focus on the Colts gives it a smaller community than MySpace, but that is probably a good thing. The usefulness it has to members will likely depend on whether meaningful niche communities emerge.
2 replies on “MyColts Fan Network”
Kevin,
Thanks for this thoughtful review of our recent activities. On the topic of “small groups” I wanted to point out that our “groups” functionality is being designed to give people ways to form smaller conversations. Each group will have its own forum, its own calendar of events, etc. Groups can be public or private.
My colleague, AJ Macht, deserves most of the credit for designing this system.
And just for the record, we have 8,000 people who’ve registered for the Super Bowl tix. 6,000 of these have opted in for My Colts Network news. The widget has been viewed over 30,000 times, and has been grabbed and place on approximately 300 pages. I throw around lots of numbers so even I get confused. These are the latest.
The Colts keep rolling, so that can only help this promotion. We’ll see if the Bears can keep the Universe on track for my dream Superbowl.