The fur has been flying all week long. On line wars, that is, going back and forth between Bears fans and Colts fans. But this bit of silliness really takes the cake:

The perpitrator is a guys named Ryan Hupfer, who works for Media Sauce here in Indianapolis.

Aside from being slightly bent, which he’s proud of by the way, he’s a bit of a Myspace guru. Ryan has journied cross country to meet (and make documentary video) of the people he is meeting through Myspace. He’s also got a book, “Myspace for Dummies.”

Ryan is a Colts fan, and while this video / voting campaign is very silly, I wonder if there is a method to his madness? While he (seemingly innocently) dances around the fringe of absurdity, Ryan is learning a lot about what people like. Notice that over 3,000 votes were cast in this contest in just the first few days.

For whatever reason, SOME people find this exercise in zaniness engaging. They’re playing along and Ryan is soaking in the clicks and the data. This experience could prove valuable as he looks to commercialize his endeavors. I hope he makes lots of money from the book and other things he’s doing…after all, he’s gonna have a big dry cleaning bill when that Colt gets done with that silly bear!

On a related note: There’s nothing like a Super Bowl between two teams with animal mascots to bring out the local creativity. This week I received a call from Endangered Species Chocolate, another Indy based company, who wanted to do a blue and white Colts themed bar for the Super Bowl. (Apparently, they said, that BEARS are an endangered species, so they need to raise money to help!

Each of these “campaigns”, while obviously trying to capitalize on the Colts run to the Super Bowl, are good examples of an important phenomenon which Don Tapscott (Wikinomics) describes as “prosuming”. Our customers (Colts fans) are “consuming” our product (i.e. they’re experiencing our games) AND they’re “producing” entertainment (er, promotion) based on our product. Combine consumer + produce and you get “prosume”.

Prosumers are very messy. They mess with your brand. They mess with your trademarks, and according to Tapscott, they can’t be stopped. Entire industries (e.g. music, movies, TV) are being reshaped by people who grab digital content, mix it up and post it back to the Web in new forms. It’s messy. It’s mostly illegal, but people love doing it.

So what do we do when people start messing with our brands for their own personal enjoyment? Do we call out the lawyers and run up legal bills (i.e. put our fingers in the dike)? Or do we embrace the creative stuff happening around the fringes and watch carefully to see where it leads? Perhaps our customers are telling us something. Perhaps there’s a way we can work WITH our customers / fans to evolve our brands and keep them relevant – and profitable – both despite and because of this new “mashup” phenomenon.

It’s very difficult the get the lawyers to see this stuff as “good”, but we are making strides. Our widget efforts and our social networking platform are steps in the right direction.

Zack is not an employee of the Colts, but he has become a great partner. He was doing these videos anyway, and he’s very sensitive to the fact that we cannot allow real game footage on our site, so he makes his videos “team friendly” and posts them to his Myspace / YouTube pages AND he shares them with us so we can post them on Colts . In the process he’s gained considerable media coverage for himself, and placed the team in a good light with the digerati. We’re not quite sure how close we can or should let our fans into our marketing mix, but Zack is allowing us (forcing us) to think pretty hard about the possibilities.

Next step, get bigger sponsors to see what these guerilla brands already see. Get, Coca Cola, for example, to integrate its brand into our Web platform in engaging ways. Mashup our brands to give Coke the opportunity to connect with Colts fans at the most basic levels. Do “prosumption” on purpose – and FOR PROFIT!

The world is flat, the earth is at the center of the universe…and CONTENT IS KING.

Or is it?

We humans have ways of drawing conclusions based on what we see with our eyes, only to be proven wrong when someone comes along with better observational tools.

Columbus saw things differently. He journied to the edge of the earth, but didn’t fall off because he was correct, the earth is a sphere, not flat as prevailing wisdom held.

Likewise, Galileo had a fresh perspective. He confirmed Coepernicus’ hypothesis and proved (thanks to his newly invented telescope) that the sun is at the center of our universe, not the earth as conventional wisdom maintained.

In both of these scenarios, the way people thought – the prevailing belief system – dictated the way most people behaved. Actions flow from beliefs. Believing the earth is flat and that it is at the center of the universe caused society to make many wrong decisions about the future. Correcting these false assumptions was very difficult, but ultimately lead to unparalleled advances in science and commerce alike.

Correcting our thinking becomes the turning point

A similar crossroads may be at hand today as the Internet forces us to rethink the media landscape. Thanks to newly visible data, we’re learning the real power of word of mouth, which always existed, but wasn’t quantifiable until now. We’re learning more and more about connectivity, one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. As ideas flow faster and faster over the Internet, and as people are connecting with eachother, we are realizing the power of the individual and the power of community are much greater than we had come to believe.

Yet even as new data emerges, the big media companies and content creators are still spouting the same old axiom, “content is king.” This assumption is so widely accepted that few would question its veracity. This assumption is either correct, or it isn’t, and to some extent depends on how you look at it.

Check out the Wikinomics Blog for deep research on the Web’s shift from “presentation platform to community platform.” Given all the things that are changing around us, and the rise of social networks in particular, I think it’s time the NFL questioned it.

Content is king

Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.– Bill Gates essay, “Content is King,” Microsoft 1996.

Content is not king

Content has never been king, it is not king now, and is unlikely to ever be king. The Internet has done quite well without content, and can continue to flourish without it. Content will have a place on the Internet, possibly a substantial place. However, its place will likely be subordinate to that of business and personal communication. – From “Content is Not King,” by Andrew Odlyzko, Head of the Mathematics and Cryptography Research Departments at AT&T Labs. (First Monday, volume 6, number 2 (February 2001)).

Point – counter point

So who’s right?

It’s pretty tough to differ with Bill Gates, who is after all the richest man in the world. But hold up a second. His quote is from 10 years ago. A lot has changed since then. If you read the Gates essay you’ll note that at the time he wrote it he included software, Microsoft’s main product, as proprietary content, i.e. a thing to be packaged, delivered and consumed for a fee.

More recently, Microsoft has changed its tune significantly. While it still sells its software (in shrink wrapped boxes or as digital downloads) products to millions of people and businesses worldwide, it is showing signs of a shift in its thinking. Over the past few years, Microsoft has been opening up to open source and even plans to embrace the “free” spirit of the Internet by giving away Web based versions of some applications in an ad supported distribution scheme.

Microsoft’s changing business model might indicate a paradigm shift. Perhaps the software giant is rethinking its business in light of new data. If you read the “content is NOT king” essay, which itself is a few years old, you may start to see things differently too.

The main point I want to make today is that community, or more specifically COMMUNICATION is the driving force of the Internet and World Wide Web; and whereas old media companies see the Internet as little more than a distribution network for content (and therefore view content as king), the people who populate the Internet are voting with their feet. They say that communication and community are the things they value most. And they’re willing to pay.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of money in the content business, and I believe the NFL should continue to pursue content deals as it has in the past; but I think we should begin to make on-online community and communication into strategic priorities. Given the fast paced nature of the on-line world, the league should act immediately to build a social networking platorm that enables fans to communicate and form community around NFL content or whatever they like. If we don’t do this then somone else will.

Must we wait for a “Steve Jobs” to come along?

Sometimes we get so close to a problem that we cannot see it. When this happens, a third party, someone from outside our “industry” has the opportunity to come along and insert himself into the ecosystem. Steve Jobs is a great example. He saw how much trouble the music biz was having with people illegally downloading music, and he lead Apple to invent the iPod and iTunes to give companies and customers a channel for authorized transactions and a device to play it with.

In my opinion, we should pay attention to Steve Jobs and we should pay attention to guys like Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, who credits his companies success to a fresh belief system: they DON’T BELIEVE IN COMPETITION. Steve is all about the money, Jeff is all about his customers. We should borrow from both and seek to achieve achieve the best of both.

Meet the new king: community

The NFL (and other sports properties) face a similar challenges. How do we allow fans to take our content – and do with it what they will – and make money at the same time? Also, how do we make money from user generated content?

The long tail is bigger than the head.

The most valuable content we “create” is our TV product, live games; and while the value of the games is huge, I’m beginning to think there may be an even bigger opportunity beyond the game. Beyond the stadium. Beyond TV. Our next frontier is everything BUT the game. It’s the conversation ABOUT the game. It’s the lives of people who care about the game. It’s a lifestyle. NFL lifestyle. It’s the brand that more people want to feel closer to than any other. The Internet gives us the means to connect directly with our customers without a media middle man. We can join our customers in community. If we can create this community, we will tap a major vein. If we don’t, we will have missed a major opportunity.

All we have to do is change our minds

In order to succeed, we need to stop thinking like the NFL. We need to stop thinking like the major media powerhouse that we have become. We need to start acting like we care about fans and sponsors – caring about more than just their money – and start meeting their needs. We need to worry less about the content we create and more about the community we create.

Walled garden vs. open source – what’s NFL’s strategy?

If content is not king, then the “walled garden” strategy is not ALL right. It’s not All wrong, but it’s not ALL right. Forcing people to subscribe to a service to gain access to exclusive content can make money (e.g. DirecTV, season tickets); but I believe there’s even more money to be made in facilitating the conversation between fans.

If you think about it, the market for conversation and community is much bigger than the market for controlled content. Avid fans are the ones who buy the content, but avid fans make up just 30% of the total NFL an base. What are we going to sell to the other 70% of our fans?

Much as Jeff Bezos started Amazon with books and expanded to include EVERYTHING, I think the NFL has a chance to start with its live games and grow well beyond the sport itself. In order to do this, we need to see ourselves as more than a sport or an entertainment product. We need to see ourselves as a uniying force. As an emotional thread that connects people at home and at work, all day, every day.

Once we see ourselves as a lifestyle, we need to realize that we’re playing catchup in this arena. We need to realize that this new business is not like the old business. It is less about command and control and much more about chaos. We need to get hip to the facts of on-line life. We need to develop our “interactive imagination.”

So, since time is running short (it’s 6:45 am and my kids are starting to stir, and it’s about time for me to jump in the shower and get my rear to work), I’ll pose the following questions as starting points to our community and communication business:

What’s our myspace strategy? How will we compete / cooperate with large social networks?

When a community like Myspace has 80 million participants you have to pay attention. Do we try to compete? Do we partner? And what do we do with Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and the other behemoths?

1. What’s our on-line sponsorship strategy?

2. What’s our widget / add-on strategy?

3. What’s our “second life” strategy?

4. What’s our social news / bookmarking strategy?

5. What’s our photo sharing strategy?

6. What’s our video sharing strategy?

7. What’s our startpage strategy?

8. What’s our calendar / venue / event strategy

9. What’s our music strategy?

10. What’s our mobile strategy (

11. What’s our “niche” strategy?

12. What’s our “points” strategy?

I realize this may seem scatterbrained, but there’s a pony here somewhere

Notice I haven’t even mentioned the pure sports social nets. We should not be thinking like a vertical, or a niche. We should be thinking like a lifestyle. What is our promise?

Can we move fluidly enough to ride this wave? I seriously doubt it unless we put someone in charge of re-thinking our business model and giv him or her the freedom to pursue it.

Much as Columbus got sponsored by Queen Isabella, someone needs to get in a boat and sail to the edge of this content centric world in order to slay the dragaons who live there.

What business are we in?

Thats the age old question. Remember the horse and buggy salesmen? He missed the boat by not realizing he was in the transportation business. Could that be happening to us?

The NFL is most assuredly in the content busines today. I would assert that we should continue to develop that business, AND we should assign a person or a team to pursue the communication business as well. After all, the Internet is not an oligarchy. It’s pure democracy. We should organize ourselves around the laws of this new land.

Another phenomenon that’s caught my eye lately: a very small percentage of people who visit a web site or (or this blog) will actually post.

“Come on, Maverick, engage!”

You remember the scene in “Top Gun” where our hero, Tom Cruise, guilt ridden from the death of his side-kick, Goose, just couldn’t engage? Tom had emotional baggage which lead to fear of flying (and fighting). He lost his stinger there for a while, but eventually his Top Gun character returns and he saves the day.

But what about the rest of us? We won’t say much. Why are we like this?

We did a survey last season and asked our season ticket holders what they like to do before the games. A large percentage to out to eat, or tailgate; and many like to watch the players warm up, but by far the most popular thing to do before games is PEOPLE WATCH. Fans go to games to watch other fans in addition to watching players. That strikes me as oddly interesting. I can see living vicariously through the players, but I wonder why this fascination with watching other people?

Looking at the data on our current fan forum, it seems we’ve got the same thing happening here. Very few posters. Quite a few lurkers.

Not sure if you can actually read the numbers (I’m still learning about capturing screen shots and re-sizing) so I’ll help you out. I did some quick math to see what is the ratio of posts to page views and found in most cases, there are 95% more views that posts. Lots of people reading, very few people commenting.

I’m wondering, does this reflect society at large? Is this the best we can hope to do? Or will the MySpace generation, people who are growing up as content producers, be more willing to share?

On second thought, perhaps age has less to do with it than you might think. I’ve watched my wife go from “lurker” to “poster” recently. Amy chose to use cloth diapers instead of disposable for our fourth child. Come to find out there’s a huge and vibrant on-line community for moms who cloth diaper their kids (I know it sounds odd, but it’s there). For months, Amy would read and read and read, but never post. Then one day she did it. She posted. Then she did it again. Just the other day she told me she has recorded no fewer than 200 posts in one particular forum. (She has also bought over $500 worth of cloth diapers along the way). If this is any indication, then there is a way to get people who are hesitant to engage to not only post, but they will spend more money once they feel comfortable in the community.

Pew Internet Research reports that only 19% of the people on-line have ever created content for a website.

This number is growing fast, and I do believe that the younger generations coming up the ladder will indeed consume and participate in their media experiences much differently than I have so far. They’re playing fantasy football, their in Second Life, they’re building their own content pages, linking to friends, playing Madden NFL on their XBOX or whatever…they’re simply more accustomed to participating. Which leads me to wonder if we’ll ever reach a point where our main audience (young males 12-24) might someday realize that THEIR content is more important than OUR content. I mean, why watch the game when you can play your own? Why idolize a player when you can be one?

Maybe I’m crazy. But at the very least, I believe we need to find more ways to get people to engage so that we can better understand who they are and what makes them tick. Knowing more about our fans will help us keep them as customers (consumers of our content) and help us develop better opportunities for our sponsors. We need to engage with our fans (and they with us) so that we can represent their QUALITY as much their QUANTITY to our sponsors.
Currently, all I can tell a sponsor is the number of eyeballs viewing our screens.

But to do this, we need to enter the conversation ourselves. We have been just as guilty as any lurker in that we push out content but fail to offer ways for fans to engage with us. WE don’t participate in the conversation. Eventually, this will start costing us money. That’s why we’re starting our Fan Network. I can’t tell the value of our fans if the fan won’t engage.

So many of us go through life without engaging in the conversation.

Look at voter registration (and voter turnout), or other statistics like 97% of complaints go unregistered, or 85% of new business leads go unfulfilled. We humans simply won’t engage as much as we could engage. But that doesn’t mean we’re not listening or watching or paying attention.

It reminds me of an old joke: There was a 9-year-old kid who had gone his entire life without ever speaking. Everyone thought he was mute. Then one morning while sitting at the breakfast table, the kids blurts out “this oatmeal’s cold”. His father, feeling as if he’s witnessed a miracle, runs to him and says, “Son, you can speak! What happend? Why have you been quite for so long?” This this the kid replies: “Up until now, everything was fine.” (da dum dum).

I recently asked readers of this blog for to name the top trends they see coming in sports marketing. Read the comments on this post to see what others are thinking…

It’s pretty tough to predict the future these days, especially with the rate of change we’re experiencing. But here goes.

What will be the top 3 trends in sports marketing over next 5 years?

I believe the strongest trends of tomorrow will arise around the solutions to today’s biggest problems. For marketers, these problems include:

1. Consumers are harder to find – as the media market stratifies into niches, it’s tough to find your audience and even tougher to get your prospect’s attention, get your message through and elicit action. In fact the mass media “push” style of advertising seems to be giving way to something new.

2. Consumers have the power – your customer has information at his / her fingertips. Word of mouth is the biggest driver of consumer opinion…traditional advertising methods (which have always been hard to measure) are losing their effectiveness (especially among younger audience) –

3. Consumers don’t trust you – Enron is the poster child for this issue, but it’s not alone. As consumers become better informed, they grow more skeptical, and less likely to buy what you’re selling if your brand isn’t authentic in their minds.

So those are some of the biggest challenges facing marketers today, how can we solve them? And what “trends” will emerge in sports marketing over the next 5 years?

1. Return to “sponsorship”

Sponsorship in its truest sense is a wonderful model. A company desires to engage with an audience, so it finds ways to add value to that audience’s life or experience. Often this means finding something that is important to that audience (some cause, like a sports team or event) and underwriting some aspect of that event in order to enhance the fan’s experience. The sponsor doesn’t push product at the fan. The sponsor earns favor with the fan by enhancing the fan experience. Once it has earned favor (trust), the sponsor’s offers are more likely to be heard, received and acted upon by the fans. In my opinion, avid fans are the most likely to appreciate the sponsor’s efforts and be lead to buy.

Keys for sponsorship success: target avids, add value, improve reputation, earn business

2. Beyond the stadium and TV

To truly engage with a fan base, sponsors today need to go beyond the stadium and beyond television. For example, only 280,000 fans attend Colts games in our stadium each year, yet 6 million Colts fans visited our Website last year. The stadium is not the ONLY place to find AVID fans. In fact, the Website is the place where you’ll find more avid fans, more often. And the Web is just the beginning. Sponsors need to consider mobile, E mail, IPTV and other new media channels in order to truly activate their programs and reach fans where they are.

Keys for sponsorship success: go digital, go national, personalize the fan experience

3. Recognize the ecosystem and put the fan first

Sponsorships are a form of partnership. In the past, these partnerships have typically included only the sponsor and the team. Now these partnerships must also include the fan. Whatever program gets produced, sponsors and teams need to put the fan experience first. Improve the fan experience, and the fan will buy more tickets and the fan will buy more product.

Key for sponsorship success: focus on fan’s ROE (return on experience)

As you can see, I believe the consumer is the key, not the marketer. I feel like the only “problems” that should matter to marketers are those which effect customers or prospects. If we’re not solving problems for people, and if we’re not offering products and services that make improve their lives, then we shouldn’t expect our marketing efforts to succeed.

What does success look like?

I get asked this question a lot. My boss wants to know. Sponsors want to know. Heck I WANT TO KNOW!

But by what measuring stick should we evaluate our success?

By the number of people who register into the system?
By the number of return visits?
By the number of ‘clicks’?

Or is there some other, deeper value to our online community?

Traffic figures are what media buyers and sponsors are looking to buy. We HAVE to have traffic.

But there’s something bigger going on here. Something quite special.

When you look at this site you see what fans are made of. You read stories about how they became fans…how they experience the Colts, and you see their families and their pets and their friends. You get a little window into their lives. Sure, some of the stuff you see is off the wall and even a little sophomoric. But many folks in our community are doing what I hoped they would do. They are CONNECTING with other people and forming new friendships.

It is these friendships that makes the Colts experience more fun. It is these friendships that will cause more and more folks to become connected and make Colts games into rituals, habits that will be hard to break. It’s these friendships that make Sundays the best day of the week. It is these friendships that will help them in other areas of life as well and on other days of the week.

It’s all about community. That’s where the value is for the FANS.

You should be able to “grab” this widget and send it right to your personal profile page inside most social networking systems. Myspace is the one big exception. If you’re using Myspace, you’ll need to copy the code (near the bottome of the widget) and paste it in by hand.

This widget features action photos of Colts players. We’re sending through XML feed the 8 most recent photos from Colts.com, and we’ve programmed it so that it will scrol through a slide show shwoing a mixture of different players.

We’re also sending through XML our top news headlines and our most recent video additions. All the links on this site drive traffic back to colts.com. Aside from giving fans a cool thing to stick on their social network pages, driving traffic to colts.com is our main goal.

Please note, Myspace does not automatically allow links to send traffic away from its pages, but we’re working to fix that right now.

We’re also promoting our Super Bowl tickets contest through this widget.

I explained the Colts “widget” strategy in a previous post. You’ll remember we’re working with Clearspring Technologies on this beta project. Clearspring has a widget syndication system that will allow us to get our widget posted into widget galleries, and track where our widget goes on the Web. If it gets grabbed, posted or forwarded to a friend, we’ll know about it.

View Nominees

Slide and RockYou have been the most talked-about widgets this year, with Slide.com gaining a little more traction with the MySpace set. Both are impressive products which give users the freedom to express themselves. Even the launch of MySpace’s own service, MySpace slideshows, didn’t put a dent in the popularity of these two slideshow tools. Zingfu, another one of our favorites this year, has also achieved success by allowing users to create funny images of themselves and their friends. Meanwhile, we think Stickam’s live webcams are a killer idea, and the service will be a big success. We’re also hopeful that MyBlogLog, a service that helps communities to form around blogs, will successfully expand to the mainstream in 2007 – they added support for MySpace only a few weeks ago, and we think that could be crucial.

The popular vote, meanwhile, went to Zwinky. The avatar service has a huge, dedicated user base consisting largely of teens. In our original review, we said that Zwinky “will probably be a massive viral success despite a lack of interest from the geek elite”. We stand by that claim going into 2007.