If Shaquille O’Neil is one of the athletes that are making the best use of online social platforms (think of his 1,808,777 followers on Twitter or his 823,845 fans on Facebook), his new team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, is not second to any other Sport Organisations.

On their cavfanatic.com social website they count as many as 14,433 members, 6,002 blog posts, 44,488 photos, personal videos, etcetera.
It features fans’ personal profiles and blogs, forums and groups.

Looking at groups I had the feeling of the core meaning of a community built around passion and loyalty to a sport club.
It’s not just a list of groups dedicated to this or that player, to this and that tournament, but also cross subjects like a group for Graphic Fanatics (users of graphic software like Photoshop and MS Paint), for Poker players, for Streetball players, for weightlifters, for people of Polish or Filipino’s nationality: all with different interests but connected and engaged through the same passion, the Cleveland Cavaliers.

From a monetisation perspective, this is a gold mine for merchandising, ticketing and subscription based services: it’s an active, solid, engaged audience.

The strategy here is key: a social website, separated by the club’s website, totally built around fans and their needs, and only as a consequence becoming an opportunity for monetisation.
From a fan perspective it’s about trust and freedom, it’s about feeling that the website is THEIR space, not a controlled environment with a top to bottom feed of filtered news and sale offers, where the club presence is visible only via advertising banners, like it would happen for any external sponsor.

While the debate on how to target more efficiently online audiences is always hot (how do you find them? where?), the Cleveland Cavaliers have made the smartest choice: have created their own audience, know exactly where it is located and strategically talk to them.

Alessandro De Zanche