MLB, the Major League Baseball communicated yesterday the launch of their new @MLB blog “because sometimes 140 characters is just not enough. This blog will be used frequently to support our main @MLB account on Twitter.”

MLB, which counts at the time I write 353,291 followers on Twitter, is one of the most active Sport Organisations in the field of online technology and social media.

Very unusual choice, the @MLB blog,  but only apparently. At first we could ask ourselves why would MLB somehow go “against the nature” of Twitter, which by definition is “a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices”.

If we “extend” it into a blog then it is not Twitter anymore. Why not having just a blog then? Or why not combining Twitter and Facebook where the latter allows longer text and display images in a more attractive way?

I think that MLB has done the right strategic choice here.

They probably thought:

1. We have a good fan base on Twitter
2. Our Facebook page hasn’t got a particularly big audience ( 37,000 fans, as opposed to NHL with 130,000, NFL with 155,000 and NBA 1,415,000 fans), which wouldn’t give us enough visibility even if we wanted to integrate our message through Twitter and Facebook together.
3. Building an audience from scratch on a separate blog (as an official MLB “voice” besides all the great individual blogs on MLBlogs) would take time and probably disperse energy and fans.

And here is the only apparently unusual choice of a “Twitter extension” blog.

I agree with this strategy as it is the smartest way to leverage MLB’s at the moment biggest social network, the 353,291 followers on Twitter, and integrate the platform with an “appendix”, but more than anything else it shows how a powerful and smart strategy makes the difference and technology alone is useless.

I like also the choice of MLB to explore new paths and solutions, even going against the ones that will shout out at the “violation” of Twitter’s nature (oh please…).

Didn’t we say it already a few weeks ago? The limit of Online Technology is creativity and personality.

Alessandro De Zanche

I have been in Spain for the whole of last week and I was lucky enough to catch two of the most famous, several centuries old celebrations of the region of Catalunya: Barcelona’s “Festa Major de Gràcia” and Sitges’ “Festa Major”, Gràcia being a Barcelona’s neighbourhood and Sitges a town outside Barcelona.

Festa Mayor de Gràcia

The amazing feeling of a community tied together by an ancestral bond, the magnetic energy coming out from those events have been a living sample of all those values that we can find in Sport and Online Technology.
Whatever I looked, wherever I was, it was full of similarities with a Sport event, even more: it was the prototype of the dream fan base.

It works in this way: for months, kids, teenagers, adults up to elderly members of the community spend a lot of their free time to plan a theme for the next “Festa”, trying to come up with the best idea for a “make up” of their street/s that will compete against other streets and neighbourhoods.

Festa Major de Gràcia

For months the whole community interacts, works together, exchanges opinions and support, builds decorations and artefacts that will be mounted and displayed during the celebration (I am posting a few images).

The teamwork climax of the community is reached with the “Castell”, the human tower: members of the neighbourhood build a human tower of even more than 10 levels by climbing on each others’ shoulders. As you can imagine the level of trust and collaboration has to be absolute: usually adult men are the foundation of the tower and act also as a safety net for the upper levels, while the age of the tower elements decreseases with the upper levels up to the very top, usually a very small child.

Castell in Sitges

What are the values I found in those communities during the celebrations? Here are my keywords: Openness, Sharing, Collaboration, Interaction, Communities, Networking, ‘Tribe’, Passion, Loyalty, Commitment, Desire, Involvement, Community, Belonging, Family.

Can you recognise them? They are the same core values shared by Sport and Online Technology.

Can we take home some learning from those amazing social events? We should.

Passion and loyalty don’t come only with victories, they come through a bond between people, between fan and fan, fan and players, club and team, club and city, club and region, if not nation.

Online technology today gives us the tools to build all this: it takes time, it takes a lot of hard work, but it also takes a lot of authenticity and strong values that tools and platforms need to be filled with, as otherwise they would just be cold, empty, lifeless containers.

The US BIG EAST Conference Athletics gives us a great example of legend/myth building with its sixovertimes.com website, building on top of an historic game while in parallel developing revenue opportunities with the sale of related, celebrative items.

My last thought on the train back last night was about Technology: nice to note that while it is becoming more and more powerful, opening doors and opportunities like never before, at the same time it is increasing more than ever the importance of elements like humanity, authenticity, personal relationships and contribution.

Alessandro De Zanche

Usain Bolt & Berlino the bear

Berlino the Bear is apparently the top celebrity of the moment. Berlin 2009 Athletics World Championships' mascot has been constantly at the centre of the attention!

First it threw himself in a hug with pole vault champion Anna Rogowska.
Next came a little dance-and-drop with javelin gold medallist Steffi Nerius, then he was even hoisted onto the back of discus champ Robert Harting!

Later came the poses with Usain Bolt, who showed off a t-shirt with the words “Ich bin ein Berlino” written on it in biro, followed by a 50m race down the back straight in the aftermath of Bolt’s 200m demolition.
The climax though was reached with the ride he gave new 400m hurdles champion Melaine Walker.
A new star has born and it potentially has all the skills to become a web star too.

Stamford the lion

There are some great examples of big clubs or companies using their mascot’s popularity as a bridge to their online audiences, making them become de facto spokesman of the team: it is a very efficient way to gain popularity and affection.

One of the most popular mascots in Twitter is Stamford the Lion, that constantly updates Chelsea FC fans with news from the club and the locker room.

Outside sports another top celebrity is Aflac Duck, the voice of Aflac Insurance Policies.

Aflac Duck

A mascot with an online role allows to set a different tone in the conversation with the fan base, giving additional flexibility to the Organisation’s online communication strategy.

I love when creativity takes off and brings a down to earth, friendly, strong and loyal relationship between Organisation and fans: isn’t what we are supposed to build anyway?

If you know of any local mascots and good examples of their online roles, please share with us!

Alessandro De Zanche

Mario Rossi owns an ice cream shop in Rome, but he is running out of business.
He chose to open his liquorice-ice cream-only shop based exclusively on his flavour of preference.
Apparently the majority of ice cream lovers haven't got the same taste and the shop is deserted. Mario rather than focusing on his customers' taste is still convinced that liquorice ice cream is the best in the world and blames the negative situation on location and economic downturn.

Ice cream at the baseball game

Pietro Bianchi owns an ice cream shop on the same street as Mario, just on the opposite end.
He carefully analyses the flavours of choice of his customers (among the 12 flavours on display) and regularly tops up the production of the most requested ones, also adapting the order flavours are displayed in, giving better spots to the most successful ones.
He also realised that customers were often standing outside the shop, sometimes having the occasional chat, sometimes proper, intense conversations. He decided then to provide an area with tables and chairs so his customers could spend more time in the shop, have the chance to relax while exchanging opinions and, last but not least, buying more ice cream.

With time, Pietro learnt that walking around tables and listening to his customers he was also gathering very valuable insights about his products and in more than an occasion he changed the recipe of a flavour to adapt it to what his customers really like.

This (silly?) metaphor is perfectly adaptable to any Sport Organisation’s online strategy: only those who learn to analyse their audience base, “listen” to their fans, understand what they need, give them the opportunity to interact with each other and with the Organisation itself (being it a league, team, athlete or a company) will successfully grow their audience and their monetisation opportunities.

The alternative? Get stuffed with a liquorice ice cream nobody is interested in, see your fan base developing far from you with no advantages to you, being it from an audience perspective or financial.
Even worse, miss the opportunity to engage with them, leaving the relationship with your fans based on results and victories which, as you well know, is a very dangerous and ever changing situation even for the most successful of the Organisations.

Alessandro De Zanche

With an integrated use of social platforms like youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, Puma is spreading a viral initiative revolving around Usain Bolt, that the other day shattered a world record again, running 100 meters in 9.58 seconds at the 2009 Berlin IAAF Athletics World Championships.

Usain Bolt

As Puma’s viral video says, “it all happened in Beijing back in 2008. Bolt broke the world record for the 100m dash. In his excitement he raised his arms and pointed them to the sky. Like one of those Hercules-shooting-a-bow-and-a-arrow-statues you see in a museum”.

Since then the pose has become a Bolt’s trademark, requested by fans and media whenever and wherever the athlete goes, over and over again, “39,743.5″ times so far (as stated in the video).

“Puma has worked for the last year to develop a solution to this problem”: the Bolt arms!

The arms have been banned from the stadium in Berlin and now Puma is asking via Twitter to fans if anybody managed to “sneak” them inside.

Enjoy the video below but especially the great idea itself and the integrated use of social media.

Alessandro

The Bolt arms: click to watch the press conference

Collegefanz.com, a news and social website dedicated to collegiate sports and their fans founded in 2007 by the founder of ESPN, Bill Rasmussen is is expanding its three-year-old online college-sports community with video offerings, starting with one live NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) football broadcast each week. The games will all be available free of charge at www.CollegeFanz.com.

“The NAIA just doesn’t get very much exposure — you might even say none — from a TV point of view,” Rasmussen says. “We’ll go to each campus, and it will be an event when we come in. Our van is all wrapped with College Fanz branding, and sponsors and the students otherwise don’t get to experience this.”

The game broadcast, complete with pre- and post-game shows produced live on location, will use nine cameras housed in a modified 16-foot Wells Cargo trailer, which serves as an innovative mobile broadcasting unit.

“Everything today is miniaturised, so we’ve outfitted a van with a production trailer,” Rasmussen explains. “Our van carries nine cameras, and we’ll do pre-game, halftime, and post-game shows. We’re going to do real, live television on all of these campuses.”

European sport organisations: if you were ever wondering where the future lies…

Alessandro De Zanche

There are a lot of talks about databases and data collection among Sport Organisations too.

I spoke to a few of them in the last two months about the importance of a carefully and strategically planned step to approach the online world, more focused on new opportunities and leveraging the latest technology rather than on prehistory (the read-only internet where websites were online brochures, mass targeting without distinction whoever landed on a certain page).

The key point here is not about just collecting data, but how we use the data also.

I’ll make an example using Behavioural Targeting, a product I worked on for years at Yahoo!.

One of the biggest issue we had was to persuade companies and advertising agencies that “Behavioural Targeting” is an empty word, with dozens of different providers and platforms making a different use of the collected data, hence the need, before making a choice on what provider to use, to have a high level understanding on how each platform is working (leveraging the data).

Leveraging the data is the key

I know it sounds geeky, but many Targeting companies are taking advantage of clients not being up to speed with technology, selling them a product that of Behavioural Targeting has got only the name.

Approach Product A: Sometime (a week? a month? six months ago?), somewhere on some page, Barry clicked on an ad about Cars, hence we assume Barry is interested in Cars so we will serve him Cars related ads.

Approach Product B: Two days ago Bill clicked on two Cars ads and searched for Cars related keywords, while today he visited a Cars related page. We do NOT ONLY know that Bill is interested in Cars, we know that Bill is HIGHLY interested in Cars NOW, so we can leverage this data by serving him Cars related ads.

Question: which of the two products will give me more Conversions? The one that generically targets users that have generically shown interest in a product at some generic point in time or the one that scientifically and methodically picks users with a high interest in a product in this very moment?

Same applies to Sport Organisations.
Strategic planning and goal setting allow to:

1. Designing tools, platforms, initiatives and practices that will collect the specific data we need.
2. Leveraging the data at the right time for hitting our goals, being it monetisation, audience building, or any other objective.

Alessandro De Zanche

While NFL is updating its game day policy on Social Media, it gives the opportunity to reflect a bit more on how Sport Organisations approach social media.

There are some great examples of openness like i.e. the US Women’s Professional Soccer league that last March allowed players to use Twitter during the league’s inaugural game between Los Angeles Sol and Washington Freedom (this may be a bit too far in my opinion but at least shows the will to experiment and being transparent and open) or NBA teams like the Phoenix Suns, that have at least 18 different Twitter accounts encompassing the whole of their organization, from the team, to players, to dancers, to their PR and web development team and even one for their mascot, or the Cleveland Cavaliers, that have already been a subject of a past Fastbreak Digital’s post.

What is a shame to me is that apparently the focus with Sport Organisations and Social Media is mostly on what forbidding, where limiting, how much will the fine be. There is a gripping fear of what will go out rather than a volcanic excitement in realising the incredible potential to widen and engage new and existing audiences.

When will Sport Organisations instead start coming up with a Social Media strategy plan, taking advantage of all the available platform and tools and encouraging players, coaches, fans (within boundaries of course, nobody is denying the need of regulation) to engage online, making Sport events more personal and social?

Will Europe, that has been so far quite inactive apart from a few brilliant cases, catch up and take advantage of US Sport Organisations’ learning curve?

Alessandro De Zanche

Early ‘80s, Northern Italy.
A 12 years old kid periodically stops in front of a wall in a city‘s central street, where a couple of local ski clubs’ notice boards display news about past events, weekends on the snow, pictures of participants.

2009, same city, same wall.
The (still young!) guy, now in his late 30s, is taking a stroll downtown. He doesn’t live there anymore and doesn’t have many chances to be around so the walk has very much the feel of a trip back in time.
For his astonishment the notice boards are still there and still getting updated, 30 years on!

In an era where social technology is changing the Internet and the way the world works, the ancestors of Facebook and Twitter are still there, on the same wall, and with updated content (photos, calendar of events, summaries of the group’s previous days out).

Amazing and sweet to see how decades haven’t changed anything in what used to catch my attention as a kid, despite dozens of online platforms and tools ready for use being available to Sport organizations and communities.

But nothing happens without a reason and while I was reading the board, a middle-aged guy came to post new material (the display is protected by a glass so only the person who in the Internet age we would call the “administrator” can change the content).

We started talking.

He told me about their passion as a community, the fact that the kids of the early members are now in the club as well, about the friendship and relationships that generated through skiing together through the years.
At a certain point, still not believing to what I had just discovered, a mix of mellow memories of my childhood and professional interest, I asked why they kept the notice board up through decades and never moved it online, listing all the benefits and advantages.

The reply was clear: they don’t want a profit or any financial benefit whatsoever and they have a strong link to tradition, they don’t want the community grow uncontrolled and getting out of hand and they are worried about monitoring what people post.

I understand his point of view, as there could be a few misconceptions around the subject.
Stepping into the online social scenario is not only for people that have as a goal monetization and revenue and most of the times, with a help of a few settings, the community is the best monitor of itself.
One of the main motivators for joining the Social technology revolution is pride and the increasing need of belonging to a group with a defined identity.

I told my new friend that a new approach wouldn’t mean that they would have to take off their historic bulletin board but that it would also allow people like me that have never met any of them to share my experience and say thank you for this memory trip through my teenage years.

Alessandro De Zanche

Antonio Cromartie

San Diego Chargers’ NFL Star Antonio Cromartie has been fined yesterday $2,500 by his club for making a comment from his private account on Twitter, talking about the quality of food at the Chargers’ training camp, as reported by ESPN.

Cromartie tweeted: “Man we have 2 have the most nasty food of any team. Damn can we upgrade 4 str8 years the same ish maybe that’s y we can’t win the SB [Super Bowl] we need.”

A few weeks ago Nike confiscated video tapes of College kid Jordan Crawford slam dunking over LeBron James.

Both Nike and San Diego Chargers by trying to hide the news and attempting to silence the facts have obtained the exact opposite result, litterally throwing them on a planetary stage and generating a never ending tail of comments, articles, opinions and… laughter.

Click to watch Crawford's interview

With today’s online technology it takes a matter of seconds for word of mouth and news to travel globally. This is a fantastic opportunity but sometime it can be a threat as well.
Both the opposite situations have a trait in common: there is no way to silence it.

So better be open and honest and react creatively: everybody at some point in his career has been slam dunked on, and San Diego Chargers’ food could be improved, right?

It might even be a great opportunity for a creative viral reply, making fun about the facts.
What is sure is that with social technology the world has changed and there is no way back.

Alessandro De Zanche