Social Media platforms are incredibly popular and therefore a necessary part of any web content plan. You can’t participate on Facebook, Twitter, etc. without a roadmap for what you are going to publish, when, and who’s responsible for it. This doesn’t mean planning out each individual Tweet in advance, but it does mean understanding what is and is not helpful from the perspective of helping the team accomplish its goals. It is especially important because too often businesses diving into social media do so by using it to broadcast messages, when the real purpose of, and success stories in, social media involve listening to and interacting with fans/customers.

Twitter should primarily be used to provide news, behind-the-scenes info and pictures, and answer fans’ questions in real-time. While it should be used several times per day year-round, it provides the most value to fans (and therefore sponsors) just before, during, and just after races. Not even live TV, radio, or cycling media text updates can provide a complete picture of everything that’s happening at a race, making team-supplied updates a valuable commodity. Since races are incredibly hectic, a plan needs to be in place for who is responsible for tweeting, what they can and cannot say, and, if they have to stop to care for a rider, who steps in to let fans know why the stream has gone quiet. One thing I have yet to see, but would be a fantastic use of Twitter, would be a staff member answering questions during the race about what is going on. Hard? Yes. Sure to generate growth in engaged, interested followers? Definitely.

Where Twitter is the live update and interaction stream, Facebook is the place to cultivate deeper connections with fans. Its robust capabilities to share news, images, and video, and for fans to share the same with you, creates a unique environment where you can interact on a meaningful level. It provides the ability to create an incredibly detailed portrait of your technology savvy fans through polls, surveys, and day-to-day interactions – it is the environment online where people feel the most comfortable sharing personal information. This also makes it a great place to introduce your sponsors to fans in a meaningful way. Polls and contests are ubiquitous and expected, so don’t seem so much like the interruption marketing we all hate so much – just be careful not to overdo it! While the creation of a Facebook page is simple, the maintenance of it (which is the critical part of success), is time intensive. Even though updates can be less frequent than on Twitter, because it is a less anonymous medium, they take longer to create and fan interactions must be more personal.

Video is one of the most effective media for attracting fans, but means frequently updated content, which can quickly use up server space and bandwidth, the two potentially large variables in Internet costs. Fortunately, hosted platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Ustream provide a cost-effective way to provide video content on a consistent basis, and also to allow fans to post their own videos, further drawing them into the experience. The quickly falling price of quality video components has driven the cost of video down from the 10s of thousand of dollars into the low hundreds, with little discernible loss in quality. Ubiquitous Internet access makes it possible to upload video from virtually anywhere, but has created the expectation on the fans’ part that video will be uploaded from anywhere. Because of that, a simple, realistic plan for uploading video on a regularly scheduled basis is a requirement of any modern web content strategy.

But, as with most things in life, it’s not quite so black and white. The US Twitterverse alone is expected to cross 25million users in 2010, meaning that being found within that crowd is going to become harder and harder. People follow more and more folks, and unless you’ve already got a name, even your good content can get lost in the shuffle. One of the solutions, especially if you’re trying to use Twitter as a marketing channel, is to build a huge follower count knowing that some percentage of those people actually will see what you say. You can afford to only have 10% of your followers see what you write if you have 10,000 of them, right?

Most of these follower auto-generators sell themselves on that principle – you need a big following, so pay us money to get one for you! With varying degrees of accuracy and targeting, they work by following other twitterer’s followers. Going on the theory that 50% of people automatically follow anyone who follows them, if the software can follow 500 people per day for you (without tripping Twitter’s spam filters), that’s 250 new followers every day – bingo!

Like I said, my first reaction is to go running away from these damn spam bots. This isn’t growing my list organically, this is gaming the system. It’s just not right!

But life isn’t that cut and dried. What if the software followed the followers of your competitors? Sure, that might be a bit bold, but if they’re interested in what your competition has to say, won’t they be interested in you? What if you could target keywords, so the software picked people that were clearly interested in what you have to say? In a way, you are actually doing them a service, assuming you have something to write about. After all, what good is a storefront on Broadway if you don’t have a sign out telling people what you do!?

In the end, it all comes down again to having a plan for posting content, interacting with the community, and being useful. If you can’t do that, beating AplusK’s follower count won’t do you the slightest bit of good. So, build yourself a plan, write some great stuff, and if you buy yourself some followers, I promise not to gag reflexively.

The Internet isn’t a place…

…it’s a communications technology. It took me a while to realize that. Most websites, whether in sports or not, still treat the internet as a place, a storefront if you will. But it’s not been that for some time. Seth Godin talks about a website being “a step in a process.” For cycling teams, there’s the process of turning casual fans into team fans and the process of marketing their sponsors’ products/services. The creation of easy-to-use social media applications has shifted the website’s place in the process, but it is still a step along the way.

Modern web strategies that reach out to and interact with fans must incorporate social media (where the fans already are), which means your website is a critical hub for all your online activities. Like a hub, its spokes reach out to where fans are on major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., but the hub is where the process is driven. It should include:

• Basic Content – like a FAQ, the site should clearly and compellingly explain who you are, who your riders are, who your sponsors are, what they do, when you are going to be where, what you’ve accomplished, and how fans can interact with you. Just because it is basic content does not mean that it needs to be presented in a simple and boring manner. Multi-media should be used to make the site a destination. Content must be updated regularly, giving fans a reason to come back again and again.
• Media Resources – particularly in sports, the media is a key tool for spreading word about your team and your sponsors. Media resources can no longer include only boiler-plate press releases and stock photography, but should include a full suite of resources in a variety of media that help reporters tell your story, as well as being consistently updated with new story ideas. If there’s one thing reporters love, it’s subjects that make it easy for them to file interesting stories on tight deadlines.
• Clear Links to Social Media – since fans are going to be on Facebook, Twitter, etc. anyway, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to find you wherever they go. Direct links out to your fan pages, video channels, podcasts, etc. are more critical than aggregating that content on your own website. It is also important to think about where on your site a fan might click across to, say, Facebook and what you want them to see when the land there. The two experiences have to flow seamlessly together.
• Robust Data Capture – While there are several effective tools for monitoring social media statistics, none of them yet match the ability for you to gather accurate and detailed data on your own site. This data is used to adapt your content plan on the fly and provide detailed evidence of the value you offer your sponsor. A with-it sponsor will be a data-analysis partner to maximize the opportunities available.

Site Design and Content Concepts

A study has shown that website visitors decide in 4 seconds whether or not they are going to stay on a site. The best content in the world won’t keep fans at your site unless they immediately have a visually arresting way of telling them that your site is worth their time. Fortunately, cycling’s innate beauty makes it easy to capture fans’ interest immediately.

The design of the site is the key factor in making a first impression. Detailed attention must be paid to cleanly integrate sponsor graphic themes in a manner that generates a strong mental impression, but doesn’t overpower the rest of the site content. Fans have come to expect that in a sport as visually compelling as cycling, team websites will have beautiful images that dominate every page of the site. A great design gives fans the conscious impression that you have great images of the races and riders that they love, while leaving them a subconscious visual impression of your sponsors.

Visual design is not the be-all-end-all though, because once a fan’s interest is captured, you have to provide them something of value to keep them around. The major cycling news sites have captured the market for general race reports, news, and press releases, so don’t even go there. Sure, you can put up your press releases in a newsroom, but a great team website must therefore provide something more, a deeper connection to the team that they can’t get from Cyclingnews or Velonews. This content should change throughout the year to emphasize and focus on the riders and events that hold center stage in the cycling news media at that time. Augmenting your text with images, audio, and video is now easy, inexpensive, and from the fans perspective, expected.

Now that we’ve got a basic structure in place, next week I’ll cover integrating it with your social media accounts, both technically and strategically. As always, if you have any thoughts, comments, or questions, hit me up in the comments or on Twitter.

Once upon a time, a cool website was a “nice-to-have” element of a cycling team’s marketing assets. But as individuals and corporations both large and small lead the way onto the social web, it has become a vital core of the marketing portfolio. Complicating matters even more is the speed at which web trends and technologies develop. Twitter and Facebook were nice-to-have elements last year, this year they are a must-have. Within the next year, some new technology that is just on the fringe now will become a vital element of a sports marketing portfolio.

Sadly, you can rarely look to traditional marketing and PR firms for support in keeping on top of the web. Some agencies have areas of competence, and some digital agencies can create spectacular looking websites, but they usually come at a price and rarely understand the unique opportunities cycling presents to teams and their sponsors. Of course, if you are concentrating full-time on running a team, you don’t have time to keep up with what works, where fans are, and how they interact with each other, you, and your sponsors. So you put up a quick blogger “website”, or if you’re lucky a Wordpress or other CMS-based website, posting content in the form of race reports that get written by whoever has the time or was at the races that week. There’s no season-long plan, little adoption of the variety of inexpensive multi-media tools, and too often a lack of follow-through (how many teams last posted content in September, August, or even July of 2009?).

The move of corporate marketing dollars from traditional media outlets to online and customer engagement outlets demands that sponsored properties create and manage modern online media programs, regardless of time-intensity. This series outlines a strategy for creating an engaging team website, integrating it with social media outlets, and populating all of them with content that engages fans, delivers value to the current sponsors, and establishes a framework that increases the value of the team to existing and future sponsors.

This series will cover four separate areas teams need to consider when developing a strategy for creating web content:

• The website as an online hub
• Connecting with social media
• Integrating Multi-media
• Measuring, measuring, measuring

We won’t talk about everything in detail, and we won’t cover ever last potential item, idea, or tactic. The idea is to give you an idea of what the landscape is like, what the basics are, and give you a way to measure yourself against a benchmark. The idea is that you can improve in a few areas depending on time and budget, deliver more value to your sponsors (justifying more money), and take the next set of steps. Hit me up in the comments or on Twitter if you have questions, thoughts, or topics you’d like to make sure I cover.

You see, over the holidays, things got hectic chez Cardillo. There was a trip back to O-H-I-O (cold!), roomates moving out (surprise!), my own move (double surprise!), and of course client projects (no surprise there!). All of this meant I got behind on writing these posts, and couldn’t even keep up with my normal weekly schedule. Not even one post per week – weak!

It’s not that I didn’t have ideas for posts. It’s not really even that I got too busy. No, the real reason is that I didn’t execute the part of my plan that involved creating a quiver. A quiver, for a writer, is a set of posts that are pre-created and require little-to-no additional work to post. The kind of content that’s in there ready to go when you only have 5 minutes before you board your flight, or you’re laying sick in bed and can’t summon your creative juices. They are best when they are time-independent thoughts on your topic. Above all, they are useful.

They are not posts that you wrote and didn’t like. They are not posts that you never finished and need to wrap up and edit extensively. They are not time-sensitive topics you never got around to (my gut reaction to Tiger’s “indiscretions” is not a post in the quiver for May 2010). They are definitely not topics that you haven’t written about, but can put together a half-assed post on in 5 minutes.

So, I drained my quiver and never filled it back up. Instead of researching for inspiration in free time and knocking out some posts, I kicked back with a few beers instead of one. I went for a 4 hour ride when only 2.5 was in the works. I tried to find the partners to the single socks that appear after I do laundry. Anything but doing my bloody job.

So, dear reader, I’m back on it. Even though it’s a hectic time of year, I’m only having one beer, keeping the rides short, and leaving those single socks lonely – all to make sure there’s a full quiver of lessons from my mistakes. If I do it right, you’ll never know when I’m too busy to write.

The problem is pretty straightforward: Jokes that are funny when you’re in your mid-teens tend not to be funny to other groups – in this case women, or most adults in general. But with some very quick searching, I found this prospect was not alone; some of his peers also left an unseemly electronic breadcrumb trail that, I would have to expect, could illicit [sic] some pretty damning questions when the NHL draft combine comes up in the summer.

To further complicate matters, you not only have to worry about what you say, you also have to worry about what your friends say. This, of course, is more of a problem on services like Facebook where mutual consent is required than on Twitter, where you can’t possibly be expected to be held accountable for your followers. What this means is that, like the rest of your public communications, you need to have a process and strategy for establishing friend connections, creating and posting materials (text, photos, videos), curating what other people post to your wall, and managing your privacy settings.

My process and strategy for posting on the blog and/or Twitter is fairly simple – I call it the Mom Test. Basically, would my Mom be offended if she were to read this? Not “tut-tut-that’s-not-nice” but actually “can’t-look-her-in-the-eye” offended. If it fails that test, it doesn’t get posted, period. Same goes for things that get posted on my Facebook wall. Same goes for photos and videos (I’m lookin’ at you, Iinterbike!).

My Facebook friending strategy revolves around actual connections. Family obviously makes the cut, friends that I’ve known, and work connections that I have a more-than-professional relationship with. People that I ran into that one time at a race or bar don’t make the cut, nor do people I quickly did a project for (they end up on LinkedIn). If I actually had success in any of my sporting endeavors, all of those people’s friend requests would have been directed to a Facebook Fan Page with a polite note saying something like, “my friend list is confined to close, personal friends and family. I have a fan page, and look forward to connecting with you there!” Nice and polite.

The curation strategy goes back to the Mom Test. If it’s written on my wall and would offend Mom, it comes down. That goes for both the personal page as well as the fan page.

Finally there is the matter of privacy settings. My personal preference is to set everything to only be visible to Friends, and remove the ability for others to tag me in photos and videos. Especially because images can be taken out of context, you don’t want to be explaining away photo after photo. Make sure your settings notify you every time you’re tagged in a photo, and if it doesn’t pass the Mom Test, remove the tag and/or ask the poster to take the photo down.

That prescription might sound terribly restrictive, but it really is the best way to nip problems in the bud before an employer, team, or sponsor walks away from you.

Will everyone stop criticizing social media please! Not only is my jury out on this one, but I think all of your juries should be. A) It’s just a tool. B) It’s in its infancy. It’s a good thing the early adopters of the car or bicycle didn’t listen to their detractors and hop off at the first signs of criticism, no matter how valid.

The history of the bicycle is littered with what are, in retrospect, poor designs. Clunky, awkward, impractical, or otherwise a pain-in-the-ass designs abounded. But this was an early stage where innovative ideas were being explored, and has eventually led to a wide variety of adaptations that are useful in their own specific space.

Of course, they have always been, and always will be, used by dumb people to do dumb or useless things. From tight-jeaned skidding through red lights to lycra-clad snobbery, there will always be someone doing something that somebody else doesn’t like. Who cares! Run with it. If you want to tweet about your morning coffee, go ahead. Own it! If people don’t want to listen, that’s their business. Just like failed bike designs, the market will determine if you succeed or fail in your chosen endeavour, but even “failing” doesn’t mean your time has been useless.

Social media to you might be a way to “hang out” with friends and family spread around the world. Maybe these people are interested in what you have for breakfast because it helps foster that banal connection that is part of being proximate to friends and family. Less than 5% of Twitter users have more than 100 followers, meaning that 95% of you are connecting with a close, intimate group. That’s cool. Write whatever you want. Hell, Lance has >1,000,000 followers and he still tweets about useless stuff.

My rambling point is this. Neither I, nor anyone else, knows which structure and use is going to become the diamond frame design of social media. So go ahead and play. See what works, what doesn’t, what’s interesting to you, and what isn’t. But remember it’s just a tool; it’s just another way to communicate. Just like the bicycle, I’m sure after 100 years of social media, there will still be people annoying the crap out of us. That doesn’t mean it’s useless, but it doesn’t mean you deserve to make a living from it either.

For me, it’s my clients.
Freedom Bicycles – who trusted me (and Scarlett) to help them build the first website for a new brand, without any industry “chops” to point to. Thanks Marcus (and Dain).
Joan Vernikos – for letting me (and the rest of the team at Mains Associates/Connell-Whittaker) build out her personal brand one step at a time.
Hot Rod Cameras – for having a lot of patience for me playing around with different solutions. Trial and error can be frustrating for clients, but Illya not only rolled with it, he came back for more!
Solvang Cycling Clinic – a lot of back-and-forth would have made it impossible to meet our tight deadline, so Chris gave me the ball and let me run with it.
Meredith Miller – for trusting me with her website, giving me rides to races, couches to sleep on, travel cookies, and mostly being a great friend.

THANK YOU!

My dad was in sales, so he taught me a few basics, worked with me on my pitch, and then sent me off into the cold, cruel world. I was enthusiastic. I was going to sell so many sponsorships, I would make money playing hockey, and I was only 13! (we’ll stick with that age for now) I walked a long way up one side of Pearl St., going in every business, talking to the manager, and getting nowhere. I walked a long way back down Pearl St., going in every business, talking to the manager, and getting nowhere.

By this point, I was getting depressed. Not only was I not going to make money, I wouldn’t sell a damn thing and have to beg my parents for the full fee. This was not going to go over well.

Just as I got back to the corner of my street, I walked into a Great Cuts feeling pretty down. Still, I psyched myself up and delivered my pitch to the district manager, who happened to be in the shop at that particular time.

“Huh, that’s interesting. We could probably do an ad for you,” she said. “How big of an area do you cover?”

I was SO excited! “Man, if I tell her about all the different places we go to for games, she’ll probably want to take out a full-page ad! Maybe even a two-pager!” I told her about all the different places we go to; Detriot, Buffalo, even as far as Chicago and Toronto! Then I started counting the money in my head.

“Oh, for an area that big, we’ll have to run this through the regional office then. Give me the info and I’ll pass it along.”

As you might guess, nothing happened, I got no ad from them, and I was not a Pro pee-wee player. Weak.

The sales manager in me looks back on that experience and cringes. It’s a common mistake, and one that occurs all too often in sponsorship sales. A property walks in to a potential sponsor and spends more time talking about what they have and what they need than finding out what the sponsor is interested in and how they can help.

Thinking back, the audience for that yearbook – the parents and grandparents of the players in the Cleveland area – were exactly the audience she was trying to reach. But since I never asked what she wanted, the opportunity was lost for both of us. Too bad I didn’t have sales training videos to learn from…

Photo courtesy of Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com.

What This VC “gets”

Again, if you’re the money guy, a damn large number of entrepreneurs are naturally going to want to hang around you. But Fred’s community isn’t just that, it’s people from all walks of life attracted to his out-loud-thinking style of writing on a variety of topics. Most of it tech, a lot related to investing, and though he’s moved it to a different service now, for a while music. To me, there’s a few take-aways from his blog.

1. Be open and honest. Fred regularly says “This is what I think, and this is what it’s based on. I could be missing critical information.”
2. Provide something of value. If his readers are willing to open their minds, there are few posts where they won’t walk away without a new, useful tidbit for their life, job, whatever.
3. Engage the community. More and more, Fred engages his community either by directly asking for feedback (what’s your opinion? What’s your experience? Can you provide me with XYZ missing info?) or by positing an opinion that he knows people are going to disagree with, and then participating in the discussion in the comments.

The end result is that Fred has built a vibrant community that is valuable in a few different ways. He learns from them, he can promote his companies’ products to them (and his readers in turn spread the word), and he can monetize them (he donates ad revenue to charity). But how can this be a model for a pro athlete?

The Athlete’s Model

Well, if you think about it, you’re not so different from Fred. You have a built-in audience based on your status as an athlete. This audience wants to interact with you, and wants to interact with other fans of yours. You have insights and opinions based on information that the general public doesn’t have. You have the leeway to write about topics in and out of your sport, and your audience will still play along. So using Fred’s model, you would:

1. Be yourself. Write about the things that interest you. Maybe it’s music, photography, travel, shoes, whatever! There are fans who are interested in what your hobbies.
2. Say something useful. You don’t have to fill your blog (or Twitter account, for that matter) with uninteresting info about your corndog lunch at O’Hare… unless you write about food a lot. Provide an insight into your life, your sport, or your topic of interest that will cause your readers to think.
3. Talk with your fans. This is the biggest way to build a community fast, outside of winning 7 Tours de France. (And I might argue that just because he has a ton of followers doesn’t mean he has a community) People want to engage with you! Blog comments, Twitter, Facebook, etc. all make it dead easy to respond to fans without it taking over your whole day.

And just like Fred, this community can be of value to you. There’s nothing your sponsors (or potential sponsors) want more than trusted access to an interested, engaged, and active community, and you can bring that. As long as you continue to be yourself, say something of value, and interact with your fans, they’ll not begrudge you posting about your nutrition sponsor’s newest energy bar – they’ll thank you for it! Give value, get value.