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.

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.

If the only reason you don’t do something is because you never did, that’s not a good reason. If the environment has changed dramatically and you are feeling pain because of it, this is a great reason to question yourself, to ask why. -Seth Godin

Unless you’re Alberto Contador, you’re probably feeling the effects of the global recession. Whether you’re an athlete, managing a team, or promoting an event, the pinch probably has you worried a bit. The natural inclination I see is to rush headlong towards the activities that have always brought in money in the past, and push them harder than when times were good. Trouble is, that’s probably not the best strategy.

For those companies that still have money, the same-old same-old is not an attractive investment. When consumers are spending less and less, companies want the most direct and efficient route to whatever consumer dollars are out there. No longer can they throw money at a general opportunity and guess which 50% of their budget is bringing the returns. Every dollar needs to be accounted for and producing returns.

If you’re ready to step outside of the usual, this is a great opportunity for you. I’m sure the Specialized/Alberto Contador/Team Astana negotiation was unusual, and the result certainly is. My guess is that the result was a good sponsorship deal for Specialized, a guaranteed contract for Contador, and we’ll now see AC staying at Astana even if their Pro-Tour license isn’t renewed.

But what about missed opportunities?

Daniel Holloway’s personal Ustream of the Munich Six-Day from his laptop was one of the only ways to know what was going on there. What if the promoter set up a couple of cameras, a mixing board, and streamed the event on the Internet? The riders could stop in and chat with fans live between events, and sponsors would have live access to engaged fans. I would bet that they could attract an international audience as large or larger than their current in-person audience, giving them a reason to pitch more and larger sponsors. Critically for six-day promoters, when the event grows in stature internationally, locals will be more likely to show up – who doesn’t want to be part of an EVENT?

Does your local event have a unique feature that stands out from other events? Maybe your men’s fields have gone up and down in quality, but the women’s fields have gone from strength to strength. What would happen if you doubled-down on that and, heaven forbid, made it a women’s only event? Promote the hell out of it using social media – which would be incredibly effective – with the goal of becoming the premier women’s event in yourstate/yourcountry/theworld. Can you make more out of less? Sponsors would love you for that!

What if you’re not winning as many races as you used to? What are the possibilities if you spent a ton of your non-training/racing time forging real connections with fans over social media? How valuable is it to your team and/or sponsors if you have 300-500 die-hard fans that will follow and support you wherever you go, even if you’re struggling? Damn valuable, that’s the answer.

Your Iron Curtain

Anything different that you might do is a risk. But if you’re already struggling, is it really a risk? Isn’t it a risk to keep doing what you’re doing? I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about red deer in Germany and the Czech Republic. Throughout the Cold War, there was a fence, a road, and guards that constantly patrolled the border, making it impossible for even wildlife to cross. 20 years after the fence has come down, almost all the deer – even those born AFTER the fence came down – refuse to cross the old Iron Curtain. Yet two bucks – one from each side of the border – cross to feed and mate. They will, if they haven’t already, become the alpha males of their herds, having their choice of food and mates.

Is that fence really there for you, or are you pretending that the Iron Curtain is still there? What border can you cross that might have great success on the other side?

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.

In these information overloaded times, broad messaging from companies is becoming less and less fruitful. We have been seeing a dramatic shift away from traditional advertising and towards highly-focused and targeted marketing campaigns. For many, this means spending money on a Google AdWords campaign and refining the keywords they bought ads against. Though spending will continue to grow in this area, return on investment (ROI) will decrease. The latest rage, fueled by the success of Twitter and Facebook, is in building and connecting with communities. In 2010, the US spend on social media is projected to be nearly $1Billion(Forrester), up from only $50Million in 2006(PQMedia) . That is astronomical growth in such a short time, and with a projected $3.1Billion in 2014, it will only continue.

Though there were many others, Seth Godin led the charge in talking about “Interruption Marketing” and how building a “Tribe” would ultimately be more successful for companies looking to reach new customers (or stay in touch with existing customers). From Seth’s Blog:

It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn’t an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

Despite there being no lack of information on the topic, most companies are having a hard time figuring this out (how many useless Facebook ads, irrelevant/spam Twitter followers, etc. have you seen?). They spend tons of time and money trying to build their own communities, and while there are some definite success stories, there is a far larger number of failures. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that social media is in its infancy, and the methods, tools, and norms are changing quickly. This is one of the reasons that you are more valuable than you think. You’ve already figured all of that out and have built a community, and sponsors are willing to pay for access to it!

Creating value from your community can be a bit like walking a tightrope, but the great thing is that this tightrope (your community) will tell you when you’re off-balance and about to fall. I’m sure some reading this might view what I propose as selling out, but IMHO, if you are honest in your communications, the messages are going to be relevant (and amplified by your community) anyway. Providing useful information isn’t selling out. One of the cool things about being a pro athlete is that people WANT to know about your day-to-day life. This is a great opportunity to serve both your sponsor’s needs and keep your fans happy.

Sharing information about industry sponsors is easy, but non-industry sponsors can be a bit more difficult. The key is always to continue sharing honest reactions.

• Confused by or just not-interested in a product or service? Share it. “Just sat in a training on what ABC business software is. Still don’t get it. Do any of you?” The replies you get can be quite useful in guiding your updates for the rest of the year.
• Can you do a video or photo montage of you coming to grips with a sponsor’s product or service? Your fans want to know what that’s like for you, and the content is exactly what the sponsor wants to get to the fans anyway.
• Looking for sponsors? Ask your community. It’s pretty powerful to be able to say to a potential sponsor, “I’m presenting this opportunity to you because 99 fans asked me to. They’re excited about your stuff.”

As winning is only one part of your job, figuring out how to use social media to your professional benefit is just one more part of the big picture. Participating in your fan community by honestly sharing your interactions with sponsors, while noticing and responding to fans’ reactions, will keep you from “selling out”, as will continuing non-sponsor driven communications. With your community already built, you have a valuable asset that sponsors want and are willing to pay for, and you need to include that in your calculations.