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.