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.

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.