In today’s YouTube generation, we’ve seen players like David Beckham rise to fame and fortune with his remarkable free kick. But how many Americans do you think bothered to watch the other 89 minutes of any match before he stepped foot at the Galaxy? For a glimpse of the magic that is David Beckham, click on the video here.
WPS, which plans to launch in 2009, is betting on social media to help gather interest, maintain fans, increase visibility, and promote product. I’ve heard that there will be unique league standards regarding both the amount of video that is posted and the extent of interaction each team has with the community through social networks.
In my next series of posts, I’ll take a look at how I think social media may benefit women’s professional soccer. In my opinion, there are two considerations which will become increasingly important if this catches on – Maintaining game-day fans while growing the Internet highlight reel, and capitalizing on clicks.
But it’s got to catch on first, right? I’ll delve into these two topics in a later post, for for now let’s start with a basic look at what Social Media means, and some existing sites. If you have/know of more, please post!
Scattered Bits of Soccer Wisdom
I think BigSoccer.com is the stickiest interactive site out there right now, but feel free to comment/post others if you think there’s something better. The publishers have done a great job bringing together forums, blogs, TV, and shopping into one central soccer resource. Their breadth of topics span from the Africa Cup of Nations to youth girls tournaments here in the States. However, the layout and functionality need some serious work. BigSoccer has grown to include so many darn topics that it takes forever to find what you’re looking for. I anticipate quality spin-offs in the near future.
Here is a great picture of an interactive social web – I downloaded this picture from here.
As a basic definition (from wikipedia, of course) ‘social media use the “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner.’ Social media can take many different forms. Here are some
examples in the Soccer Community already:
Here are some general examples that can easily be manipulated:
The Alphabet Game
Here are a few key terms you might want to know…
1. SMO, Social Media Optimization, refers to on-page tactics through which a webmaster can improve a website for the age of social media. This includes adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily ‘saved and submitted’ to and for these services. 2. SMM, Social Media Marketing, is an off-page characteristic of Social Media. This includes writing content that is remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularizing it or even by creating a “viral” video on YouTube and other video sites. 3. SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, involves utilization of all available Social Networking platforms to brand a product using Search Engine Optimization or SEO techniques of communication, to the end consumer.
Get them coming back again and again.
Social Media is about being social. It’s about interacting with other people who have similar interests. Getting involved in other people’s blogs, forums, and niche communities will make your website more powerful.
Since I don’t know the current ‘alphabet soup’ plans for womensprosoccer.com, here’s what I think from an end-user perspective. The videos are great, and the player’s pages, although limited in scope and number right now, are awesome. (Can somebody tell Leslie Osborne that her page freezes my Safari browser and shuts down the application!?!) Props to Lori Chalupny for posting her blog, great work to US Soccer for maintaining blogs through big events, and a shout out to Gayle Bryan from Fair Game magazine, who writes when other don’t.
But social media is about how we interact with each other, because how can bloggers activate the “wisdom of crowds” alone? What it boils down to is the creation of valuable, engaging content within the context of online soccer forums, blogs, photo shares, vlogs, etc — aka communities. WPS has to build reputation and authority here. In order to enhance the WPS social media movement, we should comment on Gayle’s stories, or Peter Wilt‘s posts. All players should be posting on their homepages, and their fans should be interacting. Videos on the WPS homepage should allow for comments. RSS feeds should exist every place to allow for mashed up feeds on other pages. We should grow our Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit communities together.
I have a whole list of ideas, which I’ll post sometime soon. In the meantime, help me out by Digging this article.
