Since Pinterest is such an easy way to share lists and other graphical examples, it was only logical to expand my use of it to share sports business content. I’ve been pinning a lot of things lately to try and get my boards filled with useful resources, and I will continue to do so.

Here is a sampling of what I’m doing over there, and if you are a Pinterest user, please give me and my boards a follow!

I will also create boards to track specific trends and campaigns that emerge, like the following:

• Sports Harlem Shake Videos
• Sports Gangnam Style Videos
• Sports Black Friday Offers
• Sports Cyber Monday Offers

Additionally, check out these other great sports business focused Pinterest accounts:

• Sports Geek
• Paciolan
• J.W. Cannon
• Row 27

If you have other ideas on how else I can use Pinterest to deliver sports business content, please let me know!

By now, I’m sure most of you have seen the news that Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks are crowdsourcing a new look for their uniforms in 2015-16. You can read his own blog post on this topic over on blogmaverick.com.

I have a few quick thoughts on this initiative that I want to share:

• First and foremost, I am a big fan of crowdsourcing and applaud the idea. I am curious to see if there will also be a public voting process to select finalists that many graphic design crowdsourcing projects use. I know the team would never give up control of any final decisions, nor should they.
• I like how he is very upfront about who will own any and all designs that come from this effort. If a designer doesn’t want to cede control, then they should simply not participate.
• There are many platforms to run this type of initiative, or it could be run internal through a file upload process direct to the team, but they rolled this out with crowdSPRING. I wonder if this led to a sponsorship agreement with the team, as it had to have generated a lot of traffic and designer participation for the site. Could this be a new opportunity for digital sponsorships? There are plenty of things that could be crowdsourced besides jerseys.
• The prize money being offered is disappointing considering the potential impact this could have on merchandise revenue. Clearly they don’t need to offer a lot to get a high volume of participation, but $600 for first place?
• To me, the real potential value in this will come from the volume of submissions, not just the two top designs. The range of creativity that they are tapping into through the power of the crowd could inspire a wide range of ideas for the Mavericks brand, merchandise, in-arena graphics, digital creative and much more.

—–

UPDATE: I was able to get send a couple of questions to Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of crowdSPRING. Here’s what he had to say:

Who is providing the reward and how were the amounts selected?

“Beyond public recognition, Mark Cuban offered a few tickets to Dallas Mavs games if he really liked a design. crowdSPRING offered awards totaling $1,000 for the two best designs. Buyers on crowdSPRING set their own price and because of their experience helping 35,000 entrepreneurs and business owners, crowdSPRING believed this was a good award level. crowdSPRING set multiple awards because multiple awards often attract more and higher quality designers, since there’s a greater likelihood of being picked. The project has been open for only one day, and already more than 120 designs have been submitted.”

How did crowdSPRING get involved and is the site an official team partner?

“When Mark mentioned on his blog that the Mavs were re-designing their uniforms for the 2015-16 season, crowdSPRING reached out, introduced Mark to the site and offered to involve Mavs fans and the global crowdSPRING community of more than 137,000 designers and writers. crowdSPRING has worked with some of the world’s best brands, many of the world’s best agencies, and tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and startups. As a savvy entrepreneur, Mark wanted to see many creative designs and knew crowdSPRING could help. Mark liked the idea of the project on crowdSPRING and said that he would look at the submitted designs. crowdSPRING is not an official team partner but has worked with many official sports organizations and professional athletes.”

Credit: Engadget.com (5/13/13)

Welcome to my inaugural post on thebusinessofsports.com! Russell Scibetti has generously brought me on as a regular contributor – so expect to see my writings (at least) twice a month in this space.

As way of introduction, my full-time “day job” is as a professor of Marketing at Sonoma State University. I also teach in the University of San Francisco’s Masters in Sport Management Program. So, I’ll occasionally post on Student and Job Search related topics, but my most persistent themes for the blog will be Social Media and Big Data.

Consistent with the Social Media motif, two recent developments have piqued my interest. First, Twitter and ESPN have deepened their partnership. Undoubtedly, this is one direction that the dissemination of sports highlights is headed.

The question becomes, how will teams and leagues combat this move? Partnering with existing digital platforms? Further developing their own sites and apps to include more game highlights? Deepening relationships with their current broadcast partners to provide more online content? Let’s keep an eye on this story going forward.

The second news that grabbed me this week is regarding the social scoring company Klout. If you are unfamiliar with Klout and/or social scoring, this article will get you up to speed.

Klout recently announced that its site is going to morph from just a scoring site to a more fully developed social site. The reason I’m intrigued by this news is that I’m interested in how sports teams may be able to incorporate social scoring into existing database management/CRM practices. Klout and its competitiors (Kred and PeerIndex, for example) are at the front end of quantifying consumer social media usage and its resulting influence.

I suspect that teams would love to know which of their fans have the most social clout and determine how to best manage those relationships to drive even more fans to their events. So, monitoring the social scoring scene – and the business models of those firms – will be a recurring theme in this space.

Thanks for reading my first entry in this forum.  I’d like to encourage you to offer any feedback on this post or suggestions for future posts. Looking forward to engaging with you on thebusinessofsports.com.

It seems like MLB is going back to the “members-only” private time-period concept for their @MLB Twitter account that they executed on last September. And it went so well then that this time around, it became a sponsorable event. Blackberry is the presenting sponsor for this “takeover” and has a fun integration into the campaign’s hashtag, #mlBBtakeover.

I’m not going to do a full write-up again, but you can click here for the recap I did last September on their first private Twitter event.

When it comes to photo sharing, Instagram has definitely become the place for great content, and teams are looking to it more and more as a vehicle to drive their own campaigns and microsites. Here are a few excellent examples!

KnicksNow.com/knickstagram – Team microsite created by MVMT Strategy that gathers all Instagram photos with the hashtag #knickstape and shows them by geography (five boroughs of NY or the rest of the world):

Nike PHOTOiD – Nike created a way for people to use their Instagram photos to design Nike ID shoes that they can share and even purchase.

#RipCityPix Instagram Night – On March 27, the Portland Trailblazers had an Instagram Night where fans’ Instagram photos were shared in the arena, on TV and on the team website, complete with a contest to win free tickets.

#MLBSpringBreak Challenge – Baseball fans could respond to “assignments” with their tagged Instagram photos for the chance to win prizes, with the photos aggregated on their Spring Break Challenge page.

RomaGram – A microsite by AS Roma (Italy) that encourages fans to tag Instagram photos to help construct a photographic archive of the club’s history (according to my Google translation)

Miami Heat #WhiteHotHeatFan – Similar to the Knicks example above, the Heat are running a hashtag-driven microsite around their 2013 playoff run.

Today’s post is courtesy of Amanda Rykoff and appears on her Amanda’s World blog.

It’s baaaack. For a third season, die-hard baseball fans will gather in New York City to watch every baseball game in a fully-loaded, tricked out apartment as part of the MLB Fan Cave.

Last year, Major League Baseball introduced baseball enthusiasts to nine passionate fans (“Cave Dwellers”) representing seven teams who blogged, tweeted and posted about their experiences at the Fan Cave. After 2,430 regular season games and the postseason, over 100 player and celebrity visits, 21 Cave Concerts and countless online videos, tweets and blog posts, San Francisco superfan Ashley Chavez was crowned the “Ultimate Cave Dweller” at AT&T Park, where her beloved Giants wrapped up their second World Series championship since 2010.

This season, after several months of online applications, voting and in-person tryouts in Arizona during Spring Training, nine baseball buffs (six men, three women) representing nine different teams (Angels, Blue Jays, Dodgers, Indians, Mets, Rangers, Reds, Red Sox and White Sox), will make their homes away from home in the Fan Cave.

Though the details and execution have evolved since MLB introduced the initiative for the 2011 season in the 15,000 square foot space on Fourth Street and Broadway (the former home of Tower Records), the goal of the Fan Cave remains unchanged: mix baseball with music, pop culture, media, interactive technology and art to help generate content and conversation via social media.

“We saw a lot of really talented people. We expect the content creation side to explode,” said Tim Brosnan, MLB’s Executive Vice President, Business, during an open house for the media on Tuesday afternoon. “Someone asked me before, ‘What’s spontaneous about the Cave?’ I said, ‘How about everything?’ It’s supposed to be a place where ideas can turn into executions. We think we have this unbelievable foundation for it this year to send this thing incrementally past where it’s been two years before.”

Many of the features from the 2012 Fan Cave are back in 2013, including the “Dirt Bar” where fans can get authentic dirt from MLB ballparks, skee-ball, shuffleboard, a custom billiards table (with billiard balls representing all 30 MLB teams), the PS3 gaming system and a ten-foot tall orange tube slide (aka the Home Run Slide). New additions to the Cave include a table tennis table, pinball machines, hammocks, a “charging stump,” and a giant orange squid.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s new for 2013 to help take the Fan Cave to the next level.

“Mission Control”

Along the center south wall of the Fan Cave, a 20-foot long “Mission Control” panel will revolutionize the way Cave Dwellers and visitors see the games. While the “Cave Monster” in the middle of the space remains the centerpiece of the viewing experience (15 of the 50+ Sony HDTV screens in the Fan Cave will show all the current games), Mission Control features 30 Android-powered tablet screens and will show every game live on location at every major league ballpark. Powered by MLB.TV, Mission Control allows for live video chats between fans and Fan Cave visitors and will provide tons of data about each park (seating capacity, wind speed and direction and many others). Mission Control also contains a variety of social media metrics, including who is at the ballpark now (via Foursquare), Instagram photos, tweets, Facebook likes and Foursquare tips for each venue.

“This place is one of whimsy and phantasmagorical stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s part of our business,” Brosnan said. “As business people, more and more we’re diving into the analytics and diving into data sets against our customers and what they’re liking and what they’re not liking. Through Mission Control and by it being powered by MLB.com, we’re going to be able to analyze everything that anybody does. We think we’ve come up with a pretty great solution.”

“Cave Art”

One of most striking features of this season’s Fan Cave is the gallery of “Cave Art” on display on the front south wall as soon as visitors set foot in the space. The idea came out of Brosnan’s desire to enhance art’s presence in the Fan Cave as it continues to fine tune its mix of baseball and pop culture.

Kerri Lisa (fans may recognize her from the Bravo reality series, “Gallery Girls”) is the woman responsible for curating the art gallery at the Fan Cave. The current installation features a mix of original and commissioned works by Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash (featured in the Banksy documentary, “Exit Through the Gift Shop”). Each exhibition will run for approximately six weeks and will include a rotation of yet to be determined artists.

“If you go blocks from here to the East Village or go to Williamsburg, or Bensonhurst or Red Hook, in those neighborhoods there’s a bubbling art scene,” Brosnan said. “Who’s going? 18-34 year olds. We want them here. So we contacted the ‘Gallery Girls’ folks and Kerri said, ‘I get it, I’m all over it, I’ll put on six shows.’”

“Fan Cave University”

Another new initiative launching next week is “Fan Cave University,” where MLB will invite leaders in non-sports related fields to speak at the Fan Cave. It’s a way to showcase the venue and also broaden the experience for the Cave Dwellers. The first guest lecturer will be Bobak Ferdowski (aka “Mohawk Guy”), the NASA system engineer who became famous during the Mars Curiosity Rover landing.

“I hear my kids talk about BuzzFeed and Politico and they’re into politics,” Brosnan said. “It might not be deep and technical and ideological, but it’s a part of their currency. We say we’re going to do Fan Cave University. We’re going to bring lecturers in and we’re going to talk to them about politics and the social scene.”

“Cave Crashers”

MLB knows that fans want more opportunities to experience the Fan Cave personally and not just via video and social media. MLB also wanted to find ways to engage the individual clubs beyond the player visits and videos throughout the season. MLB will introduce a new promotion to combine those two goals — the “Cave Crasher” contest.

All 30 Major League clubs will run promotions to find a superfan who will come to New York City to “crash” at the MLB Fan Cave for two days while their team is visiting either the Yankees or the Mets. According to Brosnan, the teams are already “wildly excited” about this new idea.

Cave Dweller Travis Miller, 27, a Mets fan from Red Hook, NY, can’t wait to show off his custom ping pong paddles and crush his opposition on the new table tennis table at the Fan Cave. Miller, a Marist College graduate who had been working as a freelance sports writer in Chicago for the past four years, also looks forward to the “Cave Crashers” joining him and the other eight superfans.

“I’m excited about the Cave Crashers,” Miller said. “You’re going to get one from every team and they’re going to come in for a couple of days. It’s going to revitalize us — not that we’re going to need it — but it’s going to bring a new energy and a different perspective every day when teams are in town. You don’t know what they’re bringing to the table so it will be very spontaneous. I’m absolutely excited to see what we can do with it.”

Amanda Rykoff is a New York City-based writer, sports fanatic, social media maven, recovering attorney, devoted aunt, proud Penn alum, and TiVo junkie. She has contributed  to espnW.com, ESPN’s online destination for female sports fans and athletes. Follow her on Twitter (@amandarykoff). 

Today’s post is courtesy of guest blogger Joshua Duboff, and was originally published at TheSportsBusinessExchange.com (TSBX).

Sixteen fans have been selected to represent their country/territory in the MLB Fan Cave during the 2013 World Baseball Classic.

The 16 “Cave Dwellers” were announced at a ceremony at the MLB Fan Cave in New York City. The Cave Dwellers were welcomed by MLB Network analysts Bill Ripken and Dan Plesac, ESPN Deportes analyst Candy Maldonado (a favorite for Team Canada and Toronto Blue Jays fan Daryl Andrews), EVP of Business for Major League Baseball Tim Brosnan, and Miss America 2013 and Brooklyn resident Mallory Hytes Hagan.

TSBX has compiled a list of all the Cave Dwellers’ Twitter accounts so fans can follow all the fun throughout the tournament.

As part of the 18-day MLB Fan Cave: World Baseball Classic Edition, the winners will cheer on their nation while watching every game of the WBC live at all hours of the day and night. They will also share their national pride, meet baseball personalities, and chronicle their experiences online through videos, blogs and social media. Australia’s Nic Connell said he has a few chants and props he’s ready to break out when Australia is playing. Nic came out banging thundersticks when he was introduced as Team Australia’s Cave Dweller.

Once a team is eliminated, the Cave Dweller will return to his/her home country within 48 hours.

Ketchum Sports & Entertainment was retained last year by Major League Baseball to help with World Baseball Classic Edition of the MLB Fan Cave. According to Shawn McBride, SVP of Client Service for Ketchum Sports & Entertainment, driving excitement around the WBC and engaging with developing MLB markets are the major goals behind the WBC Edition of the MLB Fan Cave. The 16 Cave Dwellers will be seen as ambassadors in their home markets and will help push the Fan Cave as a social media content engine. It was important to MLB and the WBC that the 16 ambassadors encompass not only established baseball markets but emerging and developing markets as well.

Click the image below to view more pictures from the press conference including a look at the remodeled MLB Fan Cave.

UPDATE: TSBX just published another post to track the “Social Stats for MLB Fan Cave Dwellers” – click here.

Unruly, a UK-based company specializing in social video campaigns, released a great infographic highlighting the top facts that brands show know when it comes to create Super Bowl advertisements that resonate socially. I originally found this through an article on AdWeek.com (want to give credit!) and thought it had some pretty good insights, particularly on how effective teaser versions have such an impact on social distribution.

You can click here to read more about this research at Unruly’s website, and they also have links to their “Super Bowl Social Video Playbook” and “The Most Shared Super Bowl Ads of All Time” – great additional resources.

Turkish Airlines saluted Manchester United’s new Premiership season by taking 19 lucky fans from around the world to the city of Manchester. It began with Turkish Airlines launching the “Fans United” contest on their international Facebook page. The goal was to help a few lucky fans experience Manchester United culture in its home, the city of Manchester.

First stop was Old Trafford, where the group was treated to a private, behind-the-scenes tour. This was an experience with stops at the players’ dressing room, the dug-out, and the club’s award-winning museum. On August 24, the winners traveled to Carrington where they got to watch the first-team of Manchester United warm up before tactical training by Sir Alex Ferguson. They also had the privilege to get autographs and talk with famous team members such as Rio Ferdinand and Javier “Chicarito” Hernandez.

The group was treated to lunch at the Old Trafford’s Red Cafe, followed by visits to some of Manchester’s other impressive sights, before being treated to dinner at one of the city’s finest restaurants. But the real highlight of the trip arrived on Saturday, when the group witnessed United’s 3-2 win over Fulham in the first home game of the season from some of the best seats in Old Trafford’s East Stand. It was the perfect way to cap an incredible few days in an experience that one winner described as “a dream come true.”

By the end of this four-month social media campaign, the Fans United application reached out to over 322 million people globally to give 19 lucky Red Devils fans an unforgettable experience. To learn more about this campaign, watch the video below and check out the infographic recap.

Video:

Infographic:

Yesterday, I received an interesting report by a company called Fizziology that did a deep-dive analysis of social media conversations surrounding the NHL lockout. Here is the quick overview of their report:

“This DMA Analysis looks at the social conversation toward the NHL Lockout over the last week. The analysis looks at the total social conversation and negative sentiment of the top 5 markets in both the US and Canada, to identify the market that is the most social engaged, and most negative toward the ongoing lockout in the NHL.

Fizziology listens to the “big 3” of social media: Twitter, Facebook and blogs. We use broad search terminology to gather all references to a tracked property. Trained analysts then read a statistical sampling of the total conversation to determine what is relevant conversation, grade sentiment (to 95% confidence, using a 2-tiered approach for accuracy) and flag conversation drivers.

The data is quantitative and should be looked at week-over-week. But the insights are qualitative, using the social conversation as a giant focus group to learn about audience reactions and perceptions.”

The report points out some interesting facts:

• Ontario is by far the most socially engaged market in North America when it comes to discussing the lockout.
• Within the U.S., Los Angeles has the most negative sentiment but New York shows the most total discussion, probably due to the presence of three teams in the market.
• Urban areas have more than six times the percentage of total lockout conversation than rural areas.

You can click here to download the PDF or read the full report below: