What makes web communities appealing to Sponsors

[Paul Marsh]

All,

Recently I have been working with our sales team on trying to educate them on what would draw a sponsor to a Sport Community.

I was wondering what your thoughts were on why a community site based on social networking would be valuable to a sponsor. What sets it above and beyond just some regular old section on a site, say News.

Any ideas, stats, info is greatly appreciated.

[Pat Coyle]

Two things that come up at our Summit events...engagement, and avidity...the data shows community sites draw the most avid fans...and while I can't prove avid fans are more likely to buy sponsor products, some sponsors have told me that their data show that they do. Engagement is a slippery thing since there's not standard way to measure...most use time on site and page views. Users on mycolts.net spend more time and consume more pages than colts.com. Finally, it's my theory that the heavy users of social nets are the early adopters and heavy influencers...they folks who start word-of-mouth...and one more thing...this online community stuff is relatively new and doesn't appear to be going away...sponsors will benefit from testing it now...learning...and applying their learning in other markets even beyond sports...the nice thing about sports is that it's easy to get consumers engaged in the first place...which brings in more data faster.

[Paul Marsh]

For the hard metrics we are going to have to turn to time on site as the leading indicator of what separates a social network from the regular site.

I will have to see if we can correlate these avid fans on social networks to those who tailgate / attend games. Certainly would be helpful to see that there's a good chance that the fan on the social net will also be at the game. Makes that signage sold at the game cross right over to graphic logos on the social net. The fan would be immersed in that sponsor the entire time they are in contact with the team.

[Pat Coyle]

Certainly the season tix holders are avid fans, but from our research, they're not necessarily more avid than heavy online users who never attend games. Keep in mind your stadium only holds 70,000 (or whatever). You've got millions coming to your Website. When you think of it that way, isn't the stadium the smaller audience??

[Doug Bishop]

I find this one of the most difficult issues I face. Many sales people do not believe in the worth of Communities online... they will tout low CPM and clickthrough rates and scare away from it.

I disagree, but the real isse is there is no hard data to fight my case. I notice on here as well, each of the responses is opinoin, but not fact. Its a super tricky battle for social/sport communities, as we all know we're the future but can't prove that we have enhanced buying power.

Our sponsors who are pleased with it are the ones who have taken advantage of all of our web 2.0 feedback features we put in our advertising. We use a mixture of display advertising, paid blogs, contests, and mailouts. In the blogs for the sponsor (where their athletes communicate directly with our users) they can see comments from site visitors. This engagement is so valuable to the ones that get it.

THe problem though is that even with wicked stuff to offer, we're generally at the mercy of who does the ad buying. If they like web 2.0 then bam we're in there, but if they prefer print media then for lack of a better word, we're f@cked.

[Paul Marsh]

@Doug

You wrapped it all up nicely.

In the sports world, and the NFL especially, traditional media has such a presence it's hard enough to get old CPM based banners sold sometimes.

Without some hard data to offer up to sponsors who aren't on the web 2.0 train it's going to be a long uphill battle.

I'm going to have to stew on this some more, think of ways to gather compelling metrics using what we have in house.

[Doug Bishop]

Paul - Maybe we should pitch in and get some of this hard data rolling! :)

I always have the difficulty that I've got tonnes of proof that people are using our site a lot. They come back once a day on average, we have high PPV, High TOS, and I can make all the pretty graphs in the world that show it. Many times that fact is just ignored, or it doesn't have any impact. I worry that its not just our hard data, but hard data from 3rd party researchers that will finally break the obsession with Print advertisement.

Don't know how your sport is, but in skiing, the print guys have ALL the available ad dollars.

[Paul Marsh]

Doug,

Lucky for me I'm over here in the NFL world with Pat.

Pretty graphs might actually help with convincing traditional buyers in my world, it seems their eyes get nice and big when shown such things, but it'll take some time to get that data gathered. What I'm hoping for is to use our new message boards as a jumping off point. Granted it's not a full fledged social network but TOS will definitely be higher. I'm hoping that might be enough to get people's interest piqued to go further into communities.

Another idea I was hoping to use was to possibly run some in-house advertising for our main website, including our community initiatives, kids club, stuff of that nature. Perhaps the numbers on those ads will be good enough to be able to turn around to sponsors and say, "These should be your numbers."

It will take some time but I will slowly post some numbers that hopefully can help us all.

[Jake Rutter]

A sports social community is a much more targeted network, you can drill down and get more information about your users. This is great for sponsors because they can use this information to place ads that are relevant to the users and catch more of an audience.

Jake Rutter
FanBoom.com

[Paul Marsh]

I had been typing out a message about what information exactly you'd have to collect to make it appealing to a sponsor. Wasn't sure where it was going so this is a bit of a brain ramble. Hope it provokes some thoughts.

My thought example was to collect information on favorite food. Out of 20,000 people in your community (which I thought was a very good size network) you get maybe a couple people filling that information in. Say 10%, that's 2000 people. Let's say 10% of those choose some form of pizza.

Is it reasonable to think you could spin that into a compelling package for a sponsor? I'm thinking perhaps you could get a smaller local pizza chain to buy-in if those fans are all clustered in a city.

For those of us battling traditional media buys with large sponsors I'm going to have to come up with something a bit better.

Is my community too small? Will this drill-down model really only work when community size reaches a much higher critical mass?

[Jeremy Beynon]

Pretty interesting article on Sports websites in the emarketer today:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006440&src=dp1_home

Cheers
Jeremy

[Pat Coyle]

Don't buy the full report...I've made that mistake before with those guys...the summary says about as much as they know.

[Pat Coyle]

Paul, just focus on sponsors who've already shown they want to reach Jets fans. Taking your pizza example, I imagine you guys have one of the big chains on board already...they all want to sell more pizzas online...so sell them a test program designed to increase online orders flowing from Jets.com...build a contest around it...give away a few pizzas each week to get attention...you may not get rich with this program, but both the Jets and the pizza company will not learn if you don't try some stuff...and remember, we're not selling "media" we're selling "sponsorship". Don't let yourself sell programs like this to media buyers and don't get into the CPM game. Yes. We're too small (for the most part) to play that game EXCEPT inside sponsorship packages. Call me and I'll tell you how we're doing this with some success