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.

[Warren Jackson]

If the community site is well put together, it cannot help but be a draw to sponsor. The site can allow our members to post their thoughts, opinions and views on a variety of topics regarding the sponsor.

[Rob Lewis]

If the post from Jeremy Beynon on cricket in South Africa is a sign of the times the sponsors will be extending their communities into sport rather than the other way around - see http://standardbank.socialmediarelease.co.za/
Jeremy pasted in in the thread 'is there much behind the hype under blogs here http://www.sportsmarketing20.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1736840%3ABl...

[Kensel Tracy]

Hi Paul, just a quick thought here. One of the things we do is provide valuations to organization for their sponsorship and the social network or a web site has significant appeal. The first thing is that it allows sponsors to partner with the community using your organization as the broker so to speak in getting to a specific type of audience that your sport or activity appeals to. The second thing is financial -- a unique visitor to a web environment is worth approximately $.02- ..03 cents so if you have significant unique visitors, it starts to add up. Also the ability for the target audience to receive something of value including a coupon or a download or a referral to a site or blog -- also can be as high as $.10 cents depending on what the referral is to -- so your sales guys should see that their is significant value in having an activity on a site. We recently were contacted by an NHL team that had 1.5 million unique visitors to their site. We put the value at $35,000 -- for one partner with just a logo and a link. So if 4-6 were sold independently or it was packaged with another asset the team could add this value as tangible value and not some non value or intangible having less value.

Hope this helps in your quest -- happy selling Kensel Tracy

[Nancy]

hello all,
I agree that it could be a great target for a sponsor, it is so subject oriented. I think a sport community is a good place to find the audience they need, not sure what the stats are mind you.

".the nice thing about sports is that it's easy to get consumers engaged in the first place...which brings in more data faster."

I agree with this statement for sure!

for all your tracking needs.....call tracking

[wxjunkie]

It's not all about CPM. If you have a captive audience of rapid fans, you can sell them anything -- be it apparel, tickets or advertising.