If Likes don’t matter, what does?

Nick Woods

Stefan Olander is Nike’s VP of digital sport, and he has a new book out called Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital. At its launch yesterday, Olander had quite a few stand-up-and-cheer revelations to share about social media in 2012, saying “a whole industry is stuck on trying to force old metrics on to new channels.” It’s a new way to beat a dead horse: The size of the audience matters, but size is for naught if you can’t engage.

Nike of course launched the Nike+ FuelBand a few weeks ago, technology integrated with their products that makes it easier for users to keep track of activity using a smartphone. And more recently, the brand launched an initiative allowing customers to bid on products using their logged activity. The point of these efforts, Olander says, isn’t to advertise, but to add value to something people already do. “Once you have established a direct relationship with a consumer, you don’t need to advertise to them,” he says.

The Olympic Athletes’ Hub

Nick Woods

When it comes to social media, people are more likely to follow people than brands. So when putting together a marketing strategy that involves Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., it’s often a good starting point to ask who you want to showcase, rather than what. Who do your customers want to hear from? Partners? Employees? People just like them? Or some kind of combination? There are a lot of possibilities.

For a company like Apple, Steve Jobs – an executive – was the answer. For an event like the 2012 Summer Olympics, it’s the athletes. That’s why a site like The Olympic Athletes’ Hub is such a great idea: It’s a site that organizes every athlete’s social media presence into one central location, giving fans a direct link to the people they want to talk to and hear from. It makes communication easy. And more importantly, it’s a tangible link to the brand – The Olympics are about the competitors, and the spectacle. Letting the audience become a part of the action is a compelling way to build trust, loyalty, and community.

Tweeting while driving = 100K followers (apparently)

Nick Woods

Following a jet fuel explosion during the Daytona 500 yesterday, Brad Keselowski – a driver with ~85,000 followers on Twitter – picked up his phone, and started tweeting. By the time the delay ended, less than two hours later, Keselowski had gained an audience of over 100,000 on his page. Just goes to show how original, exclusive, and timely content from a credible source can spread, and how once again, creation wins over curation.

Football as Life Support

Nick Woods

In a post yesterday on Media Daily News, Wayne Friedman discusses how advertisers are paying anywhere from 13% to 29% more for a TV ad during the Superbowl this year, over the ~$3.1 million it cost in 2011. “By way of comparison,” he says, “the average price for a 30-second prime-time commercials [sic] in the first quarter of 2011 was $96,800 — down from $101,500 in 2010.”

I’m not a media guy, so I’m just spitballing here, but it seems to me that the trend might have something to do with the number of people who DVR the Superbowl compared to prime time programming. Everyone hesitant to ditch cable for Netflix/Hulu seems to say the same thing: If they could get live sports anywhere besides good ol’ fashioned TV, they’d make the switch in a second. But no one wants to miss out on the conversation occurring both during and immediately after the Big Game. Until a suitable, legal substitute is found, football, basketball, baseball and our favorite events are going to keep TV revenues humming along.

It’s OK To Come Out of the Basement

Jon Grider

Ping-pong popularity is on the rise. Thanks to hip clubs like Spin (Milwaukee, New York, St. Pete and Toronto), all levels of table tennis players are coming out of the woodwork (most likely musty, knotty pine woodwork) – me included. Competitive exercise, rewarded with a well-crafted brew in a state-of-the-art space with good tunes and good people is a good thing. The US is still no match for China (or Germany, or Japan, or India, or Korea, etc.) when it comes to ping-pong proficiency and popularity. In fact, we pretty much bring up the rear in the world table tennis standings. But when you consider our ability to have fun, the US kicks @#%! Get your pong on, people!

Chitwood And Hobbs

DeChazier Stokes–Johnson

Chitwood & Hobbs is a blog dedicated to sports, culture, passion and the desire to compete. Presented with a very clean, easy to navigate design aesthetic and little known interesting facts about sports in the 60′s, 70′s, and 80′s, Chitwood & Hobbs is easily one of my favorite conceptually well executed sports sites.