When I first saw this article in the paper earlier in the week, I will admit that I didn’t quite get why people, let alone big league venture capitalists, would be excited about Fanbase, who in their words is “the web’s largest almanac of college and pro athletes built by fans.” It’s sort of an intersection of classmates.com and Wikipedia, but with a narrower focus on sports teams.
As I went about my day, I thought more about it, and it started to sink in the Fanbase is not only a really great idea, it is also setting a great example for all sorts of companies.
Since the beginning of time, marketers have tried to understand the various groups or segments of people that buy, or might buy their products. That’s one of the reasons social networking has so much potential, you literally have groups of people opting in to various circles of friends, and when people know, or know of one another, the potential to market into those groups not only allows you to be more targeted, even more importantly with things like referral businesses, you can see causal and correlation behavior based on your marketing investment. In other words you get transparency into whether your marketing efforts directly cause a person, or a group to buy your products or services or at the very least see a correlation, where historically very little of that data has been available to marketers so a lot of marketing has either been guesswork.
One problem with a lot of social networking sites is that just because someone is a “friend” of someone else on a site like Facebook, you don’t really have insight into how well those people know each other, and thus it’s potentially a very loose connection, so it may not really be meaningful that a given person is in a specific network. A site like Classmates.com has some additional benefits where you know that people are the same age, and there’s probably a good chance that they have a lot of common demographic characteristics (like income and personal interests). The downside of a site like classmates is that it’s mostly involuntary. I didn’t pick my classmates, and there are a lot of them that I am not friends with, either in the conventional sense, or in the evolving Facebook definition, so there’s still some risk there in getting to a “pure” segment of customers, if such a thing exists.
Sports teams are great because they are likely to be a much more tight knit group, I would assert that the members of the teams are much more likely to actually like each other, and they probably still behave like a cohesive group. In my case I was on the rowing team in high school and college, and I still keep in touch with both of those groups, I have a picture of my rowing team on my facebook page, I still know all of the names of the people I rowed with and I have kept in touch with more than half of them over the years. So not only is Fanbase going to be a valuable thing to me and my rowing friends, it also puts us in the cross hairs of marketers, because between my schools and the sport, the demographics tend to be very consistent, so my guess is that Fanbase is going to be very successful selling ad space to marketers.
The larger point for companies, and I have talked about this in previous blogs, as well as the Rethink book, the more you can know about your customer and what they value and don’t value, the much easier it is to get more targeted and tailored messaging for them. I expect to see more sites like Fanbase that combine opting in, with groups that have similar demographics, who actually stay in touch with each other, but Fanbase sure seems to have a lot of potential, and if you read the article, it also sounds like a great management team. I am a fan.
-Ric
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