My New Relationship between Real-time Social Media and Sports

Ah, the good old days....when I had enough time to watch college football most of Saturday, pro football most of Sunday, and could usually catch Monday Night Football to boot.  You couldn't get soccer on cable back then, which left me enough time to study and get my degree.

Later on in life, we'd record games on DVR, and selectively watch later.

I came to realize today that now things are different.   I pick up on subtle real-time social media clues and join in on games in progress.  All the time.

Take, for instance, today:

Hmm...we might have a game.  Let me turn that on.

and 

Hmm...well, I don't really care that much about the NFL playoffs now that the Bears are nowhere in the picture, but I better turn this on right now!

Of course there are still games I watch whistle to whistle when I can plan ahead, but this is mostly how it goes.

And it's not like I'm feverishly studying social media instead of watching these games;  it's become a form of ambient music playing in the background - multiplexed into the 10 other things I have going on in the day.

I can hardly wait until each of those examples above has a "click here to join the game in progress" - but I have a feeling it's not that far off.

EpicMix: Skiing + RFID+ badges + achievements = fun

This is intensely cool.  I'm trying to think of another example of where product innovations in video games and mobile LBS games were brought back out of the virtual into reality to make something better.  I think EpicMix is genius, and it's going to be fun.

By adding game mechanics to their season ski passes, if it works as advertised, I am certain they will sell more season passes, which will sell more concessions and generally increase attendance at Vail Resorts throughout the year.

With your RFID enabled season pass most of the Vail Resorts, that is Keystone, Breck, Vail, Beaver Creek, and Heavenly,

you can ski or board around the mountain and earn badges for things like riding certain lifts a number of times, skiing at night, and boarding a certain distance in a specified time.

In essence, they've married Foursquare/Gowalla badges with PS3/Xbox 360 achievements and brought them back into the real world to enhance the experience.

Of course, you can setup your account so that it automatically posts to Facebook and/or Twitter when you earn these badges, and there are both iPhone and Android mobile apps to check your progress as you move around the mountain.

I look forward to trying this out and posting the results this Winter.

Twitter Promoted Trending Topics

Not that anyone asked me, but I like this new ad model being used by Twitter:  promoted trending topics that lead to the conversation led be a promoted tweet.   It's mostly user driven - that is, you have to look at trending topics, and then click through to see the promoted tweet.  You've already registered your interest, so at that point, you don't mind seeing the ad.


The challenge here is that I think this works really well for top, known, brands, less well for the long tail advertisers, but that's okay.

They need to keep this as a facility for premium brands - there's enough to go around to prove this out.

I could easily see Twitter creating a dashboard for top brands that display organic trending topics and give them a chance to get in the game with a large buy.

If you ran the spend for Disney and got an alert that said "Toy Story 3 is a trending topic - promote this now" - you can easily see how that can build upon these non-organic (promoted) trending topics.

This also needs to be added to the Twitter API so all clients can display these.  The question is, will those clients want a cut to display promoted tweets?

My evolving social network

For sometime now, I've looked from the outside in at social networks. They just weren't for me. The Chinese got them, the Japanese got them, the American youth got them, but I didn't get them.

My social network was dispersed. Some of my network was at Flickr (I have long believed Flickr's power had little to do with its photo capabilities and more to do with its social network). Some was in IM. Some was in Twitter. Some was in gmail. Some in Google Reader via friend's blogs. People looking for jobs hung out Linked-in.

Fred's quote below is from a slightly different context, but it made a few light bulbs go off.

A VC: Declaring Bankruptcy: "And I share Jason's frustration with Facebook. It's just not my world. The web is my world. Blogs are my world. Flickr is my world. Twitter is my world. Facebook aggregates all of those features, wraps a social network around it, and provides a turnkey solution. It's better in many ways. But when you make it easy, you get overload. And that's what Jason is facing. And that's what I am facing."

That is, my world was the same as Fred's world. But something happened. My network reached critical mass on Facebook.

Now I've stopped Flickring, I've stopped Twittering, and I soon I may stop blogging outside my social network.

This partly has to do with who my network is, and how I have built my network. That is, I pretty much only accept friend requests from people I have met in real life. This makes my virtual social graph the same as my actual social graph.

If my actual life has 24 hours in the day and it is manageable, then my virtual life also stays manageable. If I am not very social personally, then I am not very social online, and thus I don't get overloaded.

Now, in the context of the problems Fred is having and Jason Calacanis is having, their issues are the same: they have a higher level of fame than most, but have opened their online lives way more than most people of their fame would do so in actual life. Most people (outside of stalkers) wouldn't knock on Fred's door and say "let's be friends" if he didn't invite it.

But, online, he does. And it has made him the successful VC he is today. That is, by doing everything he can to understand his potential entrepreneur base (which I am presumptuously categorizing as a generation younger than he) and opening up his life (such as where he is on family vacation at any given time) he has made himself totally approachable by the social networking generation. This is critical to his business, yet has created some interesting problems.

So I agree: what's going on with Facebook is too important to ignore. Mostly because it's made us Web 2.0 biodome dwellers realize the power of having a centralized social networking platform.

I don't think Facebook will be the only successful player in this space. Like most social network it caters to a specific demographic, and there are lots of other demographics out there. But it sure is working now. Let's hope we can all continue to avoid the overload.