“Brands want to communicate with customers, and there’s an equation there that can be easily replicated with sports in that players want to interact with their fans to create a more loyal fan base. [In terms of the NBA] social media allows players to very easily transcend just being a basketball player. It allows any athlete to take that next step in communication with fans and make it personal.”

Check out SLAM Magazine Online and read the rest of the article HERE.

This article is copyright © 2012 

I thought it’d be fun to sit down with Ty (CEO & Founder) and quiz him a bit about his background, learn more about his vision for FanFeedr and get his take on the changing sports media landscape. Below is our conversation. I think you’ll find that Ty’s unique product and perspective are going to have a positive impact on how we all consume sports information.

What is FanFeedr – what’s the general concept and what are you trying to accomplish?

We are a real-time personalized sports aggregator. In a nutshell, that means that we want to connect casual and the more, dedicated, shall we say, sports fans with the teams and players that they care about the most AND we want them to be able to talk to their friends about their passions.

Where did the idea for FanFeedr come from?

I am passionate about music and sports, in no particular order, and it occurred to me that surfing five, six and seven sites a day to try and get information about the players and teams that I am passionate about didn’t make much sense. I think the same problem exists for music. Additionally, I have grown less and less interested in wading through presentational layers (e.g. the top story of the day) to get to the stuff that is personally relevant or that my friends are doing

Can you give us a little background on yourself? I know you worked for Viacom and helped build MTV.com, but can give our readers some more info on what you did there and how it got you to this point.

I grew up in the SF Bay Area, went to school in Philadelphia, and started work out of college as a visual journalist at the New York Times. Because I was younger and could run fast, I got all of the death and destruction stuff like the LA Riots; Waco, TX; the Oklahoma City bombing; the Cambodian elections in 1992, and so on. Rather than continue to cover the newly emerging fields of the world wide web, as I was doing in 1995, I decided to actually create stuff.

I moved back to San Francisco and started working in the Valley as the Creative Director of Excite@Home (nee @Home Networks) for three years, creating the world’s first three broadband portals with my talented staff. I took a year off to go to cooking school in London (no, it wasn’t British food, cease the chuckling.)

I came back to the Valley for two years, developing interactive television applications for TV Works (nee MetaTV), took off some more time to go snowboarding for nine months in Lake Tahoe, and then joined Comcast in Philly. I did business development there, signing wireless, travel, and dating deals for the broadband portal, and then moved back into Product Development for the cable television group.

And then on to Viacom, rebuilding MTV.com and rolling out social features with my smart team across the Music and Logo group.

As an entrepreneur, what is your favorite part of building FanFeedr.com?

My favorite part of the effort is changing the product based on user feedback, and making sure that we are serving both our 80% customers (the casual sports fan) and our 20% customers, the dedicated sports fans. People who eat Yankees or RedSox cereal for example.

Refer to the scene in “No Country for Old Men” when Frances McDormand shows her, uh, dedication to her team of choice. We want to enable those people, in all senses of the word.

What interests you most about fans and their use of technology today? Do you think technology could ever have a negative impact on the way fans experience the game?

The use of Twitter by athletes in college and in the pros is probably the biggest deal at the moment, given the asymmetrical friending model employed by that service and the league uncertainty of how to mediate an unmediated dialogue. I don’t think that technology can go too far, as long as it enhances the entertainment value, because, at the end of the day, sports is an entertainment medium, in addition to being a very large business.

There’s been so much chatter about pro sports and Twitter lately; Do you have any underlying thoughts on this? Should NFL players be allowed to tweet? What about journalists who are on location at team practices?

I have no issue with athletes or coaches tweeting, at any time, and not just because I value it through FanFeedr. Tweeting is the spoken word delivered through electronic distribution. The only reason NFL players are muted in the lead-up to a commercial break, or on the field, is because they might let loose with a curse word. If you see an athlete saying “Hi Mom” by lip reading, or saying “I am amazing” when he scores a touchdown, it seems irrelevant to try and constrain them from typing the same thing. One could argue that it would distract them from the game, but I see athletes whiling away their time on the bench and during timeouts with the opposite of focus.

What is the value in real-time news for sports?

Sports is a soap opera. There are usually an antagonist and protagonist, depending on your point of view, and there is a measurable outcome that normal people besides me would call a “winner.” With that in mind, providing a real-time view of the sentiments around that struggle, pro or con, is extremely valuable, because sports, like news, is highly perishable, and we want to know what is going on now. A friend of mine has the DirecTV package for the NFL, with a channel called “RedZone.” It is, as you would expect NOTHING BUT TEAMS ON SUNDAY IN THE END ZONE. I was baffled two years ago, but it became the equivalent of heli-skiing: highly entertaining, and addictive (we will leave cost out of the equation for now.)

Do you think tools like FanFeedr will cause fans to become more hardcore or just allow them to get the exact information they want in a quicker way?

I don’t know. Users of the site will determine where the site evolves. I simply want to give them the tools to make their sports consumption easier and more timely, and to model to things they are already trying to do (but lack to the tools to execute.)

Please join me in welcoming FanFeedr to the neighborhood. For more info and updates be sure to follow them on Twitter.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Whether it was Kevin Love breaking news or Shaq hearing he’d been traded on Twitter (and then singing about it), the fact is social media is changing this landscape. More and more NBA players are signing up for Twitter everyday, connecting with their fans and building actual relationships with them – no Traditional Media outlets involved.

Twitter alone has gotten so popular among NBA players and teams that David Stern even warned teams not to disclose draft picks on Twitter before the official announcements at the 2009 NBA Draft.

Side note: Thanks to our good friends in the NBDL, Kyle and I were in attendance at the Draft. We had a great time hanging with the guys from HHReynolds, The Sports Hernia and Project Spurs. Speaking of which, here’s a quick video of Kyle screaming at Hasheem Thabeet with some UCONN love.

Anyway, my point here is simple: Social media is truly changing the sports world. By choice, athletes are more accessible, and that makes being a fan more fun. Executed correctly, a social media strategy allows a player, team, or league to expand their reach and provide fans with an enriched experience. It’s a win-win for everyone involved and it is enhancing fandom as we know it.

This is what Carrot loves about the social web and it’s exactly why we’re entrenched in sports.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Not only was this event groundbreaking, it was also glass-breaking. When Guinness starts getting served at noon during a sports blogging conference, you can only expect that things will get a little lively. It was a long day of listening and people were eager to chat and meet each other. You would start to hear the chatter as soon as a few attendees lost interest in a panel. For instance, during the Leveraging Social Media panel there was mainly only talk about Facebook and Twitter followers, and people got talkative because they got tired of hearing about that. Thinking about this led me to finally realize that bloggers want to be ahead of the game. Most of them are already on Twitter and Facebook – they’re on top of all that buzz. They want to know what they need to do next and how they can improve it.

During the conference, I started writing notes about my thoughts on the future of sports blogging and how social features have the potential to drastically improve the visitor’s experience. My main thoughts are listed below.

Social Media
There are a ton of ways you can leverage social media to increase traffic to your blog and gain awareness. For starters, every blog should use these: Facebook Fanpage, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube channel, Tumblr site, Delicious, Digg, Disqus, BallHype and FanFeedr. Fanfeedr offers personalized real-time sports aggregation and it launched in public beta yesterday. If you run a niche sports blog, it could be the perfect way to stay on top of your team, region or league. All the tools I’ve listed are absolutely free, easy to use and they will allow you to have a presence in multiple communities. There is no reason your blog shouldn’t have just as much personality as the writer behind it… just look at HHReynolds and LaxAllStars (disclaimer: I’m a co-founder).

Player & Team Accessibility
Players and teams are going to become much more accessible to the average sports blogger. With more and more big names embracing social media, there is no better time to start planning a strategy for getting your foot in the door. People get jobs through Twitter, so why not try snagging an interview or a press pass? Whether it’s a blogger or journalist, a good writer deserves a press pass.

Real World Networking
Three words: BLOGS WITH BALLS. Don Povia and Chris Lucas from HHR Media Group are onto something big here. BwB facilitated great discussions and networking, and more of these types of events will surface. There’s no doubt that sports bloggers who attended the event came away recognizing the value in what they can learn from meeting with others who are in similar shoes. Tweetups, meetups, BwBups… A community of sports bloggers can and will unite.

Outreach
As one panelist mentioned at BwB, it’s important to keep a good list of your contacts. The truth is for every article there is a good reason to reach out. When it comes to players, teams, brands, or any blog post’s subject you can always find someone important to share the link with.

Niche Dominance
At BwB, there was a guy representing a Cricket blog. During Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote, Gary asked the guy what he wrote about and people chuckled at his reply. No one there was an avid cricket fan, but there is an audience out there just waiting for the best Cricket blog on the planet. Sport-specific advertisers, time on site, influence and trust – there is huge potential in catering to a specific sports niche. Banner ads and full-out site sponsorships are going to become easier to sell because advertisers are going realize the value in keeping their brand in front of eyeballs for a long period of time. Time on site will become a huge factor in ad rates and so will the ability to influence purchase decisions.

Community Building
With new media rapidly evolving and the demand for real-time access to information increasing, it is important to keep friends close. Bloggers should have a group of people they can reach out to immediately if something big happens. Ranging from friends and family to avid commentors to contacts made via Twitter, it is important to reach out and include them when exciting things are happening. Building a community of core people who visit the blog everyday will allow you to easily collect feedback, solicit ideas, and ask for input. This is crucial. After all, these are the people worth writing for.

Community Sharing
Building out social features on a blog will inevitably help grow traffic and keep visitors engaged. Adding ShareThis or similar capabilities is a must. Beyond that, just picture giving your readers a chance to publicly submit links others might like, then you add a voting function and all of a sudden your community is filtering content. You can learn a lot about your readers from such an addition. Or what about asking your readers what other blogs they visit and creating a RSS feed hub (think AllTop Fantasy Football or SportsBizFeed.com) as a place for them to start their day? Another idea: welcome any other sports blogger to automatically dump their info into a blog directory on your site. It’s small features like these which aren’t difficult to build that will strengthen a blog’s long-term potential and bring it notoriety.

Platform Sharing
More and more bloggers are going to get developers on board. The ones who move away from Blogger-esque hosting and onto custom-built platforms are going to hit home runs. The best platforms will embrace the social web, integrating relevant social media mentions into layouts while simultaneously giving readers the power to easily respond. At some point a specialized sports blogging platform can and will be openly shared, allowing bloggers to control every aspect of their site without having to come on board a blogging ad network. The possibilities are endless here.

Analytics
Traffic analysis is incredibly important and any good sports blogger already has Google Analytics or something similar. So, what’s next? Look into a real-time service like Chartbeat and you’ll see the possibilities. Not only can a blog owner see what’s happening right now on their site, they can now adapt and change things quickly. As your blog becomes more sticky and average time on site increases, imagine the effect displaying real-time stats publicly would have on your audience. Another service, Navegg, collects navigational data from visitors and provides you with demographic information on your visitors. Currently in private beta, the goal is to help you make your content more relevant and target advertising more efficiently. All-in-all, these tools are important to grasp because they allow for deep analysis of who’s actually reading your blog and how you can create a better user-experience.

Can you think of other things that will effect the future of sports blogging? Drop them in the comments section or shoot me an email. If it’s unique, crazy, or downright brilliant, we want to hear about it.

For a full recap from a sports blogger’s perspective, you can check out the writeup on LacrosseAllStars.com or the many recaps listed on the Blogs With Balls blog.

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>carrot is excited to announce that Team It Up, the first comprehensive sports utility application, is a home run on Facebook. As both the developers for this application and as sports fans/former athletes ourselves, we are thrilled to bring all facets of the sports world to the general Facebook fanbase. Never before have Facebook users been able to:

From grandstand fan to collegiate star athlete and beyond, this application caters to every sports enthusiast, and we are thrilled to be a part of such a complete sports experience on Facebook. Join the team Today!

This article is copyright © 2012