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• How do you create a social network while protecting your brand?

• How do you translate a real world experience into an online one?

• How do you spread your brand’s reach

In highlighting companies leveraging social media I turn to Turner Sports. Now Charlotte, North Carolina may have outbid Atlanta to house the NASCAR Hall of Fame, but Atlanta-based Turner Sports manages NASCAR.com.

I don’t follow NASCAR, but 75 million Americans do. While it’s one thing to attract legions of fans to the racetrack, it’s quite another to create a compelling online experience.

Apparently, NASCAR teams still draw relatively little traffic online. Many will admit that their official Web sites have been treated as “a necessary evil.” Teams generally don’t have the staff or know-how to keep the content relevant and it brings little to no return.

Turner Sports is hoping to change that and create a huge online following by managing NASCAR’s online presence. They are combining traditional website features with social media to foster loyalty, sustain interest and drive traffic.

To see how Turner is succeeding, I did some digging on the Internet and found an excellent customer case study published by Cisco who partnered with Turner Sports to create NASCAR.com. I also spoke with Scott Doyne, business manager, NASCAR.com at Turner Sports New Media.

The challenge was how to attract fans to the site and create features that extend the NASCAR experience. Turner sees social networking as a way to help fans connect with each other and share their interest in and passion for the sport.

The first step in the process was gaining upper management’s support. Establishing a community was at the time a new concept and there were “few precedents on which to build a business case.” But with management’s approval, Turner and Cisco spent about 8 months creating an architecture that gives fans and teams the ability to:

• Create their own NASCAR.com presence using highly personalized profiles

• Share photos, blogs, podcasts, other media files

• Customize their pages with graphics and content

• Join affinity groups, known as “Crews,” around particular races, drivers and sponsors

The result: Nascar.com’s community website.

Building a community without brand protection safeguards is relatively easy. The challenge was “balancing the desires of fans to express themselves with NASCAR’s need to administer content quickly” without sacrificing the immediacy of a successful online community.

According to Cisco, much of the development time was spent on creating procedures to moderate conversations and monitor uploaded content. Special software screens out prohibited words. Moderators contracted by NASCAR also work to block inappropriate content.

Not surprising to me, the fans have for the most part followed the rules of engagement and less than .3 percent of all comments have been rejected for using inappropriate content.

Is it working? According to Turner, through the end of November, the site is averaging over 6.5 million unique visitors per month. In February 2008, they had 8.9 million unique visitors, which was their highest month ever. And November saw a 19 percent increase in page views year over year. Nascar.com site has 60,000 Registered Members and 4,200 crews and has generated 260,000 pieces of content (blogs, photos and videos) from its users.

Beyond forums, Nascar engages fans through fantasy games like Fantasy Cap Challenge and 3 Wide in the Chase that allow fans to compete with others for prizes.

They also have had a lot of success with widgets extending the NASCAR.com site. The widgets allow users to view, read, and interact with their favorite NASCAR content on their social network, blog, personalized page or Web site.

As Scott Doyne said, widgets extend the ecosystem and give users more flexibility to combine content in new and creative ways.

When a community site is successful, you tend to minimize the concerns you may initially have had.   As Michael Adamson, vice president of sports new products at Turner Sports New Media said: “When we started, the idea of an online community was hardly on the radar for most companies. Now for them, and for us, it has quickly become the cornerstone of an online strategy.”

It appears the lesson in all this is that the chances of success are greatly increased by soliciting management buy in, anticipating pitfalls, and most importantly respecting the fan experience. 

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: NASCAR; Nascar.com; Scott Doyne; Turner Sports;

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With the inauguration of Barack Obama a day away, it is worth noting the communications strategy that helped get him to the presidency.  In last month’s New York Times Magazine, there was an excellent analysis on how the Obama campaign mastered the media.  I think it is very useful for communications professionals who wish to embrace both openness and message control.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people say you can’t control the message in the age of new media.  While you can’t dictate what bloggers say about you (and it behooves you to pay attention to what they are in fact saying), you can control what you say and how you say it.

As the Times reported, “Obama’s New Way organization was grounded largely on Old School codes — notions of loyalty, aggressiveness and discretion.” If there were any disagreements, power struggles or hurt feelings you would never know it.  Perhaps that is the luxury of a winning campaign.  Losing campaigns tend to spout leaks.  

Interestingly, Obama’s control of the message coincided with an “open” embrace of new media. In the course of the campaign, the Obama team showcased a number of new-media applications designed to project a sense of open-book communications to the public.  While clearly not ignored, traditional media had to compete with new forms of communications including Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

For examples, check out slides 37-41 from Online Community Best Practices by Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Research.

The Obama campaign made news by directly communicating with voters via email and text addresses for major announcements and taking advantage of websites like fightthesmears.com  to defend against rival attacks.

And what did openness mean to the Obama campaign? According to the Times, it was about the campaign’s willingness to make the candidate, senior staff and information (from policy positions, donors lists, and birth certificates) available in a manner that “bred a feeling of real-time connectedness between campaign and voter.”

In short, they provided access to information to those with the least amount of access – the public.

For corporate communications professionals, the Obama campaign demonstrates that even the most open and transparent communications efforts can be disciplined.

As Jonathan Kopp wrote me

Obviously, a balance has to be struck. The campaign clearly respected and valued peer-to-peer conversations among voters. And they earned people’s respect and trust by providing the information and tools that helped those conversations flourish on MyBarackObama and at offline gatherings. The campaign-to-voter conversation is a different story. That’s where message discipline and consistency come in to play.

Jonathan is a partner at Shepardson Stern & Kaminsky, an integrated communications firm that was on Obama for America’s national media team and the campaign’s agency for youth.

In the age of conversations, with decentralized communications and multiple spokespersons, losing control is a palpable fear.  And in fact your message will be lost or muddled without guidelines.  

New media gives you new ways to reach your audience.  It’s immediate.  It’s personal.  It’s about creating a “non traditional” corporate image.   But it isn’t carte blanche for employees to say what they want.  They should be fired for using abusive language or revealing proprietary information. The Obama campaign was relentless in staying on message.  

Disciplined also means not wavering when embracing new forms of communications.  The Obama communications team understood its value — using it imaginatively and consistently.  It was not a gimmick used on an ad hoc basis.  New media was integral to Obama’s message and central to a large portion of his supporters.

Perhaps in the end, one of the lasting legacies of the Obama campaign may very well be its understanding of the power and novelty of new media as well as its ability to use it as a fulcrum to drive its message.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Obama; Obama Campaign; Jonathan Kopp; SSK; FightTheSmears; MyBarackObama; Jeremiah Owyang; Online Community Best Practices;

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The Quest Begins:  My First Video Game

Yesterday, I continued my quest to get a handle on interactive gaming.  A combination of art and technology, gaming and the principles of gaming are playing a critical role in the future of marketing and my understanding of social media.  They help build brand and community.  They are highly interactive, immediate and lend themselves to hours of engagement.(Check out a previous posting on gaming that I did.)

Earlier in the day, I sat down with Hector Pages, COO of Brandmovers.com (blog), an online games, contests, sweepstakes and loyalty promotions firm here in Atlanta.  He showed me an interactive game for a wireless communications provider.  This “advergame” asks users to look at two very similar pictures and pick out the differences,  The goal is to build customer engagement.  These games yield a great deal of customer data, email lists from users who opt in, and a small cadre of very loyal brand ambassadors.

While it goes without saying that the game needs to be fun, it also must be consistent with the brand and part of a wider marketing strategy to be successful.  As Pages said, “Games don’t live in isolation.”

In the afternoon I met up with Lukas Bradley in the refurbished garage behind his house, which also serves as the home for Thrust Interactive, a gaming studio.  As his team of developers looked on amusement, Lukas gave me my first gaming tutorial.  A bit disoriented at first, I burned through a an hour of Portal, a single-player first person action/puzzle video game.  It was immersive and yes addictive.  It makes me wonder how I will find the time to do everything else I want to do in life.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Brandmovers; Thrust Interactive; Advergame; Portal; Lukas Bradley;

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This Tuesday, I am moderating a panel for the Atlanta Telecom Professionals that explores social media’s impact on telecommunications. I will be joined by:

• Jay Curthrell, CTO, Digitel Corporation

• Hunter Montgomery, senior manager of marketing communications platforms, Verizon Business

• Emily Soelberg, director of premium content, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets

We will discuss such issues as the cost of implementation as well as network capacity, marketing, product development and customer support. At one level, we are interested in how telecom companies are using social media to deliver better service and more products. At another level, we will explore how telecom companies are addressing the greater demand for video services and other forms of user generated content.

The event will begins at 5:30 PM at Crowne Plaza Ravinia here in Atlanta. I will follow up with another posting later in the week.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: ATP; Atlanta Telecom Professionals; Telecom;

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While most of Atlanta was watching Florida play Oklahoma in the BCS Championship Game last night, 30 social media stalwarts attended the January meeting of the Social Media Club Atlanta at Manuel’s Tavern. So above the shouts and groans from fans sitting in the next room, we played Online Identity and Buzzword Bingo. Led by Amber Rhea, we discussed

- Is your online identity different from your real life identity?

- What does it mean to “manage your online identity?”

- Are there any off-limits topics on blogs? Who decides?

- Rethinking the personal/professional dichotomy and tearing down the walls of compartmentalization yea or nay?

Each time someone said a buzzword in his or her answer, we got to put down a bean over that buzzword. The Goal: The first person who had five buzzwords in a row would win.

Here were some social media buzzwords:

Hyperlocal
Whuffie
Social capital
Online reputation
Thought leader
Expert
Relationship building
Conversation
Integrity
Personal brand
Transparency
Credibility
Beta
Overshare
Authenticity
Peer influence mapping
Microblogging
Evangelist
Netroots
Viral
Crowdsourcing
User-generated
Long tail

The winner was a blogger known as JBrotherLove.

The winning string of buzzwords: Authenticity, Transparency, Personal brand, Conversation, Credibility

And yes, I got home in time to watch Florida beat Oklahoma, but my real concern is the Giants vs Eagles on Sunday.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: SMCATL; Social Media Club Atlanta; Social Media;

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