The web is a keystone of your communication with fans, ticket holders, vendors, and the media. Unfortunately, "if you build it, they will come" may work for a cornfield in Iowa, but it is not the model for growing your audience on the web. The internet is like surfing... You have to catch the right trend wave and ride it. Do that, and your audience increases. Fail to recognize the trend, and you sink.
Now, the next wave is the social search engine (SSE). It brings you and potential fans together surgically.
Picking the Wave
Search engines were the first wave of connection to your audience. Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask digested millions of pages of information in seconds, and delivered results to readers. The problem has been that often these engines are not very context sensitive. Type "Las Vegas Gladiators" into Google and you will get something on the AFL club there, along with a lot of non-related items on Las Vegas, Roman gladiators, and things that may mention any of the words in passing.
A social search engine is the next generation of finding stuff on the web. It is digital democracy and next-generation social networking all wrapped into one. It helps link your website, your news, to the micro-channels of people in your town, or those that follow your league, or your parent club, or even a particular player passing through.
Some SSEs are just news sites, while others have chat space, forums for readers to discuss common interests, games, and more. A number rebroadcast in RSS (Real Simple Syndication), which means that bloggers and other publications that repackage the news carry links back to your website and your news content exponentially to hundreds or thousands of other websites.
News SSEs
The biggest of the news SSEs is Digg.com. Readers "discover" news items that they like, and then "Digg" them by voting for them. Sites place a button on the story, and the reader clicks on it...
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