If ESPN thinks it can be MySpace, they are dead wrong. If ESPN thinks they can create a rich, content-focused experience interwoven with significant community offerings, then they are absolutely right!
The key here is that ESPN does not fall into the trap of thinking they can just throw up a social network with the features they listed including sports scores, quizzes and so on and expect to driven millions of users. Instead, ESPN needs to look at this as bringing the complete ESPN experience online into a community format. That starts with taking advantage of ESPN's huge library of sports highlights. I think videos could be leveraged to drive significant traffic in a variety of ways.
For example, ESPN can use its clout to draw top athletes to maintain profiles on their "SportsNation" social network. Just as MySpace's bands drew its fans to join, so will professional athletes. However, that comparison comes to a grounding halt when you consider the long tail of music versus the long tail of athletes.
In music, you have over two million bands on MySpace. The smaller the band, the tighter knit the fans tend to be. Why? Because the music creates an emotional connection that is made all the more special by the fact that there are not a lot of fans, and thus that band feels all the more a part of you.
Contrast this with athletes. The long tail of athletes is very long in that there are millions of them, but the problem is that you do not see the same band-type phenomenon of tighter knit groups of fans. A major real arbiter of popularity in sports has to do with whether or not you are televised, usually on ESPN.
So clearly ESPN cannot rely solely on pro athletes maintaining profiles to drive users to SportsNation. But ESPN can enhance each athlete's profile significantly by tapping into ESPN's content libraries and including many minutes of clips of each athlete's performances. As the ad model gets more developed for online television, ESPN could even stream full games of Roger Clemens pitching performances on Roger Clemen's profile on SportsNation.
This could of course be extended to tens of thousands of other professional athletes who have had coverage on ESPN. Just as MySpace bands provide music content that keeps drawing fans back to their pages, athletes need to have video content to draw their fans back to the pages, and that is best provided by ESPN since it owns the copyright to many sports broadcasts anyway. ESPN could enable users to repost videos on their MySpace profiles, which provides more exposure for SportsNation while maintaining the ability to stream ads before the clips.
Thinking about the finer points of the network, ESPN needs to consider how much they value privacy. Do they open up like MySpace and let anyone see anyone's profile? (Of course MySpace has some privacy protections to block viewing by some, but not a significant number of people use this). ESPN needs to consider the fact that they will be creating a valuable site that should be driven by localized connections.
For example, ESPN could draw in fantasy sports as part of SportsNation so each of the millions of registered users could become SportsNation members. Participants in Fantasy Sports tend to be in pools with good friends or coworkers. These are clearly very real world connections, which contrasts with the superficial connections that exist between people on dating sites and to some extent MySpace.
Each user could insert information about the sports they play, how good they are and much more about their interests as related to sports. This opens up a host of potential free services that could draw users back such as matching people to play golf games based on handicap, basketball based on ability or easily organize a flag football league for a certain range of zip codes.
In creating a message board system, ESPN should be considerate of the fact that people who are completely anonymous tend to post more harsh comments than people who are not anonymous. That said, ESPN could implement a digg-style rating system that draws attention to posts that people think are good, and buries those that are mindless.
To provide all the more reason for people to be more considerate of their posts around SportsNation, each user's profile could include a section linking to all the user's posts throughout SportsNation. That would provide accountability. The section should also draw attention to each user's best posts as rated by other SportsNation members. High ratings make people feel good and gives them reason to continue being good contributors to the community.
In summary, ESPN is knocking on the right door. I just hope that they reach their full potential with SportsNation rather than expecting a MySpace clone will do the trick.
What do you think ESPN must do in order for SportsNation to be a big success? Please post in the comments.
Good post. I definitely agree with you that ESPN needs to do more then the basic social networking features such as blogs and friend lists to truly make this a great sport experience.
I'm the founder of a site that is launching soon, http://www.fanlete.com, that is taking a more interactive approach to sports social networking with predictions, competitions, and discussion boards. These are the types of things that general social networks such as myspace can't implement do to their very specific focus.
Posted by: Brian Balfour | July 12, 2006 at 11:29 AM