Is it possible for a sports team in a non-traditional market to have one of the worst records in their league for almost 10 years running and continue to have great fan support? The Los Angeles Kings certainly seem to think so.

I realize I am talking about Hockey in LA in September but I think the Kings are on to something that other leagues and teams should learn from.

Fans+ Social Media =Power… Power = tickets sales

Things the kings have done several note worthy things with social media

1. The L.A. Kings list fan sites on their official site official web page (the Kings don’t control these sites but they are send people there anyway)
2. The L.A. Kings engage random fans on Twitter regularly
3. The L.A. Kings/NHL allow their players to have blogs and twitter accounts. This provides a great inside look which is what fans really want anyway.
4. The L.A. Kings have posted a link to an unofficial fan pages on Facebook and Myspace
5. The L.A. Kings even have a blog they link to that is written in Spanish

With an average attendance of 89.1% the Staples Center was often filled in 2008-2009. Kings fans still went to games despite seeing a team that has missed the playoffs since 2002 and missed it again in 2008-2009.

Could it be that Kings fans are just better because they are empowered?

Where are your Fans?

Do you give them a seat at the table?

I came across this post on Slashdot and it just really pissed me off. Reverb Communications’ idea of good social media practice is to hire a team of interns to spam the iTunes store with fake positive reviews of its clients’ apps. Be prepared, because I’m going to rant a little…

THIS is EXACTLY why people get suspicious of marketers using social media! Consumers are afraid of companies co-opting what was meant to be an authentic, altruistic community for mercenary ends. By contrast, they don’t mind if companies (like Threadless and Zappos) use social space to have real conversations and provide real, useful content…so why is it so hard for companies to understand that, to make the best of the social space, you need to participate in good faith?

/rant.

Seriously, when you (the reader) find out a company employs tactics like that, does it make you reluctant to purchase from them, or is it just me?

If you’re a skeptical business owner or a corporate executive just interested in social media, this clip is a must see. And after viewing this clip, you still think social media is nothing more than a bunch of ramblings by high school and college kids, you better start looking for a new job relatively soon.

As I have said (and countless other people), there is a fundamental change occurring in the way business will be done in the next few years. Social Technologies are drastically altering the business landscapes and how brands communicate in them. And if companies, brands and people don’t get on board they’re lively hood may be irrelevant come 2015.

Now I’m not saying that this is the end all be all and brands should drop everything they are doing and dive in head first. These social channels are another tool to add to the marcom arsenal. By understanding and integrating social tools into your current marketing mix, brands can begin to open new and untapped customer segments that they probably never dreamed they could have reach 2 years ago.

Let us help us help you understand and strategize your business options: nostruminc.com

Thanks Socialnomics for making these insights available and we here at nostrum will continue to help educate the masses as well!

Mommy bloggers are becoming a force to be reckoned with and in Chicago at this year’s BlogHer conference, they were treated with shopping sprees, lavish meals and the much coveted swag from brands like Tide, Bounce, Kodak, Pepsi and more. I suppose for this particular segment, it’s akin to hitting the motherload.
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Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, discusses the business pros/cons around Google’s innovative (lack of) corporate structure and the challenges that he himself faced coming from a traditional business hierarchical system into one where employees feel “their managers work for them.”

Eric Schmidt defines the term and speaks to Google’s early years and how it has evolved from a company of fun to a company where business matters. Yet, the core of value of “Don’t Be Evil” is and has always been paramount in every single business decision made.

Evan Wittenberg, Director of Google Leadership Development speaks about how Google leads by example at each and every single level. At its core, it all comes back to sharing, teamwork and trust.

I freely admit I don’t golf. I don’t watch golf. I don’t even play miniature, putt-putt golf (unless it’s somebody’s birthday).

I know NOTHING about golf, except that old guys like to dress up in what would ordinarily be considered embarrassing clothes and spend hours chasing a teeny-tiny ball around with a metal stick. And most of that I learned from Robin Williams (warning–NSFW language).

But I do know social media. And the PGA Tour gets it.

For the pga.com coverage of the PGA Championships, they’re using the Justin.tv/UStream model of streaming coverage combined with live chat. You can sign in using your Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace credentials and chat with other viewers. You can chat with everyone watching, or just your friends on whatever social network you signed in with. I realize it’s not a new or complicated idea, but it’s just nice to see it popping up in such an Old Boys’ Club as golf. This is the group that most people see as LEAST involved with social media and the new communications forms popping up on the web, and yet they understand that being able to watch the matches and talk about it with other fans is the ultimate goal here.  For that, the PGA gets serious brownie points. Pompom hats aside.

So the question for other sports (and any other traditional media-based business), if a bunch of old guys in plaid pants and fuzzy hats get it, why don’t you?

Jolie O’Dell has an entertaining macro conversation with Bob Nanna of threadless.com discussing how they use social media to spread t-shirt love.

Check out what “5″ Gum is doing on the technology front.

Who would of thought gum, AR, and electronic music would all meet in the middle.  So many options for this type of technology IF you have the right audience to serve your message to.

Thoughts?

While everyone continues to tout that Social/Digital/Interactive Media are the next greatest things, then why do businesses fall into the same rut as they did back in 20th Century.
Businesses continue to assume that they must produce things within an industrial age construct where production on a mass scale is revered to almost a god like state. By scaling on a mass level, price and efficiencies are surely gained, but at the expense of what: the expense of the original product AND servicing the people who are directly engaging with those products .

“In the 21st Century the challenges of building great businesses differed than those in the 20th century, and at the core of success is responding to the consumer.” John Gerzema expands to his thoughts in his post in regards to re-thinking how businesses need to be built in today’s economy. “Scaling (businesses) becomes an operation unto itself, with entire businesses built up around the idea of scaling as a goal. Scaling is not the goal, the goal is providing the customer with the product they need at the time they need it.”

Why then do businesses continue to operate within this robber baron mindset? Fear, Memories of the Dot-com Bubble, Lack of Historical Data, Uneasiness with the Concept of Change - Probably a bit of them all, but it is high time that business understand that mulling things over for the next big scaled objective is going to be the demise of their Executive Positions. Web 2.0 and furthermore 3.0 have already seeped into corporate cultures across the globe, and if a business hasn’t acted on this, their competition has - Digital Darwinism at it’s finest.

That’s why businesses need to adopt and understand these 5 essential pillars in today’s Enterprise 2.0 Economy (all of which are expanded upon in detail in Christopher Vollmer’s paper Digital Darwinism):

1. Turn Consumers into “Prosumers”
2. Build Bi Lateral Brand Experiences
3. Place Context on Par with Content
4. Master the New Calculus of Communications
5. Collaboration is King

So going forward, instead of worrying about what we had and trying to protect it, lets look what we are doing on the innovation and collaboration front and make sure we stick to the goals (people)  that got us here in the first place.