Whooooaaaaa!
About @#$%&! time this got a serious run.
This is going to be a long post but hopefully it can add something to the discussion. I've been meaning to write to the club for a while about the site and any future deals they may be locking themselves into.
Earlier this year when Talking Carlton was founded I was an advocate of trying to get the various Carlton communities together to create a fan forum/site that utilised the broader Carlton community in order to provide fans with a site that would be the envy of all the clubs.
The thing is whilst we might talk about Essendon* or the Saints being ahead in this area the truth is that they're miles behind where they should be as well. In fact I'm yet to see a sporting club site that does what it might which is to be a true community of its interested parties built and maintained by those interested parties.
Have a think about how much goes into the contributions and maintenance of fan forums such as TC, CSC and TBV. Have a think about how much of that energy is harnessed by the Carlton Football Club.
Other than a few contributors submitting a few articles now and then it's bugger all. That's not to belittle the contributors to the CFC site just to acknowledge that as a percentage of the energy that's spent by fans in forums such as these it doesn't even rate 1%.
There's an opening for the club with the end of the Telstra deal that offers the possibility of doing something truly extraordinary that will change the way sports clubs use the online environment for all time.
Christopher Locke who was a co-authour of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" has written about this future in "Gonzo Marketing". The guy comes across as potentially psychotic but his message is sound and it's amazing that it hasn't been taken on board by more organisations (although perhaps not if you consider how inately conservative most ot these are).
The basic message is as follows (to save time I'll quote from a review of the book):
Eric Norlin wrote:
"Gonzo Marketing" works from an established premise: The broadcast paradigm is dying. The broadcast paradigm in this sense refers not just to marketing but more to the mass media that disseminates marketing messages. The book alleges a growing ineffectiveness of marketing in the context of its creation and a vastly different approach to an alternative.
Here come the quotes:
Gonzo Marketing provides a model whereby companies can stop manipulating people as if they were abstract demographic data, and instead create genuine relationships with emergent online communities of interest: powerful new web micromarkets. The paradox is that companies can have everything they've always wanted. Greater market share. Customer loyalty. Brand equity. All those empty phrases that today make people blow coffee out their noses. But companies can actually achieve these goals. No really. All they have to do is follow the advice my Junior High principal once shared with me. "Son," he said, shaking with anger, "you've got to get your thinking straight!"
You can read the entire review here:
http://www.clickz.com/experts/archives/res/personal/article.php/903301
This isn't pie in the shy shit. If a sporting organisation got courageous enough to do this properly the future would look like this:
Carlton Football Club would own and oversee carltonfc.com.au. The basic maintenance of the site would be handled by a team of two or three techs overseen by a sub-committee apopointed by the board. The sub-committee would be made up of board members, techs and interested fans with a history of contribution to the online football community.
The site would be built in a way that 95% of all content would be provided by the fans for the fans. The club would still release news via its own section of the site and handle advertising but other than that it would do very little. Obviously you can't just completely open up the site to anyone to post whatever (other than in the various forums) but you can open it up to established interested parties to build their own domains within the larger Carlton online world.
For example the site could have the following:
Jarusa's stats interests could become a key area of the site where a larger archive of stats related data and articles could be accessed
The Blueseum would be another area that would spin off the site
Those hard-core training freaks could be lent a digital video supplied by the club on training days which would then be placed in a training section with an archive of training videos that would allow fans to go back and compare and discuss the various changes or lack of to both training and the individual development of players.
Once a week a player would come online for discussion with fans.
carltonfc.com.au would not need to maintain its own forum. For legal reasons I'm sure the club would be nervous about having open slather on the forums. What it could do is provide the links to the existing forums essentially bringing them in under the club's umbrella but not being responsible for them. You can't be sued for something that's said on a site you merely provided a link to. if that weren't the case then Google would have been out of business years ago.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could go on but the key thing in all this is that the role of the club's online presence would change from "broadcasting" to the Carlton community to "facilitating" engagement between the carlton community.
If the sub-committee can get their head around this significant difference then there's a chance of it happening. If they see it as too difficult or too revolutionary for their conservative tendencies then we're condemned to be following behind forever.
I have little doubt that a club is going to do this one day and my money's on Eddie or Thomas to drive it through at their clubs but there's no reason why it couldn't be Carlton to lead the way.
What would it cost?
Not a lot.
Salaries for three techs. Enough backend to support the site which could be quite large before too long.
That's about it off the top of my head. There may be other expenses but they wouldn't be great.
As mentioned earlier by steve (I think) there's also a need for better database management and utilization of the online side of the club's membership but that's just a basic operational issue that should have been implemented yonks ago.
The fundamental shift is for the club to recognize that it's in partnership with its stakeholders and to utilize their resources rather than preach to them (poorly) from above.
The benefits to the club in facilitating a true online community with all the possible bells and whistles will pay dividends many times greater than any potential costs.
Time to have some guts Blues.
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