Live: Blogs With Balls 3, Chicago, IL

Today, I’m at Blogs WIth Balls, a sports blogging conference taking place in Chicago, IL. Below, I’ve included the streaming video from Justin.TV as well as a live blogging/Twitter stream that will be updated throughout the day.

To WomenTalkSports members/fans – please note that Dr. Nicole Lavoi from the Tucker Center (One Sport Voice) will be speaking on a very interesting panel from 2:40-3:40 CST: You’ve Gotta Fight For Your Right…to Blog?: A Legal and Ethical Primer to Sports Media. Should be interesting. Make sure you participate in the conversation and be sure to use the #bwb3 hashtag.

Watch live video from blogswithballs on Justin.tv

Happy National Girls and Women in Sports Day!

National Girls and Women in Sports day is today; a time when female athletes are honored. Check out this totally awesome slideshow compiled by the WomenTalkSports.com contributors! To see events and conversations going on throughout the country today, visit this page on WomenTalkSports.com.

NCAA and social media: Friends?

I’d like to extend a huge “welcome!” to NCAA collegiate athletic departments – it seems that this year, you may have finally realized the power of technology in bringing fans into your stadiums. Well, at least some of you have.

What am I talking about? Well, apparently, a panel of [experts?] convened at an NCAA education session and came up with the following finding:

“Programs willing to invest in effective communication can reap far greater support than at any time in their history.”

Couldn’t agree more. I’m just left a little confused as to why it took a panel of experts AND so much time to figure this out. These tools have been around forever. The only thing I can come up with is that there are some weird regulations out there that I don’t know about. Or athletic departments weren’t willing to lose control of their information. But now they don’t have any choice, and control is being relinquished. I guess that’s innovation?

NCAA institutions (especially schools which have strong female programs) should be doing everything they can to get fans, even if that means going online. Free tools exist, starting with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These are ways to connect with people and keep them engaged, and sports fans are some of the most faithful users. Embrace it.

So I have to ask the question -  sports information directors, where the heck have you been?

You’ve got a lot of work to do. You need to show me why my friends and I should care about you. What makes you different and cool? What makes you indispensable?

The NCAA panel was right – unlike any other time in history, there’s a huge opportunity here. But like the millions of Americans who are out of work or suffering in the economic depression, you’ve got some proving to do. Here are a few things to think about:

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Womens professional soccer engages over 200,000 Twitter followers

While most of us in digital marketing know that corporate use of social media is not, by any means, a popularity contest and the number of “followers” you have is by no means a measure of success, the Women’s Professional Soccer league (WPS) achieved a milestone this week when its Twitter account, @womensprosoccer, reached 200,000 followers. In fact, they’re ranked fifth behind the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL for leagues with the most followers.

The overarching reason WPS achieved the 200,000 fan milestone is because they built social media into their communications program as a fan-engagement mechanism. Not everyone understand this concept. Here are a few ways WPS engaged their fans this year which I believe have contributed to their overwhelming success.

1) They participate.

As you can see from their number of @replies, re-tweets (RT’s), and #hashtags, WPS actively participates with and contributes toward ongoing conversations. This is not something every company, league or brand knows how to do or why they need to do it. Actively participating in conversations with your consumers brings you closer to them. You develop what we call relationships, by actually talking to people. Relationships and conversations, over time, turn into loyalty. Loyalty turns in to word-of-mouth… and, over even more time, word-of-mouth turns into increased sales.

2) They provide value.

Now, look at the content of the league’s tweets. It’s actually valuable. They’re not overtly pushing their own agenda, meaning, they’re not posting links to where consumers can buy tickets and pushing it down their throats everyday. Instead, they’re posting content that soccer advocates would find useful such as newsworthy articles about the league and information about the sports industry.

3) They’re human.

One huge win, in my opinion, is the fact that WPS shows who they really are as people and teams. They also do an excellent job of cross-promotion; the league actively promotes the Twitter accounts of various teams. In fact, sometimes, they use Twitter as a way to communicate between each other.

Couple cross-promotion with the fact that they’ve created Twitter lists for WPS staff, teams and players. These show that WPS respects and trusts its staff and players enough to allow and even encourage them to be online tweeting about the league. Suddenly, the world sees that WPS is a living, breathing institution made up of some funny, personable people. WPS clearly values its consumers and employees enough to talk to them and show their staff’s human personalities.

These tactics all work toward a strategy that was built into the league from the very beginning: engage directly with new fans through the online medium. As we can see from their recent milestone, I’d say they’ve achieved significant success. Congratulations, WPS!

Can’t wait to see you in my Twitter feed…

1/11: Update:  Also, I forgot to add, WNBA has a great Twitter following as well, with 150,000. Stay tuned for a post on their significant efforts online later this week

Best of ’09: Forming a community, WomenTalkSports.com

This post is the start of a series this week in the WomenTalkSports.com network titled “Best of ’09.” Throughout this week, our community will be posting about their favorite moments in women’s sports in 2009.

There’s no doubt, 2009 was an exciting year in the women’s sports world, and I’m excited to see more posts. For me, though, hands down, my favorite moment was creating the WomenTalkSports.com blog network. It’s the first time in history female sports fans have come together and taken action as a community online.

We launched WomenTalkSports.com in February of 2009 with a mission of increasing attention, awareness and coverage of women’s sports. We felt that traditional media was doing somewhat of a disservice to female athletes by not focusing and covering women’s achievements in sports. For example, when was the last time you picked up the sports section of a newspaper and saw the headline of a female football player, swimmer, ice hockey player or gymnast? It doesn’t happen often.

In the spirit of citizen journalism, we took matters into our own hands. I, along with two of my like-minded friends, Jane Schonberger and Ann Gaffigan (and later joined by Lesley Higgins) decided to start a network of bloggers who take it upon ourselves to cover the achievements of female athletes. We knew there were quite a few of us out there, so we started reaching out and asking if we’d like to come together as a community.

In 2009, our network was born. We now have over 70 contributors to the site, and a community of engaged advocates. We cover local events, discuss the hottest trends in the media, digest cultural and gender issues, conduct interviews, do research and simply do our best to promote women in sport in every possible way. Here are just a few quotes from our members and friends:

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Sports bloggers: We’re not hermits, after all

This blog post is part of my ongoing weekly series discussing the role of social media and female athletics.

A recent post on TechPresident.com explains that new research by Pew says the Internet has not made us all hermits, after all.

That’s right, fellow twitter-ers and blog readers. We’re not the big dorks sitting alone in our parents basement typing away after all.

The full study/evidence can be found here on Pew.

Nancy Scola reports, “This is the sort of research that helps flesh out the promise of using connective technology to build civil society and the political realm.”

In short, the Internet – blogs, email, mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook – it’s not pushing us all apart. It’s bringing us together.

Maybe that’s why I’ve made over 70 new friends over the past year on WomenTalkSports.com. That’s where my home is. Where’s yours?

The power of the telephone: feminism, sports and social change

This blog post is part of my ongoing weekly series discussing the role of social media and female athletics.

I’ve been blogging the past couple of weeks about social media and its impact upon women in sport – mainly due to my own personal interests but also to fulfill a class requirement. This week, I’m compelled to change it up a little big and bring us back to a time before the Internet and social media, a time when we relied upon the telephone. Why? Because I am beginning to realize it’s just still as “social” as any other media utilized today.

I’m going to take you back to a time that I can only imagine (because I wasn’t alive). Let’s think about the 19760′s and 1970′s, a time when our foresisters (female equivalent of forefathers) organized and fought for an equal playing field as it relates to gender and sport.

Let’s think of people like Bernice Sandler, a part-time lecturer at the University of Maryland, and Rep. Martha Griffiths (D-Michigan), Rep. Edith Green (D-Ohio), researchers like Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter, and athletes like Billie Jean King who started coming together at the grassroots level to create change. For the sake of this post, let’s call these women “feminists.” (but I don’t want to label anyone)

According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, during that time, there existed a combination of, “the modern feminist movement, a youth culture, and other sources of social unrest.” And these are women who did something about it.

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“We The Media” of female sports

 

"We The Media" by Dan Gillmor / Photo credit: wethemedia.oreilly.com

This blog post is part of my ongoing weekly series discussing the role of social media and female athletics. My latest reading is We The Media, by Dan Gillmor, who will be joining my class via Skype tonight.

 

 

In short, Dan Gillmor’s book is “important,” and is one that every female athlete sports fan should read. Why? Because he’s 100 percent spot on, and his call to action it’s our only hope for survival.

Gillmor wrote his book in 2004 and then printed it in paperback in 2006, long before the worst economic climates in recent history hit our country, a climate in which journalists from around the world are now suffering, particularly in the women’s sports world, where, as Mechelle Voepel puts it, “Pretty much nothing is ever “safe.””

Look at how Dan’s predictions relate to the the female athletic industry - our one comprehensive magazine died at the end of 2002 because it wasn’t profiting. Not only that, but incredibly talented journalists are taking buyouts and are now living in some shaded area between a freelance writer and a professional blogger, and paid far less than they deserve.

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Tampax: A suitable sponsor for female athletes?

I continued to read Joe Favorito’s blog today and also saw his post about Tampax. I have such strong feelings on this subject that I just couldn’t resist sharing it with my readers.

Favorito’s post is titled Great Example of How Far Women’s Brands Have Come… For the Better… Serena Williams and Tampax. He told a simple story:

In 1997, as the WTA Tour was suffering finincially, and they were presented with a unique opportunity to have Tampax sponsor the tour.  At the time, Tampax was looking to “take the category out of the traditional area and attach itself to vibrant, global accessible female athletes who could grow with the brand.”

The deal never happened because the athletes and advisors feared “a feminine hygiene product as its title sponsor would cause tennis not to be taken seriously as a sports brand and would slow the growth of the sport into the mainstream.”

Today, however, 12 years later, the deal went through. Favorito says this change is remnicent of a new female athlete image, “Women’s athletes are powerful role models and health and well being for women and girls is much more prevalent an issue than ever before.”

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New sites with high school sports coverage: Will they have a positive or negative impact on women?

I was reading Joe Favorito’s Sports Marketing and PR Roundup blog and immediately took interest in a recent post titled Is 24/7 High School Media Coverage Worthwile?

In his post, Favorito discusses recent trends for brands to capture a “younger audience and families” in coverage of  high school sports. He discusses a trend of  “the consumer flock[ing]  more to local coverage than national coverage these days, and the more niche the better.”

This got me thinking about my experiences as an athlete in high school. The local papers were literally “all over us,” and the more successful your team was, the more media coverage you recieved.

Granted, the papers almost always featured more male sports news than female (which, as you know, is typical) but we always had a voice, and one that was heard. People (kids AND adults, male AND female) in my local geographic area literally read the sports section every day. People would frequently approach me to say congratulations, and I’d never even met them before. They knew me from the paper.  And yes, I was a female athlete.

Why did this happen? Because the papers gave us attention. It’s also important to note that specific reporters had a vested interest in their assignments: covering the female teams.

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Erin Andrews tells peep hole victimization story on Oprah

I Tivo’d Oprah today and got to see a story that I’d been waiting for awhile. ESPN reporter Erin Andrews told the queen of talk television the story of a complete invasion of privacy as a female sports reporter.

This is the first and only interview Erin will conduct with herself as the subject of the story. Now that it’s over, she told Oprah she’s ready for football season to begin and, even more importantly, she’s ready to move on.

What Erin told Oprah was the story of a classic peeping Tom, only today’s peeping Tom lives in the age of a World Wide Web, an environment where anybody can create content and share it with the world.  While the Web is awesome in its own right, it takes no mercy upon sexy female journalists (especially in the sports world).

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Blogs With Balls: Female sports community ignored, again

If you’re familiar with the mammoth multi-billion dollar male sports blogging scene, you’ve probably heard of A.J. Daulerio of Deadspin, Spencer Hall of The Sporting Blog or Dan Kellyand of the Bleacher Report.

Chances are, if you know these guys, you also know about Blogs With Balls. Why? Because they’re panelists. And chances are, (forgive me for stereotyping)… you’re a guy.

The first of its kind, Blogs With Balls is a an event occuring in New York City this Saturday, June 13. Sponsored by Yardbarker, this event will bring together some of the biggest names in the sports blogosphere for a one-day discussion on the space.

Topics include the future of sports media, leveraging social media, claiming earned media, the secret of success, content networks, financial return, and sports journalist vs. blogger.

While these topics are great ones and people in the industry would (and should) gain value from attending the event, I must point out that there is one serious problem. And if it is not addressed now, I fear that it never will be.

While some of the speakers on the agenda do include women, many of these ladies either work in the male sports industry or blog about completely men’s sports. Only one of the panelists actively blogs about women, and that’s Sarah Braesch, who, only as of a few nights ago, became an advisor to WomenTalkSports.com.

It is incredibly obvious that the female sports blogging community (yes, there is one) is seriously under-represented at this “sports blogging event.” In my opinion, if you’re going to use a gender-neutral term like “sports,” you had better include the other gender’s interests and not force us to live in a separate world. This is not only a common, significant oversight, but a dumb one, too.

As far as I know,  WomenTalkSports.com is the only network of female sports bloggers (writing completely about women’s sports).

Not one of its founders or bloggers was invited to this event. YardBarker (of which I am a member), HHR MediaGroup and every single panel moderator (including Matt Ufford, With Leather.com, Michael Tunison, KissingSuzyKolber.com, Dan Shanoff, DanShanoff.com, Sporting News, Matt Sebek, JoeSportsFan.com Dan Levy, On the DL Podcast) either did not realize this problem or chose to ignore it.

If you’re a female sports blogger, the very name of the event, Blogs With Balls, should – on some level – piss you off. Do you really think women are welcome or taken seriously at such an event? It’s not exactly welcoming for the gender that doesn’t (physically) have balls.

So I must ask those in the male sports industry – what do we need to do to be welcomed? This points to an even bigger quesiton – what do female athletes themselves need to do to be welcomed in traditional media coverage of sports (that doesn’t involve taking off clothes)? This, for example, would make a great debate topic for a panel this weekend.

Why were we excluded? Here’s my take – because that’s where the money is.  As I mentioned earlier in this post, male sports a multi-billion dollar industry. To date, the female sports industry is not at that level. Until women sports bloggers are recognized as part of a bigger, more diverse “sports community,” we will continue to rest in the shadows of our male counterparts.

I didn’t write about this topic because I hate men (I actually love them). I blog because I hope the opportunity to join this community is possible.

Until then, I’ll rest on Saturday knowing that Sarah will be there talking for me, and maybe next year, I’ll get the invite.

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