I am very excited to show off a couple new functions that we are planning to launch with very soon. Several months back, I did some market research on a wide variety of sport marketing expert sits, both inside and outside of the martial arts and combat sport market. I was trying to compile a list of what where the features that event promoters want or need. One of the standout questions I kept on running into was “What is next in event engagement?”. this question churned in my head for a while and bellow is a peek at what we are about to share with the martial arts and combat sports world.

To successfully find possible solutions to “what is next in event engagement?”, we needed to define a few variables. These variables include target audience, availability of resources, and being that Find Fight prides itself on being a low to no budget solution for event promoters, a low to no cost point.

Defining your audience
The target audience for most martial arts and combat sport events falls somewhere between 18-34 years of age. A large majority of this age group, compared to all others has the most residual income, due to not having monetary responsibility like mortgage payments and families. Also, this very same age group is leading the way in social media with 40.8% of all Facebook users and 47% of twitter users falling in the category. The natural result would be that your audience of fighters and fans are both tech savvy and most likely own or plan to own a phone that allows them to communicate with their social networks more easily. You could see this trend already happening within the NBA with players like Shaq tweeting during games.

If the trend is that users will be actively engaging within there social networks during your events, then why not promote the trend by creating a centralized area for the content to be aggregated. Find Fight allows your audience to share there experiences through the use of twitter and a specified hashtag that the promoter sets. This hashtag is then filtered out and shown on your event page so promoters could easily point their fans at home to follow along by tweeting a message like “See what is going on at Acme Fight Classic 10 here http://www.findfight.com/acmeFC/10 and join the conversation! #acmeFC” By directing your fans to your own branded site, you will allow perspective fighters and fans the ability to not only join the conversation, but also explore your blog posting, and upcoming events.

An added feature of Find Fights Live Event Tweet Stream is it’s ability to search each message for any image reference and automatically send that photo to the live photo feed. Not only could fans at your event share 140 characters of text but most mobile Twitter application also allow you to capture photos and send them in your tweet. This allows you audience to submit a stream of photos of fight action as it happens, or just send an image of hanging out amongst friends.

Live Video Streaming
Whenever i speak to promoters about live video streaming the first question they have is “How do i monetize that?” and then come to the realization that in order to effectively live stream your entire event and monetize it takes lots of money, and in the long run is probably not the most cost effective means. However, if a promoter thinks about content before cash, they will quickly see that there are a slew of Live Streaming social networks that offer a great solution for creating live content. One thing to remember is that content does not necessarily mean streaming your entire event from start to finish, but it could mean creating some other forms of content to share with your audience. There may be an influential fighter that happened to be in attendance and you may want to quickly interview him live. Maybe there is one headline event that you would like to stream for the people at home to see. By specifying your UStream channel on your promoter page your audience will see your stream on your event page as soon as you begin gto broadcast. As mentioned in the previous twitter functionality, being that this service is centralize with your other content you could invite people at home to check out your event page and see the interview. You could also suggest that they ask questions via the twitter hashtag which is conveniently right next to the video.

We feel that both of these solutions enhance your audiences engagement both on location and allows people at home to also take part in the experience. Please comment and let us know what you think about these feature. We love to hear from you all!

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Find Fight has decided to leverage both Facebook connect and twitter’s authentication systems as alternative log in methods. This method of authentication proves to be a win/win for both promoters and the people viewing their event pages on FindFight.com. Although logging into Find Fight using your Facebook or Twitter username and password offers only limited access to the site, visitors will be able to comment on blog discussions and RSVP by clinking on the “I will be there” button. Advanced functionality such as event page subscriptions and setting up Fight Agents will require the user to sign in as a Find Fight member.

What this means for Fighters and Fans?
Logging in to Find Fight through Facebook or Twitter allows fighters and fans to broadcast their activity to their networks. Since social networks are built through relationships with people that share some sort of common interest, Find Fight decided that it was important to allow the user to share their interaction with their friends on other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Since there many of the user’s friends have a high probability of being either interested in Martial Art, discussion on Find Fight are very relevant to some of the discussion that they may already be having on Facebook and Twitter.

What this means for a Promoter?
By simplifying the commenting processes, and allowing the user to share their passion with their friends on other networks, fighters and fans may have an increased sense of ownership to there comments and interaction. Since the user is taking time out to interact with your event page, Find Fight feels it is only right that they are able to share that interaction with others. At the same-time this process of sharing interactions with other social networks extends the reach of the event far beyond the confines of FindFight.com. Best of all, “Word of Mouth” is always a great way to enhance your brand recognition.
 
About Facebook
Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. Check out twitter by going to http://www.facebook.com

Become a Find Fight Fan on Facebook

About Twitter
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them. Check out twitter by going to http://www.twitter.com

Follow Find Fight on twitter

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As we close into our official launch of FindFight.com. I have decided to create the first of a series of screencast that will walk you through the functionality behind the site . Our first screencast will demonstrate the flow that a promoter would take to create a new event, and broadcast the new event to their various networks.

Send us an feedback at twitter username @findfight, or post any ideas or feedback to http://getsatisfaction.com/findfight.

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On twitter i recieved a tweet by Warren M. Jackson (@knuckleslap) that I thought would be good food for thought.

His tweet stated:
“As a MMA promoter, how do you reward your fans? What current promotions are you running? How are your sponsorships activated?”

This statement stuck in my head for a bit until i got a facebook update by another martial arts promoter I follow Brian Cimins (@grapplersquest) . I haven’t seen any official site stating this, but he is running a very interesting “Compete Free for Life” video submission campaign on facebook which i feel is a great use of social media.  I haven’t seen the details of the campaign but from the little i heard it has a lot of promise!

Here is the message i got on Facebook from Brian Cimins:
$25,000 COMPETE FREE FOR A LIFETIME CONTEST with Grapplers Quest. Training Jiu Jitsu and Submission Fighting is a liftstyle and passion. Share your STORY including Grapplers Quest Competition Training, Highlights & Interviews in one VIDEO less than 1024 MB in size & less than 10 mins. in length. MUST be received by 12/31/09. You must add ‘Grapplers Quest’ & me, ‘Brian Cimins’ as Friends to ENTER

Here is one of the video submissions from one of his fans — Great Job!

My Grapplers Quest COMPETE FOR FREE FOR A LIFETIME Contest from Grapplers Quest on Vimeo.

If anyone runs into similar campains send them my way!

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If you sold air conditioners you probably wouldn’t open up a shop in Antarctica.  You go to where your consumer is, and find an area that uses your product. The same goes for promotion, if you want to promote your brand, and expose it to a pre-qualified audience you need to seek them out.  So how do you know if there are people talking about you?  Do you wait till your ear rings? Social media has found it’s place on the internet, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

So what does this mean for an event promoter, or other consumer based organization? No matter how big or small your event may be, you better believe that someone is talking about you on the internet. Good or bad, there is dialog happening and you need to make yourself part of the conversation.  You may have not realize yet, but although you may not deliver tangible products it is still essential to provide some sort of customer service. Not only will this dialog help you in understanding the needs and expectations of your audience, but you will also build trust and respect, which could affect the loyalty from your audience. In business, the thing that makes a GOOD leader GREAT, is their ability to listen and learn from their employees to assist in making decisions. I find that in a service based industry the same holds true.

The internet is pretty big, so how do you make yourself part of the conversation? Here are 2 great techniques that I use, not only for Find Fight, but for several other ventures and application i have developed.

Google Alerts

This is a service that is offered by google which notifies you via email or RSS feed about the latest web pages that google found containing your criteria. So for example if you are interested in people talking about your event in blogs, videos, forums, etc., then  you might want to create an alert for the name of your event.

Then What?

Okay you found the blog post, or YouTube video about your event.  Now you have three options:

1. read and observe the discussion and comments
2. comment and make your self a part of the conversation, offering additional insight, asking for feedback, or anything that may help in continuing the conversation.
3. link to and publicize the content on any blog, website, or social media outlet that you may have: “Check out this great fight clip that Joe Smith made at my latest tournament!”  This is a win/win for both you and the producer of the content.  Publishing their links makes the publisher feel appreciated, and will hopefully encourage them to publish more stuff regarding your brand.

Screenshot of Google Alerts

Filter Twitter using TweetDeck Searches

Twitter is all the rage right now, and you should make sure you are a part of it as soon as you can. Twitter is a micro-blogging service built around conversation, based on answering the simple question “what are you doing?”.  Believe it or not, for some people, “What are you doing?” may  be directly related to your brand. For example, “Getting ready to go to {YourEventName} Tournament”, or “Just got back from {YourEventName} Tournament”.

Imagine how valuable it could be if you could listen to what people where saying about your event at this very moment! With TweetDeck you could do just that. You could create search criteria like “your event name”, or maybe something like a specific martial arts style that is relevant to your event such as “Boxing”.

TweetDeck will then filter out all the conversations happening around the world on twitter and list them down for you to read in your steam.

Then What?

Much like the Google Alerts example you have several options.

1. Follow the users speaking about you! If the person is talking about your brand then they must be interested in your brand, and would probably be interest to follow your tweets.
2. ReTweet the message that they sent. The act of retweeting will introduce your @twitterName not only to the person who spoke about you, but all the people that follow them. This increases your chances of being seen by their friends that may have similar interest and may also decide to follow you.
3. Respond to the tweet and start a conversation to build a relationship with your audience. “Great to hear you made it out to the tournament! Hope to see in march for the next one!”

Bellow is an example of a filtered search using TweetDeck. If people are interested I could go more in depth about twitter, and other 3rd part applications that could help your stay in touch.

UPDATE 4/8/09

I wanted to add to this list a new product that Yahoo! launched which shows much promise. It is called Sideline, which validates the power of Twitter for realtime search.

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I will be the first to say, that there is no one solution for successfully marketing an event, or anything for that matter. The trick to successfully creating an online presence is being diverse in choices of social platforms.  You should broadcast your brand though any channels available in order to increase the gateways to your intended identity. Facebook and twitter is a great way to start this process, but why stop there?  Diversity you mediums, upload all your event photos to social sites such as flickr & picasa, create a audio or video podcast hosted on iTunes, or even tape live interviews on justin.tv and ustream.tv. These are just a few of the many possibilities that you could use to spread your brand around the social web.

As a note, if you do start to break out into seprate media types, always rememeber to make the connections and cross-promote your channels. So if you do a live interview make sure you send them to your blog, and if you do a blog post make sure you direct them to your facebook fanpage.

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What is Find Fight!?

Find Fight is on its way to become the Martial Arts Promoter’s best kept secret! Find Fight’s goal is to become the soapbox in which you stand on when you promote your events, and as the name suggest, help your fans and competitors “find” your events.

Social Media has taken a huge leap in the past couple of years. Companies such as Facebook and mySpace have created a new generation of consumer.  For this reason, as marketers there is an urgency to adapt to your audience.  Photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, and now Martial Arts Events on Find Fight!

The most successful marketing campaigns have three key components all of which are available on findFight.com:

1. Content - Content is the substance of an event. It is the information or tool that attracts potential competitors and fans to your events.
2. Search Engine Optimization - SEO makes it easier for potential competitors and fans to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your audience begin to learn about your brand.
3. Social Connections - Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

(continue reading…)

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