(drauh)

Who knew my good luck would come on Friday the 13th, when my open letter to the NTRA was not only answered by Alex Waldrop but blogged about by him on the NTRA site!

The comments and dialog on my site have been fantastic and a big thanks to all of those taking part in the dialog, but please go share your thoughts over at NTRA as well. I’m sure one of the reasons Alex made his way over here is that I posted my link over there, so please use their open forum to make sure your voice is heard.

This little moment in (my personal) internet history uncovered something else of interest. My post got a trackback (an automated alert that another blog had linked to my post), from a post entitled Everyone Wins. As it turns out, the blog belongs to SocialSphere, a group of slick “Web 2.0” strategists. It seems as though the NTRA has engaged SocialSphere to “implement a multi-faceted Web 2.0 plan for the “Sport of Kings””.

Really? While I’m not privy to what that multi-faceted plan might be, I am VERY familiar with web 2.0 since I’ve been building sites and web-based applications for major brands since web 1.0 (or even possibly web .05). I’m also overly familiar with consultants and their “multifaceted plan$”. So while Alex is listening, let’s review and discuss!

Success! (?)

By every measure, Straight Up has been a huge success — the right medium at exactly (or a little early) the right time. And the analytics have been staggering — keeping in mind that until about a month ago, the NTRA and the industry had very little social media presence, Alex’s 6 blog posts have been:

* Viewed 32,000 (uniques) times (20,000 more than the former top blogger on the site with a long-time following);

* Linked to from 39 other thoroughbred bloggers, including the New York Times;

* Commented upon by fans and other stakeholders more than 960 times — an average of 160 comments per post.

I’ll give them that Straight up is a success, I think it’s great and a good faith sign that a dialog is open. But the “right medium at exactly (or a little early) the right time”?

Given that the first racing blog was started 4 years ago almost to the day, I would argue that it’s a touch on the late side. I think the average number of comments also speaks to that, particularly if you read the comments, which tend toward “constructive criticism”. I would categorize it more as “it’s about time”.

And let’s not forget that the at it’s launch, Straight Up didn’t even display the comments it collected… that’s not very web 2.0!

Highlighting this passage: “until about a month ago, the NTRA and the industry had very little social media presence”. It’s true. I’m not sure how many of you noticed, but the NTRA has been quietly rolling out little bits of web 2.0-ness. There’s the Facebook Page, the MySpace page, the YouTube page, Wallpaper (which is very web 1.0, not that it shouldn’t be included in a strategy) and the widgets.

From what I can tell, the Facebook page is pretty much just a placeholder to tout the Triple Crown. They’ve created events for the prep races and TC races themselves, they’ve added some photos from the TC and a few videos. Not hideous, but not exactly scintillating web 2.0 strategy at work, particularly the kind one overpays consultants for.

The page currently has 377 fans (I’m one of them). Given that one of the reasons one uses Facebook in a strategy is that it has insane traffic and is a “medium discovery” (checking out what your contacts like and visa versa), the number of fans seems to represent a lack of strategy other than merely having a Facebook presence given that the Kentucky Derby Group at it’s height had over 1,300 members.

The widgets to date are comprised of souped up RSS feeds shrouded in a shiny web 2.0 wrapper. Again, not hideous, but definitely not something one overpays for, particularly when the tool used to create said widgets is accessible to everyone. Simply pick the site you want to create a widget for, put the url in and in a few clicks you have the widget.

Any of us could have made those widgets (like the one I had for Bloodhorse Triple Crown Madness headlines). I actually encourage you to use WidgetBox for all your widget needs, it’s incredibly easy to use and is definitely a way to both enhance your content and keep people coming back to your site.

My fellow TBA colleague, and hella web savvy “flagship blogger”* Jessica Chapel summed it up exactly right in an email exchange on the subject:

The NTRA launches Waldrop’s blog, starts a Facebook page, builds some widgets, and then — what? The fundamentals remain the same, all that’s changed is they now have a glossy, reflective Web 2.0 sheen.

Exactly. Again, I’m not privy to SocialSphere’s “plan”, but as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about all the issues at hand AND happens to know the “sport of kings”, I’m happy to dispense some free advice while Alex & company presumably are listening.

Fellow TBA-er Patrick has been a tireless proponent of standings. In fact, he’s even taken it upon himself to create standings for the TBA that we all carry on our respective blogs. He explains the standings themselves and why we need them here.

As I mentioned in my comment back to Alex, casual fans don’t understand our seasons. Making it clear that 1) we have divisions 2) who’s doing well in the those divisions and 3) that the divisions all correlate to championship races at the end of the year would help enable casual fans to hook in to our sport much more easily.

Currently on the upper right hand corner of the NTRA homepage there is what could almost be categorized as widget that displays the Top 10 Horses, Jockeys, Trainers and Owners. How are the Top 10 determined? By EARNINGS! Fans only marginally care about earnings, if it at all. How many graded races has the horse won, what’s their percentage of wins, percentage on in the money? Create some standings FOR FANS!

We all love Curlin. And some of us even love Big Brown! But these aren’t the only horses we all love. The casual fan relies on marketing and hype to find their next love object. This is not endemic to horse racing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better. Instead of pouring all of our hype eggs into one basket, we should spread the love a little bit.

This is where a well crafted widget strategy can come into play. The NBA in particular does a good job of this. They have widgets for everything… standings, playoffs, videos, teams etc.

The NTRA should have widgets for each division that display standings, RSS news feeds (per horse), and video replays of the week’s races in that division. Also, horses should have their own widgets. Say the top 5-10 in each division. The horse widgets could have their record, next target race, work outs, race replays, RSS news feeds and links to their bio pages at NTRA. I know I would have several on my site!

With this kind of strategy fans can put the widgets on their Facebook and MySpace pages which engages the medium of discover angle. Fans could also put them on their NetVibes, My Yahoo, and iGoogle pages which engages a “giving people the information they want, when they want it and where they want it” strategy. Note: please make sure to make the horse and standing widgets no wider than 160 pixels so they can easily be displayed on blogs!

If it were up to me, I would get no more than 6 smart people in front of a big white board, map out the racing year and look for areas where marketing synergy can be leveraged (ew, I just sounded like a consultant!). Looking at the whole year end to end to catch things like Stephen Foster weekend coming on the heels of the Triple Crown.

Once you identify the various events and their timing, do two things… 1) create a plan to market the events through your social media platforms (Facebook, MySpace, etc) and your widgets which are pushing content out to fans and potential fans a like, in places you don’t even know about and wouldn’t even think of and 2) work with ESPN to get that event synergy in place in advance!

Web 2.0 “strategies” should be more than the sum of their parts. This is just what I came up with this morning and afternoon. No one had to fly anywhere, labor over any powerpoint decks, listen to any presentations or most importantly overpay any Millennial-laden slicksters.

In fairness, the NTRA would not be unique in needing to overpay slickly packaged boutique firms for common sense strategies, but as Jessica pointed out in the aforementioned email chain, that shouldn’t preclude tapping web savvy people who KNOW the industry for insight on how to use design and technology as a part of a meaningful strategy to create and retain fans.

Of course, it would be helpful to keep our “product” around long enough to market in a meaningful way. As you can imagine, I’ll have more to say about that as well!

* I can’t take credit for the term “flagship blogger”, hats off to Brooklyn Backstretch for that excellent turn of phrase.