Throw Away the Traditional Office Pool Bracket—FanFeedr’s March Madness Pick’Em is Here!
The First Sports Social Game Seamlessly Integrated with Facebook and Twitter
NYC — MARCH 9, 2010 – The excitement is building for college basketball fans as March Madness is upon us — many teams are on the bubble as they compete to be included in the field of 65 for the 72nd NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament. More than any other sporting event, March Madness attracts not only the avid sports fan, but casual sports fans and others who may not be sports fans at all.
And today, FanFeedr personalized sports fix announces March Madness Pick’Em, the first sports social game that is seamlessly integrated with Facebook and Twitter, enabling users to easily share their trash talking and claim bragging rights of their winning team selections and Pick’Em badging status with their friends and co-workers. FanFeedr’s March Madness Pick’Em is a great replacement or complement to the various traditional March Madness bracket office pools.
FanFeedr’s Pick’Em sports social gaming platform builds upon the rapidly growing social gaming economy pioneered by Zynga, Playfish and several others that is predicted to hit $1B in 2010. “FanFeedr’s Pick’Em gaming economy allows sports fans around the world to show their sports-savviness to their friends and all other users,” says FanFeedr’s CEO and founder, Ty Ahmad-Taylor.
FanFeedr users who join in the March Madness Pick’Em gaming action will be challenged to choose the winners of the 63 total games from the opening round of 65 teams through the Final Four and Championship game! And FanFeedr’s real-time sports news feed is also a great tool for users to do their research on each team before making their March Madness picks. March Madness Pick’Em players can go the site or iPhone application to check their updated status and compare it to their friends, co-workers and other users.
The March Madness Pick’Em doesn’t utilize a traditional bracketing system but instead offers users the opportunity to earn badges for each round. There will be five special March Madness badges for the five rounds of tournament games. Users who pick 75% or more of the winning teams in each round earn that round’s special badge, leading to their ability to pick the winner of the national championship game and earn the NCAA Champion badge. “This format creates even more competition to see who can earn more badges throughout the tournament and to see where a player ranks among their friends, as well as other March Madness users,” says Ahmad-Taylor.
In addition to its March Madness game, FanFeedr’s Pick’Em sports social gaming platform offers users the opportunity to compete with their friends for bragging rights and reputation badges in picking the winners of NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, NCAA and other top sports. With the upcoming NBA Playoffs, NHL Stanley Cup and the World Cup, FanFeedr will also offer special games for users to show their picking prowess for these championship series and special sporting events.
Here’s how Pick’Em works: users earn points and badges based upon their success at picking team winners. “The badges that FanFeedr users obtain for their winning picks show up on Facebook and Twitter (if the user wishes) and dovetails nicely with the competitive nature of sports enthusiasts, while allowing our users to show off who knows more,” says Ahmad-Taylor.
FanFeedr Pick’Em plays to the prestige factor and competitive nature of sports fans everywhere. The ultimate goal for FanFeedr users is to earn the coveted Commissioner badge as the top fan of a particular sport. “There is only one Commissioner badge per sport and the fan at the top of the heap is going to be really competitive about keeping that badge. It is much like the ‘Mayor’ badge in FourSquare, and we’ll have real-world opportunities for the Commissioners that provide them access that other fans will envy,” added Ahmad-Taylor.
Pick’Em is a natural extension of FanFeedr’s real-time sports content aggregation platform that provides users with their personalized sports fix. “It’s all part of FanFeedr’s strategy to give fans what they want,” says Ahmad-Taylor. “The web can be overwhelming, but we narrow it down to serve up only the content a fan wants to see in one place. And now users can enjoy their FanFeedr experience even more by having a lot of fun playing Pick’Em.”
Based in NYC, FanFeedr is the leader in providing fans with their real-time personalized sports feed for their favorite teams and players, and presents an up-to-date collection of related news, video, Tweets, scores and information. FanFeedr currently aggregates and indexes over 7,000 sources of sports content and matches them against more than 55,000 athletes, 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities, across 15 sports. FanFeedr uses Facebook and Twitter for user authentication and login so that fans never need to sign up for another social network. The seamless Facebook and Twitter integration also means that fans can talk about sports directly on Facebook and Twitter simply by publishing comments via the ‘Comment’ feature on every page. FanFeedr invites users to offer suggestions via the Feedback tab on the left of every page. In addition, Fanfeedr has recently launched FanFeedr Mobile with a new iPhone application that can be found here: http://bit.ly/iphoneappff. For more information about the company, go to http://www.fanfeedr.com/about.
This week we enabled the ability to sign up using Twitter as well as Facebook, so if you would like to use those credentials as the primary way you login to the site, no problem. You can also post material to and from Facebook, but you will be known on the service primarily by your Twitter handle.
You can try it out by going to the homepage and logging in with Twitter. If you already have an account with us, you can add your twitter credentials whenever you make a comment and post to twitter or if you share via Twitter.
Facebook
You can follow your favorite teams on Facebook now, and that functionality is exposed on the team pages (in the left column, the blue button.)
We reformatted the team and player pages so that they look good (that is, not like a ransom note) in Internet Explorer 7 and 8, which are super finicky about style sheets
Our friend and advisor Scott Rafer has a short post on why startups shouldn’t focus on SEO or SMO (social media optimization on Twitter and Facebook), but should develop their own independent channels to create customer demand so that they aren’t beholden to a big company that could care less.
This is a post about traffic that I paid for, and the results, and traffic that I didn’t pay for, and the results.
The former: Early on at FanFeedr, I had big-company-itis, and I paid $2,000 for 10 radio spots, or $200/per spot. This was for sports talk radio, obstensibly, but my bookers placed me on shows that had little to do with sports, so I cancelled the contract at the halfway point.
When I did appear on a demographically-accurate radio show, I could see the number of users on the site in real-time, as we use a betaworks‘ portfolio company, Chartbeat, to monitor our real-time traffic flows. This was shortly after our alpha launch, last summer, so any customer was a good customer. This is what we did, across five interviews that averaged eight minutes apiece in markets like Los Angeles, New York, Providence, Hartford: 10 extra visitors to the site. The CPA (cost-per-acquisition) was a highly-absurd $200, regardless of the number of shows, as my $2,000 partial deposit was not refundable.
There is one hurdle in mentioning our site name on radio: it is missing the trailing “e” in FanFeeder, as you would say it naturally, and my efforts to stress that missing “e” did nothing to encourage intrepid radio fans across the country from coming to the site. Since they clearly had no previous exposure to the site, as we had launched a week earlier, this entire strategy was a waste of money.
Then, this Monday, 1 March 2010, I got a message from a producer of ESPN2’s SportsNation that we would be mentioned as one of their “Sites We Like,” as you can see below:
Based on the radio experience, I didn’t expect anything traffic-wise based on 10 seconds of exposure before cutting to a commercial, but they actually showed the site name in a fashion that is clear enough to read. And here are the numbers, based on our appearance at the 33m mark, in the middle of a one-hour show:
1 March 2010 | 04.33p ET (initial broadcast)
93 extra site visitors
1 March 2010 | 11.33p ET (repeat)
34 extra site visitors
2 March 2010 | 01.33a ET (repeat)
37 extra site visitors
Simply put: those incremental 164 visitors came from 10 seconds of television exposure on ESPN2 at odd hours. Those visitors, however, have been more highly engaged, surprisingly, on the site, than traffic that we get from social networks, which tends to be flightier (less time spent per visit) than traffic that we acquire through organic search. Specifically, these new visitors spent 27 seconds longer on the site than traffic from social networks.
Additionally, they engaged with our Pick’Em game at a higher rate than social networks or search engines. The latter makes a lot of sense, as the search engine traffic is much more directed and less around general sports topics of interest than the traffic from social networks. The Pick’Em game (“Who do you think will win, Arsenal or Portsmouth?” (Only the dimmest of bulbs would chose Portsmouth, BTW)) reflects picks, results and badges back on Facebook, and thus is one of the most pandemic (a hyper-form of virality that we just made up) channels that we have for acquiring new customers. This channel is based on prestige, which we have discussed before.
Scott is right in his advocacy for finding other channels for audience development outside of Facebook, Twitter and the search engines, but I cannot begin to suggest that happenstance mentions on television networks are a marketing channel.
But when it does happen, it can provide a nice, small bump for a web site that is seeking a much larger audience. Connecting through video with people who are fanatical about sports has potential as a marketing channel, and the good thing for us is that even if we don’t get the direct traffic, we can power other sites with sports-related goals through our API (which has aggregated news and information as well as the Pick’Em game.)
To all of you who have played: thank you. To all of you who haven’t tried it out: it couldn’t be simpler (see?). We have also learned a lot, and as a result, we are going to make some changes to the badges and the points that you get. The Cliffs’ Notes version:
We changed the amount that you win per game to represent the “real” cost of the outcome (since we aren’t using lines.) That means that you can’t automatically double your points with each bet, but it doesn’t change that a win is a win.
We changed the badging system to make it fairer. There are some single days where NCAA Basketball has over 123 games in a single day. We factored that against the limited number of NFL games, the total number of games in baseball, and so on, so that the badge levels represent your skill level, fairly in each sport.
Net-net: you will see new badges on your profile as of tomorrow, and it will be harder to get the top badges. That having been said, you will find badge achievement more rewarding.
We are also going to introduce a “Top Badge” for each sport, which is the equivalent of being a Mayor in FourSquare. No more fussing about who knows the most about the NFL, you will have a single winner.
Please let us know what else that we can do to make Pick’Em more fun for you, by giving us Pick’Em feedback here.
We have made it so that our links work on mobile devices. If you want to follow your favorite teams on your Blackberry, Android, Palm or Windows Mobile device, just add follow the team on Twitter.
You can find your teams’ Twitter account by going to the team page, like this one, and clicking on “Follow on Twitter.”
Gaming
New and better badges, you can see them on the Leaderboard.
We added a FanFeedr Pick’Em page that allows you to pick all of the games on a given day. You can access this from any page on the service using the “FanFeedr Pick’Em” link above the search bar.
Adding a user’s winning percentage after their picks on the Leaderboard, so you can see who is a “volume” winner and who is picking accurately
Reduced posting a user’s picks to Facebook and the service so that you don’t get overwhelmed with updates (and neither do your friends.)
Service
Revamped our schedules pages so that you can see upcoming games and refer to past games as well, easily.
Fixed sharing by email so that the links work properly
And robust like single-field Ethiopian dark roast, ground before your eyes.
The big deal this week are widgets, as we have a single page where you can generate widgets for your favorite team or player, or for your favorite city/town/suburb.
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