Reuters Article Reflects Ongoing BwB Conversations

If you doubt that Blogs With Balls has been ahead of the curve in addressing the relationship between sports new media and marketers, Reuters sports business journalist Ben Klayman wrote a piece last week echoing much of the sentiment we are hearing from various parties at our conferences (U.S. sports to social media: show me the money!). Not only are two of our speakers/sponsors quoted, but the topics are not much different than those we’ve addressed the last few months on our podcast.

From the article:

U.S. sports leagues, corporate sponsors and media companies can score big points by using social media and are racing to create accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter for fans.

Those social networks help businesses in the sports world build stronger ties with consumers, and the connections made by leagues can help them in ways that can pay off.

Statistics in the article back up these notions, and are not much different from what we heard on last week’s podcast with Taylor’s Rich Gallagher.

Dan Opallo, the NBA’s marketing director stated, “We decided as a league rather than putting all our efforts to wrestle (fans) away from these social media platforms and get them over to NBA.com, we want to give them an experience on both.”

You may recall the Sacramento Kings’ Mitch Germann telling us something similar back in September regarding their outreach to blogs, ““We have just recognized through observing this space that there’s some blogs in Sacramento that work hard and that cover the team…There’s a lot of interaction, there’s a lot of comments, a lot of fans are loyal to those sites and really as an organization our philosophy is that we want to be where our fans are We don’t expect to hold everyone hostage and make everyone come to Kings.com for what they want.”

The article is a great read and gives credence to what Blogs With Balls is all about.