Citizen fandom
by Jeremy Littau on Mar.09, 2009, under by Jeremy Littau
ESPN recently launched a site devoted to sports fans’ travels to sporting events, and it’s pretty slick. In addition to offering travel guides for fans looking to attend faraway events such as spring training, ESPN Sports Travel also gives fans a chance to upload content and memories from their trip (such as photos) under the Passport menu.
It also gives fans back a little bit of power to rate many different aspects of the sports fan experience.
Better, the site is cross-branded using a sponsorship from Orbitz, giving the site a sponsorship that both makes sense and connects to the actual content. In addition to giving sponsorship for the site, Orbitz travel deals are prominent on the page and give fans a resource looking for travel deals.
In some ways this might be an unfortunate time to launch such an offering. With the economy stumbling along, some have noted that professional sports could suffer in terms of ticket sales and implicit in that is that travel for events might decrease as well. USA Today seemed to confirm this idea this week when it reported that Spring Training attendance is down this year for the Arizona teams.
Despite the obvious challenges, ESPN’s idea has legs. Giving fans the ability to post photos and memories from sporting events for free, coupled with the ESPN brand name, will give people a reason to return. The service also gives fans a chance to use a bit of crowdsourcing by allowing them to rate sports venues, among other things.
ESPN also was pretty smart about setting it up and avoided a lot of the mistakes we’ve seen at professional news sites (i.e. lack of crosslinking, a clear divide between professional and participatory content that is nearly suffocating, etc.). They put links to Passport on individual game recap pages, giving the site maximum visibility across ESPN’s network of pages and fans multiple entry points to post their content. In fact, I ran across this while reading a Mizzou basketball recap; had I gone to the game and taken photos, I’m sure I would’ve been interested to post the photos to a site as well read as ESPN’s.
If you want to see an example, check out the “Were You There?” section on the Duke/North Carolina recap from Sunday’s game.
