FanTrust was also just chosen among the top digital businesses that “amazes & inspires“ for 2010 Olympics & fans. In this spirit, we wanted to feature what we know best: the fans.

So, how are active Olympic fans flying their digital freak flags this month? Today we’ll focus on Twitter.

Created by avid sports fans, Twitter-Athletes links to pro-athlete’s and Olympian’s tweets. The creators said the site, which started out “as a weekend (or two) project, [has] taken on a life of its own,” gaining momentum as a result of plugs from ESPN and other sports news outlets. This fan site features the top 10 most popular athletes on Twitter, Shaquille O’Neil has 2.8 Million followers, as well as new additions such as Canadian Olympic snowboarder Mercedes Nicoll, with links to their Twitter pages so that you can follow them too.

Are you a fan of two-time, US Olympic bobsledder Steve Mesler, who as of today has just touched down in Vancouver for his Olympic bid? If so, you can let him know by joining his 27K Twitter followers. Are you a fan of two-timing Tiger Woods? If so, you’ll have to go elsewhere as this site may be the one place he isn’t getting any action.

For more Olympians on Twitter, go straight to http://www.twitter-athletes.com/index.cfm?CatID=243&People=1. If Twitter had sound effects, you could hear the crowd go wild.

“These are going to be the Twitter Olympics,” Director of Media Services for the US Olympic Committee Bob Condron is recently reported to have said.

But fans following favorite athletes on Twitter had a shock last week when skier Lindsey Vonn and speedskater Nick Pearson tweeted that they and other Olympians were banned from posting certain types of content for their fans, including feared one athlete, all photography.

According to the IOC there are some restrictions on content: Olympians cannot have any pictures of the Olympic five rings anywhere on their website, Twitter or Facebook accounts, nor can they post photos of themselves wearing brand names of sponsors who are not official sponsors of the Olympics. The IOC reports that these guidelines are more lenient than for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Vonn and Pearson have since updated their tweets to reflect this new reality.

Meanwhile, in what is turning out to be a five-ring circus, the international media in Vancouver is facing their own sticker shock and awe over the hefty Internet access fees levied by Olympic organizers for reporters and photographers. Citizen journalists and hardcore fans can still cover the events using free wireless in a cafe while wearing Nike shoes.

Even with the current economy, we have a wealth of experience to draw from and a lot to be optimistic about.

• While retail experienced a modest Christmas, Facebook made about $35M from virtual gifts alone in 2008.
• Business models that are free to customers — and both traditional and new media are good examples — now account for the majority of revenues for 60 of the world’s 100 largest companies.
• And global digital revenues, with their annual double-digit growth, are still projected to hit $153B by 2011.
• By 2020, 80 percent of all media consumption will be digital; today it is already more than 50 percent.
• The Guitar Hero World Tour led to the creation of 25,000 user-generated songs in the first ten days of release, representing a new subscription model to monetize fans — and a whole new level of fandom!
• New media supported new levels of fundraising and community outreach for non-profits: Wikipedia just reached its $6M goal from donations; and the United Way of Canada recently launched a YouTube awareness program with FanTrust.
• There will soon be as many avatars in the world as people in Canada…leaving Canadians to wonder if we’ll be replaced by Club Penguin in the G8?

So, as 2009 rolls out, and as I celebrate my 25th year in digital media, I believe that our industry’s collective depth and experience will stand the test of time and continue to take innovation to new heights. If desperate times call for desperate measures, no doubt troubled times can be the mothers of invention.

Welcome to the FanTrust guide to digital success – Setting Your Digital Resolutions for 2009. December is traditionally a time for reflection and goal-setting, both personal and professional. Though you know what it takes to reach your goals for, say, losing weight (less eggnog, more yoga) or having fun (more eggnog, less yoga) –what if you’re venturing into uncharted business terrain?

For the next two weeks, we’ll walk you through short, simple exercises – complete with case studies and success stories – intended to spark transformation in your company. Set your sights on overall digital business goals, digital capacity, market niche and fan engagement strategies.

With more than two decades of experience in digital media, FanTrust can help you grow your digital lines of business. Our hope is to leave you inspired and invigorated for a happy, healthy digital business in 2009.

All the best!

Week 2: Know Your Audience

Last week’s Digital Resolutions post set you on the path to outlining your digital goals with motivating examples from Monty Python, Nexon and others. We asked, “What are your motivations for getting into the digital space? What do you hope to achieve?”

It’s also important to look outward – to get to know your fans. More specifically, to understand your fans’ online lives. This doesn’t require anything nefarious – such as creating a Second Life avatar and spying behind virtual bushes. As with any relationship, getting to know your fans simply requires that you ask the right questions, listen, observe, and draw the correct conclusions.

We recently blogged about trends in women’s and men’s online behavior. Tracking trends is important and can be incredibly valuable. But to be a real online success, you must drill down and understand your own fan base. What experiences and value are your fans seeking online?

The TV series Reality Obsessed follows the adventures of Murtz Jaffer, the most dedicated and obsessed fan of reality television. In each episode, Murtz enlists the help of reality TV stars-cum-friends to answer a burning question about the genre: Do participants really experience connections or sexual chemistry with the reality cameras rolling? How do you produce a fail-proof audition tape? What’s it like to “work” at the business featured in a hot reality TV show?

Producers Peace Point Entertainment enlisted FanTrust’s community-building expertise for Reality Obsessed. Peace Point had clearly defined goals – they wanted the Reality Obsessed blog, penned by the host, to serve as marketing for the show – attracting international fans and sparking interest in the series.

FanTrust created a two-pronged strategy: develop a blog that would fill an untapped need for reality fans online; and roll out targeted weekly promotions.

The blog, like the show, was designed to expose the reality behind reality TV – an insider perspective, but free of the snark found on many popular TV gossip blogs. Polls and questions at the end of each blog post facilitated fan participation and discussion.

To promote the show online, we reached out to fans in their natural habitat – on fan/ gossip sites, forums, and popular social networks. We sought out fans of reality TV franchises that were airing concurrent to the show’s rollout (e.g. Big Brother, Survivor) – reasoning that these show fans would be online in droves – buzzing, chatting and searching about the latest scandals and vote offs. And of course reality stars, and the fans who love them, were promoting themselves and connecting on MySpace, so Reality Obsessed joined the fray.

The host, Murtz, parlayed his reputation to serve as reality TV expert on the Survivor Panel of National Post’s arts & culture blog, The Ampersand (owned by CanWest, the parent company of Reality Obsessed’s broadcaster, TVTropolis).

What if your property is still in development phases, with no existing fan base? Study the digital offerings of your stakeholders and competitors. What are the best offerings already on the market, and why?

FanTrust provides digital strategies, deal-making, competitive intelligence, fan tracking, online community building and social networking campaigns – establishing the best strategic partnerships, digital properties and platforms for our clients.

Talking exclusively to FanTrust, Capcom Corporate Officer/ Vice-President – Strategic Planning & Business Development Christian Svensson said, “The feedback is largely positive. No other video game publisher has gone this far synching up fan activity.” Designed to let fans take their Capcom ID on the road, play across multiple devices and communicate across multiple user accounts, the new community hub has been in the works for about a year and sets the stage for the next level of fan engagement. “A lot of this is a very un-Japanese approach,” says Christian who notes that the global company with Japanese HQ had to push the limits of corporate culture for a deeper engagement with fan culture.

The new community site enables media sharing (which along with search is not yet fully developed) and received about 5000 uploads in the first 48 hours. In the past, says Christian, “fans fostered community in spite of Capcom’s inability to support them. Our goal now is to enable fans in all ways up to the point of making money.”

Evidently even that rule is meant to be broken. Capcom helped one die-hard fan of Mega Man monetize a music tribute to his favorite game, signed him for a Comic-Con appearance and gave him a license deal. The Philadelphia-bred rapper Raheem Jarbo, known to indie-hop fans as Random, was recently interviewed by Wired’s music blog, The Listening Post, about the love for Mega Man that inspired his Mega Ran album, and praised Capcom’s policy of encouraging fan content, instead of sending in the lawyers.

Looking ahead, fans can expect more from Capcom, everything from improved search within the community hub to what Christian calls “the most robust digital distribution strategy in the PC space, with up to 150 sites carrying our stuff.” And next month look out for what he promises will be the “world’s largest global digital launch” for the game 1942, when this classic shooter returns with better planes, bigger bosses and even sicker weapons.

At this point it is still hard for the company, which has inspired about 25 active niche communities, to ascertain what comes first, the strength of a game brand or the strength of a game community. But coming soon, says Christian, are some “explosive new products where the community will be the force directly attributed to their success.”

What’s Christian’s take on Fans and Trust? “Trust is the foundation of interaction. The more voice fans feel they have early on, the more they trust us. Trust is a funny thing… it’s not easily earned, but it’s easily lost.”

Thanks, Christian, FanTrust couldn’t have said it better.

Today, the line between “audience” and “entertainment” continues to blur. Audiences are changing both the entertainment content and the entertainment business.

In terms of shaping content, there are three main digital audience types: Transformers, Catalysts and Creators.

Transformers take premium entertainment properties, for example the show Heros, or the game Halo, and riff on them, producing everything from new storylines built on old clips, to full-length scripts to new gameplay with old characters.

Catalysts are people who love to comment. They will raise hell online if they see something they don’t like in their favorite show or game, They’re also the first to champion whatever they think is great– telling their Facebook friends and the forums exactly why they were entertained and coaxing others to come along for the ride. Catalysts are also great interpreters, translating confusing plotlines from shows like Lost for the benefit of casual viewers— helping the show writers who rely on digital fanatics to provide the depth and context missing from primetime episodes.

Finally, Creators are amateur producers who finance, develop, produce, and broadcast original user generated content—everything from digital anime to casual games, to Youtube videos to audio podcasts. When it comes to User Generated Content, creator audiences are changing the relationship between producers and viewers; production quality has lowered the bar for even on-air productions; and broadband distribution channels like YouTube have lowered the barrier to entry for everybody. Just ask Obama Girl, who appears in BarelyPolitical’s “I Got a Crush … On Obama”.

Yahoo has said that 89% of its video audience just views the content; 10% of the audience remixes the content; and 1% of the audience actually creates new content.

By the way, clever Transformers, Catalysts and Creators are all finding ways to monetize their digital content – through models as simple as Google AdSense – so should you! When the CW network failed to deliver final episodes online of its show Gossip Girl, after streaming the series all season, fans were first baffled, then outraged. And while the network was painfully absent from online discussions, fans were educating fans in online economics and proposing some great online revenue models.

Update:  Sam Ford, prominent blogger on fan culture and soon-to-be graduate of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium, similarly lists five categories of fan behaviour, another great framework for thinking about fans.

I, for one, would have given my right hand to meet Christian Ladner, Toronto-ex pat living in L.A., Internet copywriter, and creator/ blogger for Stuff White People Like (#2 – Religions that their parents don’t belong to, #70 – Difficult Breakups, #96 – New Balance shoes).

Carolyn Y. Johnson of The Boston Globe explains the phenomenon of ROLF-Con and Internet celebrity-dom: “In a way, the Web has given birth to a kind of cottage industry of individuality – people who build a brand around a personality or a passion.”

Check out the ROLF-Con blog, and check back next week – I’ll be posting my favorite ROLF-Con video footage as it becomes available!

Adonomics is an online source of Facebook analytics, enabling visitors to track the growth, activity, and valuation of companies that develop applications for Facebook – as well as valuation of individual applications.

In its latest blog entry, Building the Social Suite of Category Killer Apps for Facebook, Adonomics identified the top ten trends in Facebook application use – and listed fan applications as the fifth-largest category.

But, to be a fan is to be part of a community – fandom is a shared, and deep, experience. Therefore, there is plenty of cross-over potential between fan applications and other popular app categories:
Communicating with friends (#1)
Music (#2)
Movies (#3)
Gifting (#7)
Casual gaming (#8)
Friend comparisons (#9)
Self-expression (#10)

One of the most impressive apps I’ve come across, “My Heroes Ability”, incorporates casual gaming and fandom. Based on the TV show “Heroes”, fans can select one of 12 superhero abilities, and enter into superhero battles with friends. The valuation for “My Heroes Ability” (Adonomics analyzes each app and assigns it a valuation) –$690K.

Watercooler Inc. develops apps for a number of popular television shows, which allow fans to post pictures, quotes and videos to their profile pages, as well as chat with other fans. The developer’s most popular property app – for Grey’s Anatomy – is valued at $217K, while their Degrassi app is valued at $11.5K.

As Adonomics points out, the Fans category of apps is full of tiny, long-tail apps but, bound together, they become very interested to the exact same advertisers that are interested in the demographics of a particular TV audience. Thanks to its stable of easily replicated apps, Watercooler Inc. is valued at a cool $19M.

From profitable and mainstream, to delightfully quirky and niche, here are some of my favourite Facebook apps:

• iLike – the app for this social music discovery site allows users to add music files to their profile page, and earn free MP3s
• The Sausage on a Fork gift – For some reason, my friends an I find this gift particularly amusing; one friend even ponied up the $1 price tag to send it to herself
• Entourage quotables – Whether you watch the show or not, there are many great quotes and inside jokes for entertainment industry insiders
• Monster Factory – Developed by the Toronto-based independent toy design company of the same name. The app allows subscribers to create their own silly, cuddly monsters and send to a friend. After a friend received a real-life plush Monster at her bridal shower, “Aunties” have been creating and sending virtual versions to the new arrival via Facebook

It turns out that people become addicted to cult brands for more or less the same reasons that people become committed to cults like the Moonies. And that companies cultivate unshakable allegiance through the same basic techniques as those used by, say, Hare Krishna.

Asks The Culting of Brands: Does this make these companies unethical? Or have they simply found a way to attract and retain customer evangelists through the power of brand messages that say, “being part of my brand is being part of something special.” We all know these brands: Apple, Harley Davidson, Prada. Of course, it helps that their products are good, but is their marketing even better?

Ignoring the all-too-obvious link between Tom Cruise and Scientology, how can entertainment and digital brands capitalize on this approach? How can you use cult-building to your advantage?

Piggyback on existing fan communities:

• Ebay is a cult that latched onto preexisting communities of collectors, co-opting the collectors wherever they congregated

Lurk and listen:

• Lost producers used the web as an online audience focus group and took storylines in new directions and to new levels of complexity because of fan support

Launch and let go:

• Second Life lets users create their own economies and democracies, rewarding both fans and shareholders

Absorb: Absorb competitive ideas into your own organization; co-opt the best ideas out there and make them your own — or just go whole hog and buy the company:

• Youtube is a better Google Video

Cult yourself: Launch your own cult; establish a separate entity with its own theology and devoted followers and invest in it so that it steals share from newcomers:

• American Idol and its franchises
• Facebook triumphs over Friendster

Let the cult find you: Release something that you are passionate about and revel in the results; like-minded people are out there:

• Yahoo Groups and face-blindness

Love bomb: Overwhelmingly celebrate individuals who engage with your productions; give them their 15-minutes of fame:

• Zimmer Twins and on-air UGC

It turns out that all of these approaches are practiced by the best cults. I believe that the accessibility of the Internet makes cult-building that much easier.

• The doors are always open
• The participation is global
• The search engines promote you, and
• The shared passions multiply

Of course, if you don’t want to be your cult’s guru, no worries. Fans will happily anoint one of their own.

An ICE 2008 advisory board member and presenter, FanTrust President Catherine Warren recently sat down with ICE Cubes host and producer Alan Sawyer to share her thoughts about the digital ABC’s – audience, business and content – including:

• How audiences are changing entertainment content and the business of entertainment
• Aggregating fans to monetize online content
• Developing a profitable digital strategy (property-specific or corporate)
• Raising capital for multiplatform IP
• What the gaming industry can learn from the TV industry, and vice versa

To listen to the podcast, visit the ICE Cubes player.

ICE 2008

http://www.ice08.com/

But markets are much more than numbers – they represent demographics, psychographics, communities and fans.

Check out Henry Jenkins’ current posts about his China travels for a great read. Lead Investigator at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium and author of Convergence Culture and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture – Jenkins has been compared to Marshall McLuhan, and is a FanTrust inspiration.

Jenkins’ post on the differences between teenaged digital media audiences in China and North America hits home: a digital entertainment strategy for China must go beyond simple translation and subtitling.

Some points:

·     Almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61 percent vs. 13 percent).

·          Fewer than a third of Americans (30 percent) said the Internet helps their social life, but more than three-quarters of Chinese respondents (77 percent) agreed that “The Internet helps me make friends.”

·     Chinese youth have been very active in helping to translate Western media content into Chinese but have been much slower to embrace participatory culture (or User Generated Content) such as mash-ups and fan fiction.

Jenkins will be a keynote, along with Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerman at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin Texas, running March 7-11, 2008 – three great headliners! The Canadian Interactive Alliance is looking for companies interested in attending this year’s SXSW Interactive. For more information, visit the Canadian Interactive Alliance website.