Drawing fans to the World Cup using Gowalla

Even though soccer and pubs go hand and hand we at the Sounders decided to help educate the casual fan about the top soccer pubs in Seattle and test the growing geolocation market using a branded trip on Gowalla.  

By checking in to 11 pubs using Gowalla fans can win exclusive merchandise for the Sounders FC and Seattle Bank and interact with fellow supporters in a new way.

Visit some of these links for more information on the new promotion: 

• Sounders: Press Release | Promotional homepage
• Puget Sound Business Journal: Sounders FC hopes to score with World Cup frenzy | Sounders grab for share of World Cup glory
• Techcrunch: 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Delight
• Gowalla: Trip home | MLS goes out with Gowalla

Facebook Page Admin Improvements

Kudos to Facebook for adding individual post stats for page admins.  These stats give some great insights into how many fans see posts and allow you to see the impact of sharing.

Interview with Voting 2.0 Blog

Our online voting partner Votenet Solutions recently launched blog and one of the first entries featured a Q&A about the Sounders FC's use of online voting and the embracement of "democracy in sports."

You can read the full Q&A here.  A second entry was also added outlining what other business can learn from our "democracy in sports" philosophy.

Interview with Wall Street Journal

If you haven't already check out my mention in the October 12th edition of the Wall Street Journal.  The article entitled "Fighting Social-Media Con Artists" covers how brands, including the Seahawks and Sounders FC, are fighting identity theft on social media sites.  

The article discusses our use of Ez.com for the Seahawks and Sounders FC, a service I shared a month ago.

To read the full article visit: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574445502831219412.html

Custom Branded URL Shortening with Ez.com

Live Oak 360 has evolved its BudURL service previously outlined on Masahale into a new service called Ez.com.  The service is pretty much the same as their enterprise product BudURL, but is now a provisioned software-as-a-service offering with many subscription levels, all currently offering 21-day free trials.  

The main reason we decided to try out this product is to have our own branded URL shortner.  We have seem too many circumstances where a tweet is re-tweeted, but the link is changed to another site or where it is hard to distinguish which links are ours.  Secondly, it also allows us to create very detailed reporting for corporate partner promotions (i.e. contest or sweepstakes) and team promotions (i.e. third-party ticket ads or viral marketing campaigns).

The service itself is pretty cut in dry, setup took less than 10 minutes:

• Setup custom domain(s) - we love it because we can manage several different brands with different custom domains
• Paste in URL to shorten or use bookmarklet to create shortened URL
• Copy shortened URL to desired service

Once the URL is in the wild the service offers a slick click stream view that outlines every click in near realtime, individually, or via aggregate data.

Some interesting features are:

• The service allows you to choose either 307 or 301 redirects
• Ability to create notes to help you remember which link is which
• Referrer information
• IP information for each click
• Browser identification
• Basic statistics charting
• Bot tracking
• Total vs. unique clicking information
• Keywords from google, twitter or facebook searches
• API
• Ability to create custom alias
• Multiple administration accounts
• Downloadable stats
• Multiple custom domains (the killer app for us)

Overall I am loving the product and would highly recommend it; however, I would like to see a better geo charting (right now you have to click on each click to where a click comes from), better views for conversation tracking and most importantly integration from third-party applications.