Enjoy this great video by Nike and the emotive power of Nike+ and the running community. I love the way it connects people across the globe and all weather conditions……. It’s all about a sports oriented social network right?

I found this great video on Vimeo and thought this deserves a quick blog post.

Common Craft has does a great job at explaining complex things like social media in simple ways. Enjoy this video!

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

At 3eep, we have been continuously focused on sports social media as our core proposition. We focus on the participation of sports vs fan based “audiences”.

Look forward to your comments…..

Some of you with know Sara, a fantastically talented Aussie blogger, who established The Bargain Queen and is now play inside a Wardrobe.  She has just blogged about start-ups and wrote a great one on the need for the start-up to be made up of team players - when I run Sara’s filter over some of the start-ups I’ve been involved in, I think she is spot on!

See the original post here, but in summary:

A real team player:

1. Creates win-win situations. They align their interests with the whole group’s, so the group’s success is their success.
2. Is strategically selfless. They can put their short-term interests aside to help the group succeed.
3. Shares the spoils of success with everyone who made it happen.
4. Gives credit where it’s due.
5. Communicates what they need, want and can do. They don’t make you guess.
6. Cares about the company and the team (not just themselves).
7. Gets things done. They’re at least as good at delivering results as they are at promising them.
8. Hates to let the team down.
9. Doesn’t keep score of everyone’s relative contributions; they believe that everyone’s contributing all they can, unless there’s overwhelming evidence otherwise.
10. Believes in the value of the project, the skills of the team and the ability of the team to deliver.

It was very interesting to recently read about the global sports market growth to increase to $141 billion by 2012. Read the full Reuters article.

…Growing broadcast rights deals, and mobile and Internet spending will help drive the expected compound annual growth rate of 6.5 percent from 2008 through 2012, the report by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers said. That is comparable to the 6.4 percent rate seen from 2003 through 2007.

The strongest growth will be seen in the Europe, Middle East and Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific regions, all of which are expected to see annual growth in the range of 6.5 percent to 7.1 percent, the report said. U.S. and Canadian markets’ annual growth are pegged at 6.1 percent and 5.7 percent, respectively, PwC said.

From a 3eep perspective, it’s great to see upward growth predictions across the whole global sports market. Yet, for starters, this in essence represents the “old media” driven model of sports audience (fan) attention. New media (web and mobile) rights are increasing but again are audience driven.

The sports industry is at an early evolutionary stage with new sport “social media” driven changes. These tectonic media shifts are enabling sports fans to gain additional value as sports participants (players, coaches, managers and enthusiasts) with the launch of media or sponsor driven social media driven tools and services. The sports industry continues to underserve these “passionate” part of the sporting ecosystem and if it continues down this path, then sport will not be what we know it to be today!

“Show me the money” for local sports participants!

It’s with pleasure that we share with you 3eep’s rating as Australia’s 4th ranked Top 100 web 2.0 business, as published in this week’s BRW and as announced on Thursday at the Future Exploration Network .

While it is still early part of 3eep’s journey, we are very pleased with this recognition. The BRW Top 100 lists many great business being developed by some very talented entrepreneurs around the country, and we are humbled to have been ranked so highly.

Big shout out to the 3eep team for the endless hours of passion, challenges and most of all “can do” attitude in our current high growth driven mode!

This is one of my favourite all time quotes, from Theodore Roosevelt.  I read it again recently, and when I do that in context of being an entrepreneur, it takes on new meaning for me:

“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievements; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither defeat nor victory”

… the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena …

Let’s support the man in the arena.

Let’s support those entrepreneurs who are taking the risks to build something new and innovative.

Let’s try to avoid criticising just for the sake of it - since, as many people know and as Teddy points out, being a critic is far easier than being in battle!

Phil and the team from Pollenizer have been providing some great insight into our tech and product development at 3eep.  Phil’s just prepared a great presentation for CeBIT 2008 in Sydney.
 

| View | Upload your own

The talking notes that go with it elaborate on headings/statements on each page - but you should get a feel for his guidance.

As an entrepreneur, sometimes Phil’s Hell’s Kitchen seems like an all too familiar place!  But, with his guidance, focus on core, and then focus core again.  And, just when you think that you’ve earnt the right to look at some interesting peripheral distractions, that’s exactly when you need to focus on core once more!  Fun, hard, exhilarating, frustrating - all part of being an early stage tech start-up!

Hope you enjoy the preso.

Over the last few months, I have been attending seminars and networking events listening to media execs, ad agencies, media buyers, etc all discussing the everchanging landscape of the media market.

Questions and topics like:

Is it the end of advertising?
What about branded content?
Who is in control? Publisher or Consumers?
Conversational media is the future
Mobile is the killer app!
Search and brands
etc, etc, etc….

The same stuff, over and over. It’s what happens with so many of the same people in the same industry regularly meeting up and discussing what is happening around them. To be honest, getting a bored of the same old same old i.e. web is growing, tv is plateuing and that mobile is the “killer” app!

For me, with the emergence of the social media landscape, some very innovative and thought leading brands are really starting to take control on how they engage and add real/direct value to the daily lives of their customers. For many brand “custodians” (who are the brand managers representing product and services within their companies) they are still stuck on the world of needing to spend their annual budget to achieve short term annual returns. It’s what I call the “30/60/90 goal driven corporate syndrome”.

Seeing I’m spending a lot of time working on growing 3eep with a focus on the sports market, I’m very impressed by Nike’s approach to their advertising mix and more importantly, their focus to doing things the “Nike way!”. This is well explained by Michael Tchao of Nike Plus, who in this interview with Loic Le Meur (great French blogger!) explains their existing work with Nike Plus and they support the running community with the launch their own social software.

After watching this interview, it really go me thinking about where media companies will fit in our economies in not 5 but 50 years time! Imagine, if brands that are so dependent on awareness and “top of mind” building activities using various media channels could directly engage with their customers, where does it leave media planners, buying and media companies?

Interesting to see how much Nike will be spending in advertising in 50 years!

I was driving on the weekend past our local shopping area and saw this large billboard….

navman find sports fields billboard ad

You know when you see something at a glance and then you take a good stare back again, that was me after seeing this. I had to take a photo with the mobile phone from within the car!!

Nice work navman!

So, although I try, it is hard to maintain all of the profiles on all of the social networks that I am a member of (ok ok - I know that some of you do manage to do it).

I just spent some time on Viadeo - i have 2 contacts so far!

And, here is their widget for me - let’s see …

http://widget.viadeo.com/blogs/afficheblog/index.jsp?w=1&b=0041jv9xks4l4l5b&u=004564t9jeewhnaz”>>

mmm … ok - so, I’m either not as tech savvy as I thought, or, as Viadeo thought?!! \

So, question is, what do I do with their widget embed code????????