Courtesy Edelman PR[/caption]
I had a meeting earlier this week in Washington, D.C. with Jim Bankoff, CEO of Vox Media, whose properties include SB Nation, The Verge and Polygon. I love to visit with feisty independent companies taking on the establishment; in his case it is Fox, Yahoo! and ESPN. Bankoff has had a distinguished career in the media, working on the start up of TMZ, running AOL’s* portal and then overseeing their instant messaging service.
He told me that he and his team are “inspired by the modern means of publishing—socially driven content that relies on video and mobile to accelerate conversation.” His first and most established brand is SB Nation, with 40 million unique visitors a month. Its 700 contributing editors run 300 sites that are the definitive content creators and aggregators of stories on teams in all professional sports leagues, from football to baseball to basketball to soccer. SB Nation’s goal is to have the No. 1 or No. 2 presence for every team or sports topic. There is a global site, SBNation.com, which picks up the best of the news flow from team sites while offering its own feature stories.
I met one of his site managers, Kevin, who follows the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club in the UK. His keys to success include:
- Make it easy for the community to communicate with team members
- Offer a preview report for every game
- Go to training sessions for a proprietary look at the squad
- Be the means by which the fans can feel that they are at the game even if they lack the monetary means to get there
- Have a distinctive voice that is satirical and analytical
- Offer an open conversation thread, especially during games, when an appealing blog post can attract thousands of comments
- Be the one place where you can get all of the information on a team from your own stories to those from other media
