What we do here at the Trail Blazers, behind the scenes. We bring the community together. We are charged with coming up with ways for fans to connect to the team and fans with each other in authentic ways. This goes beyond in-arena, on broadcast, on the site. This is something that needs to be woven deeply into the core on who were are as a business and team.

If you’ve followed this rarely updated blog, or more likely my twitter feed (@darbison), you will know that this is the core to the initiatives that we have worked on for the past 5 years. From iamatrailblazersfan.com (v1, v2) to trailblazers.tv live shows, live chats during games and ongoing strategies through twitter (@pdxtrailblazers), Facebook and mobile. This will always be the first and foremost on our strategy, how does this premium content involve and engage. It is one thing to have a player with one of our hosts sit down and talk for an hour, it is another thing for the fans be the ones to ask all the questions.

This next season, I’m looking forward to pushing the envelope on what we do with fans during the games. A lot of people focus on the in-arena experience from a social perspective. I think that’s a short-sighted approach. Of course, these are your ticket holders and are the most important paying customer, however; they are not the most numerous. How we engage the audience that is watching at home on tv or following along in another country. That is where the masses are.

Our challenge is to answer this question. “How do you capture the excitement of being a fan in an arena with 20,000 other people, and bring it to someone who is by themselves on their couch?” As a fan, you want to feel like a part of something larger. Hence, why we have put so much into iamatrailblazersfan.com. Where iama, is a community that runs constantly and is there to fill-in the gaps between games, we need to figure a way to evolve the game-day experience for a digital fan.

In the past two years we’ve pushed our Game In Progress page as the homepage of trailblazers.com during the actual game (~7% of all total page views for our digital properties came from the Game in Progress Page). We have augmented this page as we have gotten feedback on fans like or don’t like. Adding in:

• Live scoring for the Trail Blazers centric mini-fantasy basketball game “Your Starting 5″
• Added live video of the pre game, half-time, post-game show
• Allowed “SuperFans” to be autopublished in the Game Chat
• Pulled in Facebook and Tweets that are tagged with specific game hashtags

Where I would like us build from here is the greater use of video, audio and simultaneous events. How do we as community and brand builders get the people at home to be chanting “DE-FENSE” like 20,000 of their fellow fans are doing in arena. We have some exciting features we are looking at rolling out for the game in progress page, so stay tuned.

Great post on TechCrunch today talking about the future of social networking (I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day)

Mike Arrington talks about a company that he has seen that could be diving into waters that Facebook and MySpace have yet to fully embrace, Mobile Social Networking. Yes, there are mobile version of both of these sites, but neither harness the power of your mobile phone.

The mobile phone is an amazing device that continues to get crazy cooler as the months go by. Not once have I ever regretted waiting in line and dropping cash on my iphone. There are few things these days that I at least don’t double guess myself from purchasing later (ahem, Netflix… at times). Back to my point… mobile phones are no longer your phone, they are your microcomputer. You can do a run a ton of apps on your smartphone that eliminate having to use your laptop. So this is quickly becoming a replacement in someways, and in others an augmentation to people’s digital experience (web, video, photos email).

If you have this microcomputer everywhere, why not have your web experience be in relation to where you are at. You see more and more mobile phones tying in GPS (Boost does this, iPhones Google Maps has a triangulation feature). Having contextual information of the people that you are having online relationships while you are interacting physically. Arrington’s thoughts:

Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

So picture being in arena at a Trail Blazers game and you fire up your iPhone. You are able to do a multitude of things on your phone, watch instant replays from different angles than what was on the big screen, get coupons for the merch store, and firing up your social network to see who in the arena is there that night. A map comes up  and shows all your friends’ thumbnails and where they’re sitting in relation to you…  so you can say “hey”! You could also see in general others at the game that you might not have met yet, or the guy who sits next to you that you’ve become friends with is on iamatrailblazersfan.com, but you never knew.

The game operations people can see use this to create a better experience based on the psychographics of the people in the arena that night. A snapshot of tonight’s crowd might say that 85% of the people sitting there that night are fans of Jay-Z, so they’ll play more Jay-Z that night. All of this could be possible.

It sounds like Arrington saw a start-up that is harnessing the iPhone SDK to make this happen. I’m really excited to see what happens. I really think this could be an awesome addition to existing social networks for Facebook, LinkedIN, MySpace, Flickr and also niche sites like our iamatrailblazersfan.com or MyColts.net.

Having something like this only available for one phone is a problem. It would need to be cross carrier/cross model. Alas, that is a problem with our system in the states, standardization is lousy on mobile phones. That’s for another post.

Two things stood out for me today…

1) Passion – I was on a panel today with Paul Colligan at Searchfest 2008, and he has passion for what he does. He has several podcasts and is a person neck deep in social media/web 2.0. If you ever get a chance to pick his brain about all things in the Web 2.0 space, do it. I will blog tomorrow about the presentation.

2) Over-reaction. Wow, there was a TON of buzz on Techmeme and blogs throughout the internet about the SWSX interview of Mark Zuckerberg (founder/CEO of Facebook) and internet reporter Sarah Lacy. People were just SLAMMING her on the blogs and in the audience at this session of SXSW. I’ve linked to the video from allfacebook.com. I guess after all the hype, I was disappointed as she didn’t do that bad of a job. She kept it casual and tried to have a conversation with Mark. She obviously has a past and tried to showcase some of those stories. Yes, she does a lot of self-promotion of her book, and no, she doesn’t get extremely technical… but by no means deserved the rousing she got. Someone in the audience heckled her for asking bad questions and then turned around and asked the most generic question in the world “What is the biggest obstacle to Facebook”. That’s like asking a band your interviewing, who their musical influences are. If you know who your subject is, you won’t find out anything new, therefor it is a question just to ask one.

She could’ve improved this interview if she would’ve had some specific direction on where she wanted to take it, rather than a fire-side chat with Mark. That I think would have shaped up better.

** UPDATE ** WordPress makes it way too hard to post video on your blog. Seriously, I wanted to embed the flash video from Viddler and it is taking too much time to hunt around for a plugin. I don’t freaking care that WP is “protecting” us. Thanks, I’ll start looking for another platform. In Blogger I could work on html in my posts. This is retarded, and no, it isn’t user error. I’ve been searching for 1/2 an hour and this looks like a common issue. Poop on WP today.

** UPDATE #2 ** Scoble has blogged about the Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg interview. Pretty solid post (as usual from Scoble). Great point by him… know your audience. She didn’t, and therefor went in directions that they didn’t like. Of course, unlike what these people are used to, they couldn’t just go to another site, they were “stuck” there in person. Also, after consideration, there is a way to handle heckelers and that was not the way. Either don’t acknowledge them, or have a solid comeback. She did neither. Having been in radio where most interviews are live, I’ve seen my fair share of really bad interviews, and this my friends, wasn’t THAT bad of an interview.