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.

Episode 005: Dan Harbison of the Portland Trail Blazers from Jonathan Dusing on Vimeo.

I was able to do an interview with the guys at Row27 on their VCasted show: The Row Show. This is their 5th episode and I’m really impressed with not only their content (Interactive Sports Marketing Tips) but the production is killer. Nice After Effects (I think) transitions and graphics. Just like websites, it isn’t all about the design, it’s about the content that goes in the design… but the design helps augment the content. This can be said about their show.

We discuss Live Video Streaming, CoverItLive for live blogging during the playoffs, the relaunch of iamatrailblazersfan.com, passive engagement vs active engagement, how Toyota’s Hybrid Social Net (preview blog post) was an inspiration for a feature in the iama and more.

We used Skype and the audio got a little funky. Sometimes I looked like I was in a 70′s Kung Fu movie. I look tired. Man, that was right before Game 6 and we had been up consistently until 2am getting stuff done for the site.

Big props to Jason and Jonathan for showing the intiative and starting this. Thanks for reaching out. Let me know anytime you would like a guy that talks a lot, looks tired and will try to throw his voice. I know a guy.

I’m sure some of you have watched this. It has been floating around for awhile, but I was reminded of it when I was on Pat Coyle’s blog today. You forget how many times this Fat Boy Slim song is used for things like this, but I still actually like it.

I try to keep the number of RSS Feeds that I subscribe to a minimum. I have read about people like Robert Scoble that read some insane number of RSS Feeds a day, I just don’t have time. I find that if don’t read the RSS feed in over a month, I dump it. I look it almost like subscribing to someone’s email list. If I haven’t read their email in awhile, I should really unsubscribe… unless it is IMPOSSIBLE to unsubscribe (I’m looking in your direction eHarmony… subscribed for purely research purposes, I swear). A blog I have recently subscribed to their RSS feed and have been extremely happy with is the blog bokardo.com. Written by Joshua Porter, author of Designing For the Social Web, the blog details examples of good and bad design throughout sites that are in the Social Web space (ie Web 2.0 sites). Below is an example of his review of the homepage of Freshbook’s homepage.

I still need to pick up his book which was recommended to me by David at Substance.

This is a space that I continue to look at for inspiration. A lot of the social networks and social sites that have been built out have been built with development in mind, but the experience or UI is secondary. How will people use the cutting edge functionality that your company has invested in if your design and UI was the last thing that you looked at, and didn’t invest really any money or time in… that is a bridge that a lot of people like to cross after they have gone live with their site. I think this is a mistake. In this day in age, there are so many sites out there, first to market IS extremely important, but having your users understand how to use it is equally important. If you turn people off once they get there, you’ll have a hard time with them being a regular user. Then your competitive advantage is wasted because you will have to rehaul your design and relaunch.

This approach is how we are looking at iamatrailblazersfan.com v2.0. We’re bringing in a lot of new features, so our UI and design needed to be really solid to support these features and to make it easy for people. The team at Substance has been amazing and I’m really excited to bring their designs to life over the summer. We will learn a lot once we get live, but if we just went with some generic skins, the Trail Blazers brand wouldn’t sing in the site and fans would become frustrated. We will of course need to change, evolve and learn once we go live, that is inevitable. BUT, because we took the extra time with the UI, I believe (and the focus groups we’ve held believe) that this will a design that will support the community.

Tags: socialnetworks, iamatrailblazersfan.com, substance

Ok, there are so many of these services out there… Qik, Justin.tv, YouTUBE is rumored to be bringing live streaming… so I’m testing out Yahoo Live to see how I like it for the Trail Blazers. Getting behind the scenes footage is always a challenged, but sometimes it is the editing that is the largest hurdle. Finding time to edit the 4 hours of video that is shot into a 1-2 mintue short. Streaming live from certain events might be the way to go. So, I’ve created a really boring live stream of me working. Yeah, boring, but I’m going to see how it works from the backend.

Ohhhh, the web. It brings us all together. We talk to each other on email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace… and probably something crazy that I haven’t heard of. Buuuuuut… people who like the web, and who talk about the web like to go to conferences. Probably to meet others because they bore their everyday friends talking about “social graphs” and “api’s”, or so I’ve been told.

So, I’m in San Diego at PacNET, our ticketing provider’s (Paciolan) annual conference. I’ll be presenting about Web 2.oh and how we’ve been using it at the Trail Blazers. PLUS, I’ll be talking about SEM (we’ve done a little of that) and multi-media with your websites (we do that too!). I think I’m going to be tired of talking, and if you know me, you know that doesn’t happen often.

Another sweet ass conference is in New York right now… Sports Marketing Web 2.0 conference. My colleague, Pat Coyle has put this together to bring the people who bring sports marketing onling… all in NYC. This is a series of conferences that we’ll all be trying to put on over the next couple of weeks. I can’t wait to be able to attend one (I’m in San Diego for PacNET, read the paragraph above)… so I’ll have to wait until March. It’s a bunch of guys and girls from sport teams (most of them pro teams) and talk about the good and bad things that are going on in our world. We’re shooting for one to be in San Francisco in March. Who wants to go? If you are interested in this space, let me know, I can invite you to the Sports Marketing Web 2.0 social network. Yes, the guys who like to develop social networks have a social network. It’s like putting a mirror up to a mirror that reflects that mirror into a mirrrr….. ahhh my brain broke.

I’ll be speaking at an Internet Strategy Forum on February 20th… we’ll be talking about what clients want out of agencies. And I’ve seen both sides so I’ll have to change order myself when scope creep sets in… wait, isn’t that supposed to happen in private? I’ll also be presenting at SEMPDX, SearchFest 2008 on March 10th. I did it last year and loved it. This year it’ll be at the Portland Zoo! Sweet ASS! Should be fun. I’ll have an update as we get closer.

Oh yeah, Jack has a new video up. He’s dope.