I work for Setanta Sports. Setanta at times is is a company much like a pubescent teenager. Big irregular growth spurts, co-ordinating different limbs can be tough, and every once in a while we’ll go and lock ourselves in our room until fresh investment arrives.

I’ll leave the bigger analysis to our friends in Media Guardian and Enders. They’re getting more right than wrong right now without help from this website.  Just one point on consumer relationships, a point that is in no way uniquely applicable to Setanta.

Here’s a role that every organization that relies on business-to-consumer relationships should have:

With apolagies to my friends in marketing and PR who do a great job, this isn’t about you. This isn’t about “telling a story” or getting a message out. It’s about open ears and interfacing. Taking the message that’s out there and reacting. Read Frank Eliason’s full blog post for reasons why.

Right now there are thousands of conversations on Twitter, GetSatisfaction.com and DigitalSpy about every media brand under the sun. If as a brand we’re not listening, and even more importantly not empowering those we ask to listen, we simply cannont win. This is nothing to do with new technologies and everything to do with new respect for those who pay our wages, our customers.

Yes.

Bottom of the ninth, 2-2 count, men on first and second. One Mitch Williams fastball later and the only teenager in Ireland watching baseball at 4.30 am is heading for bed. With a walk off home run Joe Carter and the Toronto Blue Jays had the 1993 World Series in the bag. The Philadelphia Phillies, losers, again. The Phils haven’t been back to the Series since but I’ve spent a whole heap of late nights making lodgements at the Bank of American sport. 

The third week in September for me doesn’t involve muscling through throngs of Kerrymen on the way to the bar in Quinns. It’s about who’s on the schedule for the Eagles in Week 3 of the NFL season.  Sure I read the back pages as much as the next man but like a not insignificant number of Europeans, I save my sporting passion for the ballpark

For the outsider there are three primary reasons to engage with American Sports at an intimate level. There is the liberation of choosing one’s path as a sports fan. There’s the intrinsic optimism of America and through her, her sports. And of course there is the sheer spectacle, theatre and greatness of sport played out on a stage so large.

It’s a hugely liberating experience to choose ones own sports team to follow. Much like the promise of a better life that drew in the Pilgrim Fathers from an intolerant Europe in the 17th Century, crossing the Atlantic in search of sporting salvation is an escape from a certain type oflocal persecution. A fan of any football team other than Liverpool in the classrooms of Eighties Ireland knows in great detail the persecution I write of here. 

For thousands then in Europe Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium are their Plymouth colonies. Within their friendly confines takes place a sport whose language we understand. And in a manner masonic we seek out each other and offer safe harbour, understanding and a support group on those dark February days after the Super Bowl when baseball hasn’t yet begun.

But wait, “My father’s a Man Utd fan, I don’t have a choice” goes the refrain. Well heart disease and a predilection for Scotch eggs run deeply through the male bloodlines of my family. I’m rather keen for both of those to skip a generation, so you better believe we all have a choice. 

If a need for sporting liberation is a strong push factor for international fans of American sport, the optimism inherent in these sports is the strongest of pull factors. US sport, and I think baseball in particular is fundamentally wrapped up in the American myth.

The quest for Liberty, Egality and Fraternity framed the French revolution. Noble sentiments but not ones you’d expect to produce a sporting heritage. 13 years earlier however Thomas Jefferson and company not only signaled their intent to cut ties with the Empire, but by placing Life, Liberty and crucially the pursuit of Happiness as central tenets at the heart of their fledging nation they made playing ball a constitutional right.

America is a human construct. To different people the world over it  means many different things, the worst of which are strong arm foreign diplomacy and the globalization of neo-liberal economics. But at its very best America stands for freedom and opportunity. This is summed up neatly in one simple package; the American Dream. Nowhere is the American Dream more alive than on the playing fields and hockey rinks of the nation. An American childhood is incomplete without Little League Baseball. And everyone can play Little League Baseball. 

Like life, sport is not about winning, it’s about failure, and overcoming that failure. Getting back up the next year, turning round the franchise and being in with a shout. Competitive balance to some in the US is a dirty phrase but it is a reality. Over the past 10 years eight different teams have won the Super Bowl. Seven different teams have collected World Series titles. If your team has a losing record in 2008, a good draft pick, a couple of trades and some money down on one superstar may be all it takes to bring home some gold in 2009. 

In 2007 the Philadelphia Phillies accomplished a first for any professional franchise in the history of organized sport. They lost their 10,000th game. To endure that level of failure year after year over a century, and as a fan to keep coming back, to keep the candle of hope ever lit sums up what American sport is all about.  John Elway and the Denver Broncos won back-to-back Super Bowls in the Nineties. That’s not important, the fact that everyone remembers is they lost three Super Bowls in the Eighties. 

US sport facilitates optimism and fairy tale endings like nowhere else on earth. The great boxers were and are greater in America. The quarterback, an alpha role in a sport that allows only alpha humans is a position that could exist nowhere else. Truly the modern incarnation of ancient Roman gladiatorial combat. 

The batter in baseball looks out onto the field and sees all bar one of his opponents staring him down, trying to stop him doing his job. He is left to confront the opposition on his own, isolated from the rest of his team. He takes a pitch fouls it off. He takes a pitch and swings for a strike. He takes a pitch and 70% of the time he’s out. Failure. But there is redemption. In the bottom of the ninth with his team down he swings, and only in America, makes contact with the shot heard around the world. 

The greats wrote baseball and boxing. Hemingway uses the baseball and it’s greatest icon, Joe DiMaggio, as a metronome in the Old Man and the Sea, perhaps his greatest work. Don De Lillo turns Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” into a modern day American tapestry in Underworld. The meanderings of Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch don’t belong on the same shelf. 

David Halberstam, who wrote definitive books on Vietnam and the politics of the third quarter of the American 20th centuary saved his best work for baseball and basketball. I’m not sure any self-penned book by an ex-pro is as brutally honest, and funny, as Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. Norman Mailer was maybe the world’s first method sports journalist, though bringing his knowledge of boxing into the boudoir is something we shouldn’t celebrate him for.

Constraints of space and time prevent me from discussing the great American sports movies, I can only comment that The Natural, Hoosiers and Raging Bull are peerless examples of how to get sport on a big screen right. 

If American sports fans in Europe are latter day Pilgrims, then for  much of this decade and last the vessels of escape we’ve sailed in have been NASN and MLB.tv, our digital Mayflowers.

But sport can’t be fully appreciated from the wrong side of an ocean. My US sports baptism happened age 12 in Ireland’s first Little League team. My schooling took place during college summers in the bars of South (New) Jersey and my apprenticeship was served out in NASN, the North American Sports Network. 

At times in the world of sports broadcasting we forget that our job is a very simple one. To connect people with their passion, their needs and their community. Whether that community is spread wide over a continent or localised to a rural parish is beside the point.  For that’s what sport ultimately is, a community binding agent. Getting that connection right isn’t  easy, but achieve it and you have at least some hope of success. 

The greatest sports TV moment I’ve experienced didn’t involve Ireland, Munster or any team from the Premier League. It didn’t involve a team I support or even like for that matter. It took place in a packed sports bar in London, lasted past 4 am and consisted of one of the great come backs of all time. It took the Red Sox 14 innings to overcome the Yankees in Game 5 of the ALCS. 

The dislocation to London was irrelevant, what was great about that night was that by the final out every one of the Red Sox fans present were feeling exactly what their Boston brethren in New England were feeling. Nearly 80 years after the Bambino this was gonna be their year. Those that were American were crying into mobiles at fathers and grandfathers. Those that weren’t were wondering just how to explain the feeling to their families, friends and workmates later that morning. 

Big thinking critical technology theory, yep, that’s what it takes to shake Keepfaking it from its slumber. Well that’s what we’re looking for in life and we’ve found plenty of it at Clay Shirky’s shirky.com.

But before we get into the heavy stuff, what is it with Gilligan’s Island? Talk TV studies to an American and it’s the most discussed program of the 60’s. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an entire episode. Sure I grew up on the wrong side of the Atlantic but I thought TV entertainment was a common language. The Cosby Show, Seasame Street, Bewitched, all shows that spoke the common language of TV-Land-eese. Gilligan’s Island, a foreign tongue if ever there was one.

But back to the theory. Shirky writes in-depth and rather cohesively about the concept of social surplus. Social surplus is the time people like us are clawing back from TV networks by creating internet content instead watching two minutes of Madison Avenue four to six times an hour.

The rise of the web, the blogsphere, social networks and most probably LOLCats means that this decade is the first in which we’ve started turning our eyes increasingly away from the TV and onto something different. Note, I certainly don’t think these new endevours are necessarily any more worthy. But Shirky does. Hence, coupled to Shirky’s social surplus is the notion of the heat sink:

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. This cognitive heat is now being directed elsewhere.

Let’s take that at face value. If we weren’t all stuck indoors watching plasticly enhanced actors living outrageous fantasies we’d all be doing something more worthwhile. Maybe we would.

Shirky then goes on to look more closely at the relationship between heat sinks and social surplus but I want for a second to dwell on the heat sinks. What else in society is a heat sink? Religion? Professional sport? Are these institutions sucking in society’s intelligence and thought time without reward? Probably, but so what if they are. Well, let’s go back and look at what’s happening to TV.

Traditional TV is imploding. A one to many broadcast model simply won’t work and the distribution model gets more and more confusing every year. One only has to examine the perilous state that ITV and Channel 4 are in right now to confirm this.

Organized religion in Europe is in exactly the same state. Turning up to church at an appointed hour weekly is a game more and more punters are unwilling to play. And how about pro sport? Well that’s a trickier one. Despite more money than ever going into Premier League football, average gates year on year are dropping. So maybe these heat sinks are cooling down and drawing less of the social surplus they once were.

So what does all this mean, for TV, religion and sport. Back to Shirky:

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

So Mr. CBS/Viacom/CNN/Sky/ManchesterUnited/RomanCatholicChurch, it’s easy, let us produce and create and share with you. Give us the content, some safety scissors and glue and we’ll go to town on the catechisms.

Again though I’m not so sure. Sharing for sharing’s sake. Are we merely dreaming of Life 2.0. a dangerous principle:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation.

Just why is the creation of badly photoshopped kittens a more valid use of brain space than taking in a dose of Desperate Housewives?

My thoughts:

Is this new creation on the internet actually good for anything? look at all the erroneous Wikipedia entries. Most of the content on PhotoBucket is rubbish. When did YouTube actually do anything for humanity?

Sure we have to find out where the users have been locked out of participation with big media/sport/religion. But “if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”

Ultimately we’re going to have to get the carving knives out, just let’s not fool ourselves that we’re creating a better, more cerebral society merely by letting the users play with the product.

Blogs with cartoons, that’s the way it should be done, and nobody does it better than Hugh McLeod.

His post on “social markers” has some great insights. But it’s the example Hugh uses that really catches my attention. By using the Boston Red Sox, McLeod points out probably the greatest social marker on the planet. At least for the 50% of people with “Mr.” in front of their names. Sure beer and pussy are pretty big ones too for us males, but if sport wasn’t invented for this purpose someone like Mark Zuckerberg would have to round up some funding to do it.

So why do so many sports websites fail to get this? Sure there are some great community sports ventures, I’m thinking sportingo.com and the like, but big media hasn’t done a lot of note other than the standard web forums as seen on the likes of espn.com and skysports.com. These simply do not  engage users the way social nets do. Sports news and analysis is piled high on the back of an 18 wheeler running red lights on a one way street.

This is something Setanta.com can build on. Right now Setanta is showing the best slate of big-time boxing fights the UK has seen in years. It’s a sport with renewed vigour because of the likes of Joe Calzaghe, Ricky Hatton and David Haye. And the boxing community has jumped in and are using any available means of communication to tell us how much they like it. We simply have to give them a better way of communicating this passion than web forums, reply boxes to articles and email addresses.

Great cartoon btw Hugh.

After a couple of hours playing with the Setanta RSS feeds
everything’s ready to go. So go follow twitter.com/setanta for all your Premier League football news.

Nothing groundbreaking that other media outlets aren’t doing here, but wait until @setantacritic gets going…

Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer have put together an interesting collaborative media review tool over the past few days. It’s worth checking out at http://twitcrit.scripting.com/changes.html.

The technology is simple. Get a Twitter account, track down and start following @twitcrit, then message @twitcrit with any media review that takes your fancy. So far so easy if you can script and rummage around an api. But let’s step back from Jarvis’ critique of the latest Democratic prez debate (hey Jeff, why all the hating on you boy Barack?) and look at what this approach does to media interaction.

The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is a nice simple lightweight medium for one to many broadcasting. Using a browser, a desktop app or a normal SMS from a phone, anyone can send 160 characters of  love, hate or debate to those that “follow” their tweets. There’s no walled gardens (Facebook etc.) which means the user can get information in and and out of Twitter with the minimum of fuss.

Up until now Twitter has been great in situations such as conferences, where, for a short period of time only, people need a one-to-many communication structure.  It also did a job during recent Californian fires. But all of these uses have been somewhat simplistic. There’s not a lot done with the data on either side of the transport. Message is entered into Twitter, Twitter sends it on it’s merry way, tweet is read at the other end. Bosh!

But how about we start some smart aggregation as Jarvis is suggesting. How about instead of treating each tweet as an isolated many-to-one message, we aggregate it with other likeminded tweets so that we have many many-to-one tweets all sorted and bunched on the receive side. We then start building a picture of what the crowd is thinking on any particular subject, and importantly (as this really comes into its own in live situations) we get a picture of how the crowd’s collective mind is changing as the debate/show/movie/game is progressing.

So how’s this different from those calls to action for standard text messages during X-Factor and the like? Twitter is the difference here. All of this messaging takes place within a defined (but relatively open) infrastructure. We can follow our tweets. We can reply to others and we can interact on a plethora of devices in different ways.

Two applications immediately jump to mind. Elections. Live sport. Howard Dean and the rise of the A-List blogger made blogging the big story of 2004. Can Twitter have an impact this time around?

As for sport, we have a bit longer to think about that, but at the very least a live play-by-play of the Super Bowl, or the multimillion dollar 30 second spots that surround it is a goer in a few weeks.

Now, one final issue. What and how does big media get a piece of this action?