The skinny: Through Direct Contact, I provide social media consulting services. Working with IBT now gives me the opportunity to work with sports teams to build customized applications for Facebook. This is an exciting development as now teams can:

• Take the fan experience even deeper by redefining the online experience through the custom development of their own applications
• Differentiate their brand from other teams on Facebook and outpace competitive interests
• Include unique sponsorship activation through product placement or advertising
• Improve and enhance their current Facebook presence and social media focus

This helps elevate social media engagement strategies to a direct ROI level with bottom line impact. IBT’s games yield engagement levels 4x greater than that of average top applications on social media – that means more eyeballs spending more time on your team, your brand and your sponsors.

This is a total solution approach. Many teams have adopted social media strategies, but they are unable to differentiate themselves online within their league let alone their own local markets. Direct Contact nad IBT Games now allows them to do just that.

I should be clear that anyone can use IBT’s games on Facebook right now – my partnership with IBT allows sports teams to build similar games or high level engagement apps focused on their own league, team and brand. Teams may have ideas but lack the technical resources to develop such apps, but through my partnership with IBT, we can provide the full solution.

For more information on IBT Games – please visit their website, or contact me with any questions you may have.

First off - The Vancouver Canucks Fans App by Watercooler.com

A couple of weeks ago, I connected with Kevin Chou, CEO of Watercooler.com (Pat Coyle had referred him to me – thanks Pat!). While watercooler.com does many interesting things, I am only going to focus on the Canucks app in this post.

While Facebook provides a fan connection opportunity (to both the team and other fans), teams can maximize reasons why their fans would want to join Fan Pages and continue to visit them. The Canucks app provides:

• Contests
• Networking/interactivity
• Share-able content
• Ability to purshace tickets and merchandise

So beyond the value of social media fan engagement, there is a revenue stream opportunity here as well. At the time of writing – the Canucks app has 183K+ fans… a pretty large group to tap into.

Here is a link to the Maple Leafs App on Facebook…

The Leafs have built this App internally – it still requires some tweaking, but when fully operational, it will allow fans to build a custom jersey online, or create their own hockey card with their own face/name on it.

What I find interesting about the Leafs social media situation is to see how their fan base buys into it. As I wrote about previously, the Maple Leaf brand is very strong and I expect to see their followers and fans soar online – especially as their on-ice rebuild continues.

If you are on Facebook, I suggest that you give these apps a test drive for yourself- when fans use them, the viral nature of Facebook info permits waves of 2nd degree marketing messages, e-commerce opportunities, and can help drive eyeballs back to the team website.