It’s an old and tired tale by now - the employee who gets fired/harassed/suspended etc. for blogging.

But this case, involving an NCAA basketball coach being reprimanded for comments he made on his blog about the way his league is run, is of interest to me because it brings up the issue of blogs and sports, which is an intriguing topic.

Of course the most famous sports blogger, possibly the most famous blogger period, and certainly the richest, is Mark Cuban, (http://www.blogmaverick.com/) the billionaire owner of the NBA’s powerhouse Dallas Mavericks. Cuban made his billions (5 of them, if I recall correctly) by selling his audio/video streaming operation (the world’s first) called Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999. Cuban has always ‘gotten’ the web and he has been a tireless advocate for free speech, blogging and other progressive web initiatives ever since. He also posts regularly and answers many comments himself, something few billionaires and no other sports team owners do. (His post on the corporatization of YouTube was a killer: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/12/27/ripping-on-gootube-again2/) So, good for Mark Cuban. His team might even win the title this year, if they can get past the amazing Captain Canada and his Suns. (My money’s on the Suns.)

Another NBA blogpost that really knocked me out was this one, by former Raptor and current Milwaukee Buck, Charlie Villanueva: http://www.cv31.com/myjournal.html. This post was written last year by a 21 year-old NBA rookie who had just scored an amazing 48 points in a game, the most by a rookie since Michael Jordan, I believe. This post on his blog is not some typical ghost-written prefab pap nor is it sports journalism. It’s one young NBA player’s honest outpouring of feelings about an incredible experience he had just had. I loved it. I also found it indicative of the generation gap around blogging because I tried to imagine veteran sports stars sitting down and putting their feelings out there this way and it was inconceivable. (Barry Bonds: “So then I got another shot of ‘the clear’ and stepped to the plate…”)

It also made me think back to Ball Four (1970), the hilarious book by Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton that was the first ‘exposé’ of the life of a professional athlete, with its booze and hookers and juvenile hijinx. Bouton was excoriated by many (tho his book was a bestseller) for breaking a taboo that kept players’ realities shielded from their adoring fans. Of course the journalists were complicit in this, too. These days, things have changed, and the Internet has a lot to do with that. Just take a look at this behind-the-scenes video on YouTube from NBA draft day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QibGO_QKzQE. The average Joe wasn’t privy to this kind of thing in the days of Harold Ballard. (Just imagine what that behind-the-scenes footage would have revealed…Yikes!)

Then there’s the Raptorblog, (http://www.raptorblog.com/) which has been a furious hotbed of Raptor fandom for many years. (If you notice a certain theme, here…yes, I am a huge Raptors fan). Apart from the high level of critical discussion on this board, which sees itself as able to deliver much more informed and knowledgeable writing than do the basketball writers for Toronto’s daily newspapers, it’s interesting to note that the moderator of this blog just took a job at MSN.ca as a senior sports editor. Another example of how blogging is a good career move.

When I think about it, as much as I like the new dynamics that have made sports more transparent, on some level I do long for the good old days too, when sports heroes were heroes to their fans even if they were pricks in real life. I remember when I was a young boy, my dad wrote a fine book called Babe Ruth and the American Dream (Random House, out of print). I went out with him on some of his research trips and got to meet several hall-of-famers who had played with Ruth, including the likes of Frankie Frisch, (The Fordham Flash) and kindly old Harry Hooper (who had been on the 1927 Yankees, widely considered the greatest baseball team ever). It was awe-inspiring. And although my father’s book made no bones about Ruth’s coarseness in person (imagine MeatLoaf with a bat) it also highlighted the incredible respect and love that he engendered among Americans of every race and class. It’s hard to imagine anything like that today - in the era of OJ Simpson and Kobe Bryant, of Terrell Owens and Mark McGwire, of season-long player’s strikes and endless testing of the free agent market. Maybe Gretzky was the closest thing to Ruth we’ve known in a long time. Now if we can just get The Great One to blog…

Surfing blogs recently I came across this interesting yet entirely unsubstantiated fact: 60% of all new Internet content is now user-generated.

I don’t know if this stat is accurate, and probably never will, but it’s a reasonable estimate that reflects the web’s reemergence into a predominantly peer-to-peer publishing medium. I say reemergence because it was touch-and-go there for a while, in the shut-down-Napster, kill-iCraveTV, broadcast convergence mania of some years back, when the global content conglomerates tried to turn the web into a one-to-many medium. As many of us predicted, however, that attempt was doomed. Thanks to MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, LinkedIn, and countless terabytes of user-generated content, the inherently p2p nature of the web is now a mainstream fact. Only the real dinosaurs (like the music industry) still believe in the bad old dream of the top-down web. (Though admittedly there may still be important battles ahead. See my recent article Stopping the Copyright Wars of 2017 for my take on what those battles might be).

What would be really interesting would be to know what percentage of all viewed content is user-generated. If that’s a bit too much to ask we can nonetheless get a clear picture of the world’s surfing habits by surveying global website rankings. Currently, of the world’s 16 most popular online destinations, 10 are English-language websites. They are:

1.Yahoo
2. MSN
3. Google
4. MySpace
5. YouTube
6. Orkut
7. Windows Live
8. Wikipedia
9. eBay
10. Blogger

In other words the top 10 sites are:

1. Search engine
2. Microsoft portal
3. Search engine
4. music-themed community site driven by user-generated content
5. video-themed community site driven by user-generated content
6. dating-themed community site driven by user-generated content
7. search engine
8. encyclopedia-themed site driven by user-generated content
9. auction-themed community site driven by user-generated content
10. blog-themed community site driven by user-generated content

If anyone still has doubts about the power of user-generated content, I think this data speaks for itself.

“TV is dying” is a tired cliche at this point but i think it’s also true. Just look at the numbers in this report published by the BBC yesterday. It suggests that 43% of people in the UK who use online video are watching less TV than they used to as a direct result. And of those, nearly half say they are watching ‘a lot less’ TV than they used to. How many people are using online video? We can assume that everyone who has broadband does so, and while I don’t have the UK numbers handy, penetration rates are running at 45% of all households in the USA and 55% in Canada. And that doesn’t even take into account people who check out videos at work. So we’re talking about a substantial minority of the population switching from video-via-tv to video-via-web.

That really is big news. Will it be a surprise to anyone if in a year or two those numbers are twice as high as they are today? I know that when I moved to Ottawa a few months ago I left my two TVs behind and I haven’t missed them. I keep up to date on news events via the web and RSS feeds, I watch sports highlights on NFL.com and NBA.com, and I get plenty of comedy (including some of my favourite old shows like Absolutely Fabulous) on YouTube and elsewhere. When I need a video fix I get all I need online, or I rent a movie, and obviously I’m not alone.

What I’m really waiting for, though, is for marketing budgets to start to reflect this increasingly important trend. Currently media buys of many millions of dollars are normal for businesses that invest only marginally in online marketing. One day, and hopefully soon, Directors of Marketing will start to understand that they can get a far greater bang for their buck online, and that for the price of a small TV campaign (producing an ad and buying eyeballs via TV), they can run earth-shaking online campaigns that will reach far more people and accomplish far more from a customer-development and retention perspective than been-there-done-that TV ads.

Last night at Ottawa’s Fresco Cielo, Qumana evangelist Jon Husband spoke passionately and insightfully about blogs and organizations as part of the Third Monday speakers series organized by Joe Thornley and and Ian Ketcheson (who hosted the evening).

Jon’s extensive experience in organizational change management informed his vision of how organizations must evolve in order to avoid becoming knowledge dinosaurs (my term not his, but that was the general idea). The future, as Jon clearly explained, lies in organizations using social media to become learning organizations, so they can a) take advantage of the knowledge that is already embedded within their organization but is so often wasted; b) become more responsive and nimble in terms of taking advantage of rapidly changing economic landscapes; and c) attract and retain young talented workers who simply will not put up with management practices that are based on command and control. To some extent we all recognize that this is not a new message (Jon talked about a bank that had hired him briefly as a consultant 5 years ago and that is facing the exact same issues today and still hasn’t been able to respond) but it remains as true as ever, and more and more dangerous to ignore.

Young workers who are ‘digital natives’ expect to collaborate, iterate, create and share with relative autonomy, and they have shown themselves to be very productive when doing so. The challenge organizational leaders face is that they themselves are often not good at these things and are afraid of them, yet unless they promote them within their organization they are risking their future. It’s a difficult paradox and one that can really only be overcome with the help of knowledgable and caring professionals (like Jon, Joe, Ian and others) who can accompany organizations as they grudgingly commit to reinventing themselves in the networked 21st century.

The other theme that Jon emphasized and that really resonated with me was the notion of the generation gap (again my phrase but this was the general idea Jon spoke to) which has serious implications for organizations and for society at large. As boomers retire, networked kids grow up, technologies improve and broadband speeds and penetration rates increase, the challenge of bridging the gap between what older and younger people know and do becomes increasingly important. I wrote an article about this subject recently. It’s online here: Stopping the Copyright Wars of 2017

Thanks for the talk, Jon. Good luck with Qumana,
John Sobol

I found something interesting on BL Ochman’s whatsnextblog.com about how agency.com taped their pitch process for the coveted Subway AOR and posted it to YouTube. Aside from the approach being clever, it made my mind wander a bit to what I would do with the challenge of pitching Subway, and what new ideas I would come up with for a mature brand that clearly has its USP nailed. How would I help them increase marketshare?

It struck me that Subway isn’t at all strong at marketing to families (i.e.: kids). I’m a semi-regular consumer of Subway and I’ve been in the chain in a number of cities in Canada and the US and I can’t remember the last time I saw a kid in a Subway. Is that not a bit odd?

With families being stong consumers of fast food (I mean c’mon, McDonalds built its empire on billions of tiny stomachs), and kids being a huge influencer in the choice of fast food restaurants, it seems like a real opportunity is staring the chain in the face.

The beauty of Subway is that it is a healthier choice, and with kids, nutrition and good food choices are so important while they’re still forming their eating habits (and their consumption habits…). Subway has a great opportunity to position themselves as a place kids like with food that parents like.

But not only does Subway not market to kids, they don’t consider kids in the experience. I’m not talking about a 20 ft. play structure here, just the basics. For instance, a lot of kids can’t even see over the counter, so they can’t participate in the sandwich-making experience, which is a major part of the fun for a kid. Now I know that Subway can’t go and change all of their counters tomorrow, but it’s just an example of how Subway may be cutting out (and missing out) on a huge segment of the population.

On the off chance that Subway came to 76design for some fresh ideas, I’d tell them to strive for a day when kids get to eat healthy and enjoy the experience. At Subway, of course.

“40 is the new 30.”

An astute friend of mine made this remark last night - in the context of aging of course - and it has been with me ever since. I think she’s right. And as a marketing professional it stopped me in my tracks.

Think about it. From a consumer stand point, we’re witnessing the emergence of a demographic that has more wealth than the the traditional “30s” segment but has the same value system. Consider this snapshot:

Sitting around the table with me last night were not one, but two pregnant women. They’re both 40. My significant other is taking up hockey–at 43! Quite a few of my 40-something male friends are just now considering marriage, the purchase of a first home, etc.

Gone are the days when those in their 40s are just coasting, locked into a 25 year mortage and most of the way through the child-rearing experience and quite happy in their washed out dockers and curled-collar golf shirts. They’re trying new things, buying cool new cars, starting their families, and buying new houses. They’re hip, they’re fit, they’re still experimenting, and yet their income is higher than those who are actually in their 30s.

I haven’t fully analyzed the impact of this shifting demographic but I do know that those of us in marketing need to start shifting our ideas of how that age old 25-44 demographic is defined, and marketed to.

Most importantly, given this new revelation, can I get away with saying that in September I’m turning “the New 20″?