At Shnarped we are striving to better understand the dynamics between the fans, the players, and the organization (the team).  We have a unique ability to engage players and fans on our iOS application, but in order to really start to grow our user-base effectively we realize we will need to present the teams with a strong value proposition.  If we can help them line their pockets by using our application our customer acquisition will be much easier.  

Since the first aeroplan and frequent flyer programs saw such success 20 years ago, loyalty programs have sprung up across all sorts of industries.  The advent of geo-locating on smart phones provides an excellent opportunity for fans to demonstrate their loyalty and for businesses to gain data from their customers.  FourSquare is essentially a mobile-loyalty program that small businesses can use to not only identify and reward return customers, but to also lure new customers away from competitors.

We have been thinking about allowing fans to check-in to games in order to earn some sort of ‘fan loyalty badges’ for a while now.  It turns out FourSquare has been allowing time-specific event check-ins for over a year now, but to date it doesn’t appear any professional sports teams have really taken to turning this into a formalized loyalty program.  This Coyle Media report entitled Sports Fans are Not Created Equal highlights some very interesting statistics about fans of the NHL.  It turns out NHL fans are much more likely to own smart phones and have a higher propensity for checking-in to sports events than fans of other sports.   Coyle also suggests that while most organizations are racing to apply the newest social media tools, email still outperforms all other tools in terms of actual ROI.

This offers some interesting opportunities to anyone (like us) that is looking to improve fan loyalty and drive ticket sales for teams.  Fans are PROUD to be going to the event.  It’s not like going next door for coffee and checking-in via FourSquare in order to get your tenth coffee free.  Attending games is a ritual; it’s an event fans want to broadcast to the world.  They want to check-in, tweet opinions, post pics on instagram, and get tagged with images on Facebook.  

Teams desperately want and need their fans to be sharing all of these things, and would love to be able to reward those that do so the most.  Right now the rewards mainly occur via twitter and facebook contests, neither of which have great ROI metrics built-in that one can confidently say actually drive profitability. Somewhere in this space lies an opportunity for a business to build a loyalty program that excites fans and makes teams money.

If you are sitting there with any ideas about how to do this, please send them our way!

dustin@shnarped.com

I’ve written about our vision in a previous blog entitled ‘Why Shnarped (the company)?‘.  We are passionate about the hockey community and want to embolden it by bridging existing gaps between fans and players.  We understand the player’s side of the equation and have a product they really like; now we’re shifting our focus to understanding what exactly it is that underlies the fans emotional attachment to their favorite sports team.  Darren Hands, a Shnarped contributor from our earliest days, suggests fans have ‘an unquenchable desire for more; more stats, more data, more analysis, more behind the scenes footage and commentary… just MORE.’  But why is it never enough?  What are the underlying motivations behind this unquenchable thirst?

Tapping into these emotions with both our product and our marketing campaigns will be imperative for our success.  In this blog I will review some of the literature on sports fan psychology, and in my next post I’ll show some examples of how one can use online marketing techniques to tap into this emotion. Before reading this literature I had my own opinions on what created this emotional response, and I’ll review them at the conclusion of this piece.

It comes down to basics: Motivation Theory

In his 2011 article on what motivates fans, Max Wendkos cites the three main tenets of fundamental motivation theory – autonomy, competence, and relatedness – can be applied  to understand fan motivation.  His main point is that fans want to feel like they are cared for by the organization, and should have their ‘avid’ behaviors (buying tickets, painting faces, cheering loudly) rewarded as a means of positive feedback.  Max raises some interesting examples of teams that have done a great job of engaging their fans, but I’m not convinced he’s gotten to the heart of why fans care so much.

Ok, but why are they so crazy?!?!

Thomas Van Schaik’s article The Psychology of Social Sports Fans: What Makes them so Crazy? tells us the origins of the word fan come from the modern fanaticus, or ‘insanely but divinely inspired’. He tells us that fans love the ability to escape their normal lives, to identify with something other than themselves, and even to suffer collectively.  This was a great article that sources a ton of different scholarly papers within it.

Thomas also shares this quote, from a 1998 study by Paul Bernhardt:  After a win, diehard fans are more optimistic about their personal sex appeal and their ability to perform well at mental or physical tests, Professor Hirt found. When the team lost, that optimism evaporated.  Testosterone levels were found to increase or decrease by up to 20% based if a fan’s team won or lost an important game.  A hormonal response that can increase or decrease self-esteem?  Does that suggest an addictive influence?  I find this to be a very interesting piece of the puzzle.

My thoughts (revisited)

Before reading through these papers, I was of the opinion that fans are fanatical because they want to be a part of a community and crave recognition for their contributions to the team’s success.  Van Shaik says ‘If a sports team expresses approval and makes fans feel there is value in their contribution, a fans involvement will continue to increase’.   At Shnarped we are always trying to understand the dynamics between the fans loyalties to a team and their loyalties to the players on that team.  They are in some ways parallel and in some ways much different.  In the same way that a team can encourage and recognize approval, we believe Shnarped can better enable athletes to provide their own encouragement and recognition to their loyal fans.  All players know that their fans are a huge source of motivation (and salary).  By enabling a more direct line of player-fan communication, we hope to be able to better recognize certain fans for their contribution to an individual athletes performance.  How exactly we will do this still needs some work, and this blog represents only our first glance at the real psychology underlying a fans emotional attachment to their favorite team.  I will be taking a ‘back-to-basics’ approach to understanding the psychology of motivation theory before making too many more product decisions in the medium-term.

A brief aside – So what exactly motivates players? 

I don’t have the full answer to this, but I will argue that money is not nearly as big a factor as everyone thinks it is.  The current NHL lockout overtly suggests otherwise, but I believe only relative compensation is important even in this matter, and a player’s real motivation relies much more heavily on intrinsic factors.  Intrinsics factors that a supportive fan base can promote and inspire.

This video of Eric Winston ripping into the fans that cheered QB Matt Cassel’s injury suggests there is so much more to athletes’ motivation than money. It gives me chills.

http://youtu.be/X7tG8HJsi0Y

Below is a blog we’ll soon be posting to our new company blog; it outlines our company’s vision and values.  

The answer to the question ‘Why Shnarped?’ is the same as the answer to ‘Why Hockey Players for Kids?’  I love being a part of the hockey community.  There is something special about the sport that brings people together.  From the NHL all the way down to 5-year-old youth leagues , you can’t win in hockey without an entire community – including management, players, parents, and fans – moving in the same direction.  The sport breeds character and leadership.  Both Shnarped and Hockey Players for Kids were created to harness these traits, and to use them to strengthen and grow hockey communities around the world.

Shnarped itself started as a solution to a problem our charity – Hockey Players for Kids – was facing two years ago (and still faces today).  Pro hockey players move around so much it’s nearly impossible to keep a steady stream of communications going on any one medium.  Cell phone numbers change, email is rarely used, facebook has privacy concerns; basically each of our members requires a different mode of communication.

So I thought creating a social network for our 100+ members would be a great way to improve communications, and by opening the network up to all pro hockey players we would be able to better spread the word about our charity. Realizing the network would need a ‘hook’ to keep players checking back regularly, I thought creating a player tracker across leagues would be a great add-on to the social network.  Hockey players are always checking up on their buddies’ stats, and in the past that required jumping across tons of box scores on various websites.  With this in mind I started looking for feedback, and based on conversations with a number of people smarter than myself (including Shnarped cofounder Kyle Hagel and Nottingham Panther teammate Billy Ryan), decided that starting with the stat tracking feature was the logical first step to creating this network.

The concept for Shnarped came out of issues the founding team noticed as part of Hockey Players for Kids.

This decision started us down what became a two-year journey to get the first version of the Shnarped iPhone application launched.  Many of the details of the concept have changed, but the overall vision has remained relatively the same.

We at Shnarped truly believe in the values and people that embody the sport of hockey, and aim to build a platform that will let more people see what we see, with the goal of strengthening and growing hockey communities around the world.

Scott Reynolds, an HP4K volunteer, teaches kids in Cincinnati the tenets of the game of hockey.

Whether it’s via buzzfeed, techcrunch, mashable, hacker news, or any other startup news source, big names in the tech industry seem very willing and able to recount their past stories of failure and glory to masses of people hoping to find the secret piece of advice that will earn them the golden ticket to a billion dollar IPO.  And while each of these authors brings something new and interesting to the table in terms of content, they all have one thing in common.  At some point these guys all hit it big.  Usually they hit Point B at least once before hitting Point C on the above graph, but a pre-requisite for building a popular blog and having 60,000+ followers on twitter tends to be some success in your field.

The Guys You Never Hear From Until It’s Too Late (Because now they’re Rich)

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear from some of these guys before they hit it big?  To see them reflect on their lives and situations as things unfolded as opposed to simply in retrospect?  I wouldn’t even know where to look to find such reflections; startup history is written by those that survived in some way, shape, or form.  Read Steve Blank’s fantastic blog on entrepreneurship and you’ll learn great tips from a guy that has made it.  Or even take Mark Suster’s recent blog called Entrepreneurshit, What It’s Really Like. Let me confirm that Suster’s comments about the unappetizing pieces of the entrepreneurial experience are pretty much bang-on.   But again, these comments come from a guy that eventually realized the light at the other end of the tunnel.  You listen to his story with an odd sort of sympathy, believing things were tough, but realizing that he’s now rich and famous.  So everything worked out in the end.  What about all those guys that have yet to see the light? Those that are sitting at Point A, of whom a suggested 90% majority of are headed towards Point B (failure)?

Ok, so let’s talk to the guys at Point A that are headed to Point C.

What I think is interesting is that it’s virtually impossible to determine who at Point A is headed to success and who is headed for failure.  If it was easy VC’s would all be making billions. They aren’t – many say the VC model is completely broken.

I’m forced to pitch my idea to all sorts of people all the time.  I pitch not because Shnarped needs money (for the moment), but simply because everyone and their dog wants to evaluate you and your concept as soon as you say you’ve started off on your own.  In doing so, I’m constantly bombarded with floods of reasons why it won’t work.   I know all the reasons it won’t work.  They scare me to death.  But I’m not delusional.  I’ve decided that the reasons it will work are stronger than the reasons it won’t. And I’ve convinced some teammates, investors, and an initial user-base that this might be the case.

 So what is my point? 

If you want to hear what entrepreneurship is really like from someone in the flesh, you need to talk to people at Point A.  While it’s true that 90% of the people you talk to at Point A will have ideas that will fail, one needs to realize that 10% will succeed.  And if it’s virtually impossible for even seasoned venture capitalists to tell the difference between those about to fail and those about to succeed, then your chances are even less.  So instead of bombarding new entrepreneurs with lists of problems and reasons why they are destined for Point B (failure), instead try framing the discussion in such a way that assumes everyone has some chance of being on their way to Point C (huge success).  Provide them with solutions and alternatives to problems.  Help them identify resources to avoid problems all together.  Be a motivator.  This is how you help entrepreneurs and learn to be one yourself; by solving problems instead of identifying roadblocks.

I myself am an entrepreneur at Point A, and I’ll be sharing some more of my observations about what it’s like to be here within this blog series.

Many of our users have been asking us the same question… ‘Why the name Shnarped?’.  I decided that a blog response would be the best approach.  This blog will be posted on our new company blog sometime very soon.

What is a Shnarp? 

Everyone’s asking, so it’s time to explain.  Shnarps (aka shnarples) is a rummy-like card game played by the vast majority of major and minor professional hockey teams.  The term is being further popularized by the recent release of Shnarped, a hockey app created by myself (@DustinSproat) and my two cofounders (@kylehagel and @kamilsikorski)

On road trips players get meal per-diems.  While not a huge amount of coin, this per diem is handed out at the start of a road trip as cash in denominations that are very convenient for playing cards.   Most buses have big card tables at the back, and quickly shnarps games of 6 – 8  guys fires up around them, often with rookies being left either seated on the floor or out of the game completely.  The stakes aren’t really that high; it’s sort of like fantasy hockey in the sense that the pride of winning outweighs the value of the cash received.

As a Princeton graduate and an engineer, I was pre-labeled one of the smart guys on most teams. For this reason I would sometimes stay removed from Shnarps games (and crossword puzzles) to ensure at least a mild preservation of said reputation.  Shnarps is a game where experience, shiftiness, and sobriety outweigh educational qualifications (implying I was shitty at it).

As for the term ‘Shnarped’ itself, we don’t really know what it means.  You don’t actually say the words ‘I shnarped you!’ in the card game.  The word has

neither positive nor negative connotations.  We like it as a name because it is kind of a cool word, can be used as a verb, and is distinctly pro hockey, much like our app.

Jason Jozsa, a hockey player with over 400 pro games under his belt, and triple that number of Shnarps games, had this to say of his favorite pastime:

Shnarps is more than just a game, it has a life of its own. No other game can create more alliances that last less than a minute, or more enemies that last a lifetime.  How else can you put a positive spin on a 10 hour bus ride through the night after being shut out by the worst team in the league.  Shnarps was always there. 

If anyone has ideas how we could use the word better to represent something on our app (ie. pounds or public messages could be called shnarps?) please feel free to share.

Sincerely,

Dustin Sproat

The take-away from what I’ve written in this blog:

If you are starting a company or trying to sell a product, you MUST take the time to read both the articles mentioned below. 

Trust that I’ve read hundreds of blogs in this space and wouldn’t make such a recommendation light-heartedly.  I’d read bits and pieces of these two blogs  in months prior, but sitting down to fully evaluate their usefulness to my startup endeavor has been something I hadn’t made time to do until now.  And man am I glad that I did.

What I thought I would be doing was comparing and contrasting two different approaches to generating PR buzz for a product.  But really the first article gives one a superb overview of what strategies should underly your PR strategy, and the second article articulates specific tactics around implementing this strategy.  I will briefly review each of the articles and offer some of my own thoughts in the space below.

The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing

Written by Kissmetrics, one of the leading online analytics packages available on the market,  this blog breaks down the steps any startup should take to generate a PR strategy.  It details out how to lay create marketing strategy, use social media, create inbound marketing content, and measure, test, and iterate on various initiatives.  It’s almost like this blog took all of the learnings from the Sauder MBA program relevant to starting your own online business, merged them with Lean Startup Principles, and listed them out in an extremely well-structured, logical framework.  Implementing each of the items listed in this framework might take a week and require reading 5 – 10 more blogs, but having this framework to fall back on should prove invaluable to the Shnarped Team moving forward.

The 5 Top-Performing American Apparel Ads, and How they Get PR for Free

This blog was posted by Tim Ferriss, best-selling author of the Four Hour Workweek and the Four Hour body, but was really a guest-blog from Ryan Holiday.  Ryan has used all sorts of crazy ploys to generate huge product awareness on a small budget.  The actual content of the article doesn’t really reflect the title at all, which is likely an implementation of some of the tactics he describes in the blog itself.   The article discusses how you can get people talking about your product without paying them.  Ryan explains how media has seen a fundamental shift from traditionally sourced towards more crowd-sourced.  Traditional writers might write a couple articles per week; popular bloggers need to pump out that many articles per day, and therefore making their lives easy by doing their work for them can benefit both parties.  Ryan suggests three tactics:

1. Start small.  Look for local reporters, newspapers, community centres, that you’ve established a trusting relationship over your lifetime.
2. Always appeal to self-interest.  This point created a ton of debate online, but it basically entails writing your own exciting headlines for the bloggers and writers you approach, and therefore pitching your company’s story as an opportunity for them to get the scoop as opposed to them doing you a favor.
3. Feed the monster.   This is another someone controversial tactic, however it has been extremely effective in Ryan’s own career.  Content that pulls at heart-strings,  often in a negative way, can really go viral.  Angering people with content such as the racy American Apparel ads of porn star Sasha Grey displayed on the blog evokes an emotional response, and be it positive or negative, people want to talk about it.