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3eep’s Rob Antulov (right) & Nick Gonios |
For more than a decade, the internet has been the single most powerful engine driving individuals towards global citizenry. The web is profoundly international, and this is, for the most part, a good thing. If you have a taste for, say, Flemish death metal, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be able to engage meaningfully online with similarly-afflicted souls, whether you live in Bruges or Rio de Janeiro or Gundagai. That’s today’s web in a nutshell.
Yet, in our rush to shrug our geographic fetters – by scattering pieces of ourselves on blogs, podcasts, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook – it seems that we’ve missed something. The thrill of going global from our couch has left other opportunities barely explored.
The next evolution of the web – the neglected frontier – will see us turn its connective power around 180 degrees and enable geographical communities to strengthen their bonds – and build revenue in the process.
A good example of this is new Australian sport-focussed social network platform, 3eep. The brainchild of former Director of Strategy at Fairfax, Rob Antulov, and business partner Nick Gonios, 3eep has been created so community sporting communities can extend their interaction online using all the tools of the social media revolution.
Sport is one of the primary windows to community in Australia, so it makes sense that amateur sporting organisations have access to highly-evolved tools to interact off the field as well as on.
“Many local sporting organisations are the heart of the community, yet they struggle with funding,” says 3eep CEO Rob Antulov. “We want to help them strengthen those community ties and give them access to additional sources of revenue through their own social network.”
Enabling communities with social media tools has been the focus of exploratory efforts around the world, including Korea’s OhMyNews and Australia’s own Norg Media, both of which rely entirely on “citizen journalists” for story submission, classification and ranking. Then there is Our Community, winner of the “Social Capitalist” category in Anthill’s 2007 Cool Company Awards, which provides a broad digital tool-set to Australian community organisations more generally.
Sports media is a multi-billion dollar business globally, yet interest and profit is heavily skewed towards the small number of tier-one competitions (the English Premier League, NFL and NBA in the US or AFL in Australia). Antulov and Gonios have seized the opportunity to refocus some of that interest – and, by extension, revenue – to the grass-roots sporting level by encouraging individuals to interact online around their passion.
Fifteen-year-old Jason is, in all likelihood, more passionate about the headed goal he scored on the weekend for his local soccer club than he is about Ronaldinho’s stunner from long-range that night in Barcelona. 3eep provides Jason with the platform to brag about it online with teammates, coaches, parents, friends – even the goalie he put it past. This can only enrich the communal experience of potentially millions of amateur sportspeople in Australia and around the world.
“There is a natural network effect within the social media environment,” says Antulov. “If a couple of kids from the local under-14s sporting team sign up, there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll get the rest of the team to sign up. The whole team gets much more value out of the service if everyone in the team is signed up. Once one team in a club is signed up, then there is more of a chance that other teams in that club will sign up too. Once one team in a league is signed up, there is a better chance that others in that league will also sign up. And so on.”
As of November 2007, 3eep is distributing its social media platform exclusively through alliance partners. One of these is PRIME, which has a regular audience of five million people in regional Australia.
“It became apparent that we were better positioned to be a provider of technology and commercial services through partners that already had reach into their local communities,” says Antulov. “We’re providing defined communities with a social platform that they can then use to extend their real-life conversation in an online space.”
With distribution partners in Australia, Canada and Germany, and ongoing talks in Asia and Western Europe, it would seem a natural progression for 3eep to apply its technology platform beyond amateur sport to the almost infinite array of community groups out there. A social network for knitters of Himalayan goat hair perhaps? While Antulov acknowledges that such diversification is part of the longer-term strategy, he and Gonios are firmly focussed on ensuring that the 3eep social media platform is adopted by as many local sporting communities as possible.
After all, when it comes to hyperlocal, there are many goals to be scored in the backyards of Australia.
Paul Ryan is editor and senior journalist at Australian Anthill.
