marketing sport through social media

I know there are sports sites arriving on the web that incorporate sports fan interaction - and always have been through notice boards and chatrooms since the web started. However what intrigues me is how much do sports organisations - from the top professional teams and organisations, through to the amateur, participant oriented sports clubs, actually use the new media to promote organise and develop their presence?

I did some research for my MA two years ago into UK Premier Rugby and County Championship cricket clubs investigating how they used the web in a marketing sense and found that the marketing presence and messages was relatively limited, and most web sites were pretty much static noticeboards, and that fan 'chat rooms' were more or less tolerated rather than encouraged.

I was wondering whether this had changed, whether there were better examples of really interactive communications betwen sporting organisations and their fan base (and between organisations and those interested in practising or developing their sport)?

I am doing some new research myself into this by trawling the blogosphere and the web sites globally of sporting organisations, but I wondered just how much sports had adopted the new social media, and would love to here from people who had positive (and negative) experiences.

http://knightknetwork.com/2007/08/27/sports-on-the-web-20/ was my first port of call, but this tends to illustrate the fact that socila media lies outside maintsream sports organisations. The acquisition of FanNation by Sports Illustrated, and the fact that searching, say for sports blogs tends to unearth traditional media in its on line appearance (BBC, Guardian OnLine in the UK for example, Fox in the US) made me think that sport and the new media is not really being adapted by sporting organisations as much as by those whose job it is to report sport.

Other sites like takkle.com and isporty.com seem glorofoed chat rooms or weak imitations of Facebook type profiling (I may be doing them a disservice and need to explore these further!).

As I go on this exploration, I'll share views and insights and hope that this develops further