I have spent an interesting time looking at. and participating with, sports marketing 2.0 and the differences between the US and European take on social media.(http://sportsmarketing20.com/group/theeuropeanperspective)

I guess my latest position is that there is a simplified way to see how sport marketing is adapting to the WWW - and it follows more or less the Tim O'Brien paradigm of web 2.0 - reproduced below from his seminal paper 'What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software located for download at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008839

Its a journey from the recently learned (for sports managers at least) areas of web 1.0 to the braver new world of web 2.0 where paradoxically, the technology is more accessible, but the rules of successful deployment are far harder to comprehend if they exist at all. So whereas the blogosphere is full of comments and stories on sport (and fewer comments on comments except on fan sites where it easily degenerates into name calling and ranting!), sports marketers have to work out how they can make this journey. To date certainly the hi-tech industry, and surprisngly the high visible brand FMCG industry are deploying user communities and social networking tools to engage more closely with their customers. As they must do in a competitive market. But sport has always been a bit smug about the devotion of the fans who are rather taken for granted. So much so that , as I have said, many organisations do not even want their fans to interact except in the case of putting their hands in their pockets at match day and for merchandise. I agree more is being done to use the web and internet technology to provide more and more content to fans (sometimes at a price and sensibly so). But one feels there is still the fear of engagement, and that the sponsor and the traditonal media will always be placed first because that is where the money appears to be. Plus there is a culture of secrecy, a tradition of clubs being walled off from their fans than discourages communication and interaction in case the fans make unreasonable requests. In this way many sports organisations are very Dilbertish ' we exist to meet our customers needs - our customers want better products for free- lets sell them what we have and call it a strategy' (apologies - couldn't find the orginal cartoon strip).

In other words its very outward looking, very one way. If the fans start talking amongst themselves- will they want better for free? or will they want better and want to pay for it? how will you know if you don't engender the dialogue and find out?