Before the launch of the Chicago Bears' Web site, like a lot of Web site managers, I carefully surveyed the business plan and development strategy to ensure that our staff wasn't missing any unpredictable issues that would affect the site.
It would have been impossible for me to predict the one area that would have the greatest impact on the site at the time, but it is an issue that I soon realized that team and league site directors should include in their business plans.
This area is the tragedies and triumphs that will affect every team. Site directors will be wise to be prepared for the day when these inevitable situations arrive.
After the untimely death of former Bears running back Walter Payton, I was bombarded with e-mails from fans all over the world looking to grieve on the Bears Web site and looking to buy anything with the number 34 on it. Many willingly mentioned that they had never bought anything online before but were compelled to do so because of their emotional ties to Payton and the team.
Needless to say, we never expected the million-plus visitors, who ranged from the die-hard Bears fan to a Payton fan in France who wanted to buy a jersey but didn't own a credit card. We did, however, respond quickly to service the jump in traffic by designing a Payton-dedicated discussion area where fans could share memories while creating content of their own for the whole world to read.
In recent tragedies in the college and motorsports world, two sites were prepared and reacted properly to create an area for fans to share memories and mourn.
After the Oklahoma State University basketball airplane crash, FansOnly Network created an area on the school's athletic department site featuring updated announcements as well as a tribute area for the deceased. More than 5,000 e-mail messages were posted to the site and hourly page views increased from fewer than 2,000 a hour to more than 6,000. In addition, more than 200,000 page views were collected the day after the crash, up from 30,000 page views the day before, accounting for a 500 percent increase in daily unique visitors to more than 60,000.
"It was a great exercise for us under extremely tragic circumstances," said Jeff Cravens, vice president and general manager of FansOnly. "We realized how powerful of a communications tool a team's Web site is."
NASCAR also experienced this exercise firsthand after the death of driver Dale Earnhardt.
"We realized that the Web imitates life and if there's a tragedy in the family, the family gets together in one place to be united," said Drew Reifenberger, executive vice president and general manager of nascar.com. "For the NASCAR fan family, rather than gathering in the living room, they gathered at the site and shared stories and cried and did all the things that you do in the face of tragedy."
Reifenberger's staff reacted quickly to the news of Earnhardt's death and created a tribute site within nascar.com to recognize his accomplishments.
It's too early to collect traffic figures from the days after Earnhardt's death; meanwhile, Reifenberger said the site's tribute plans are far from over.
"There's no proper grieving period," Reifenberger said. "We'll have to continue to listen to the community and gauge a future plan."
While these examples serve as sad examples of how a loss of life can transcend the game itself, a triumph on the field can have the same effect on a team's Web site.
Within minutes of the University of Oklahoma's Orange Bowl victory, there were more than 150 official national championship items available on the school's Web site. The school generated nearly $500,000 in merchandise orders in the month after the game, and more than $70,000 in orders arrived within 24 hours of the game. The pace has continued beyond the month of January; 7,000 orders were taken in February, after 18,000 items were sold a month before.
"Clearly events that touch people beyond the box score have an impact on team site traffic and merchandise sales," Cravens said. "This business is still so young and this is just another area that will become more and more important for growing sites to adapt to their business plans."
Dan Migala (danmigala@aol.com) is the author of "Web Sports Marketing."
