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Launched successful US/Canadian rollout of over 60 event partnerships for realbuzz.com, providing turnkey, branded online forums, blogs and route planners to enhance connection between event, runners and sponsors.
Alicia was retained by realbuzz.com—a popular social networking site based in the UK and based on health and running—to launch the site in the US and Canada via partnerships with marathons and other large running events.
This was a difficult and complicated prospect since many race directors did not have a clear understanding of how forums, blogs, and other social networking tools actually work, nor were they familiar with realbuzz.com. Race directors knew enough to know that they should consider some type of social networking on their site, but in many cases didn’t even have the time needed to understand what realbuzz.com was offering.
Alicia was able to set up a few key initial high profile sites so that the race directors could see for themselves how these turnkey, branded tools worked on an actual event website. By doing so, the race directors could more easily grasp how the tools would look and work on their site.
Here are two examples of the realbuzz.com packages available to events:
For more information on realbuzz.com partnerships and cool tools click here: Runaway success of realbuzz.com in online partnering of fall marathons.
Over the year she represented realbuzz.com, Alicia was able to form important partnerships with more than 60 key events to carry these interactive web enhancements. This served both the events and realbuzz.com.
For the events, it was a way to get ‘with it’ instantly and provide runners with the up-to-the-moment social networking tools on their event site. Events received branded tools that featured sponsor logos and created traffic to the event site. Runners were offered great training and communications tools to enhance their connection with the event and with other participants. Runners could check in regularly to the event forum, or journal as often as they wanted to in their blog or online diary. A route planner also provided a reason for runners to check into the site and plot out their running routes, eliminating the need to guess mileage or get in the car to measure.
These interactive tools provided traffic to the event site — something that is attractive to event sponsors who want to provide “value added” -- significant additional exposure to runners -- for their sponsors. Anything a race director can do to solidify the relationship with their key sponsors -- or offer attractive benefits to entice new ones -- is welcome.
Scores of well-regarded events entered into realbuzz.com partnerships, including Philadelphia Marathon, Cleveland Marathon, Flying Pig Marathon, World’s Best 10K, Ottawa Marathon, Toronto Waterfront Marathon, and Big Sur International Marathon to name some.
The benefit for realbuzz.com was realized because they were able to introduce their social networking service to hundreds of thousands of running enthusiasts in the US and Canada. Since runners need to register before they can use the tools, realbuzz.com was able to drive up their US/Canada subscription base, which helped them sell advertising on the site. Further, Alicia reached virtually all of the US/Canadian running event marketplace with the realbuzz.com presentation, thus creating awareness and understanding of the company’s offerings.
After a successful first year, realbuzz.com took the sales function in-house in October 2008, and will continue to support the US/Canadian efforts to grow in this marketplace.
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