ChasNote

It’s one thing to get scooped by the competition. But when you get scooped by a co-worker (James Gross) who gets an exclusive interview with another co-worker (John Shankman), it’s really humiliating. I’ll try not to let this cloud my judgment when I approve their Q3 bonuses. On to the story….

Here’s how John Shankman describes the AOL’s sponsorship of SB*Nations’s Fan House Leagues, where fantasy players can take on their favorite SBNation bloggers.

“Federated Media represents SB*Nation which is an amazing community of sports bloggers and individual sports team blogs. AOL FanHouse recently acquired a great fantasy football platform called Fleaflicker that players can use as instead of Yahoo!, ESPN or CBS Sportsline to manage their fantasy football leagues. There are value-propositions that Fleaflicker offers, that their competitors can not, the problem was though how do we make the fantasy sports playing community at large aware of this in a way that will cut through all the other ad messaging out there? And so, Fan House Leagues was born. I hope that the FanHouse community and SBNation community continue to use this brand asset to promote both of their brands for more than just this season. Helping to support a community like this goes so far in today’s marketplace.”

Demolition Man video

In partnership with FM, Samsung launched Defining Moment of the Weekend, a site that invites visitors and passionate sports bloggers to submit their takes on “defining moments” among the latest NFL match-ups.

Bloggers from the SB Nation sites, ArmchairGM and PROTRADE, as well as visitors to the site, contribute content, and other visitors can vote on the “defining moments” they like best.

Jeff Ma, co-founder of PROTRADE and unabashed Patriots fan, posts his “defining moments” in video:

Here’s a post by Fooch at Niners Nation, in which he explains to his readers how the Samsung sponsorship works:

“While we get the taste of another ugly loss out of our mouths, I wanted to point everyone’s attention to a little something with which SB Nation has become involved. Federated Media is the marketing company for SB Nation and they have scored us a campaign with Samsung called “Defining Moments.” What it entails is various blogs (SB Nation football blogs among others) offer up their thoughts on the defining moment for the past Sunday’s games. At that point they post all the submissions at their website (click on the logo to the right to get to it) and open up the polls to vote for which one you think is the defining moment of the week….

“Anyways, head on over to the Defining Moments and if you agree with me, go ahead and vote for me. I think if I get the most votes, they’ll post video from the Patriots game with Niners Nation listed below the video in the top left of the page. However, you do have the option of submitting your own defining moments through a link at the top of the page.”

See? It’s not that hard to do cool, high-value marketing sponsorships and still be transparent with your readers! One way to measure whether or not it’s working for the target audience (ie, is it, in fact, high-value) is visitor engagement levels. In the first 48 hours, one in five visitors to the site participated at some level, either by submitting their own “defining moment” or by voting on one they liked. Not a bad start.

Congrats to Dev Pillette, Matt Jessell, Bernie Albers and Bill Brazell — the FM team that worked on this program — and to Louis Giagrande and the innovative crew at Samsung for bringing this idea to life.