The annual sailing business conference runs for two days and covers the commercial side of the yacht racing and sailing industry, from sponsorship to marketing and managing events.

Through its marine business publishing platforms, Pilote has been a media partner of the World Yacht Racing Forum (WYRF) since the first conference in 2008.

This year, speakers will include; Kevin Roberts, Editorial Director, Sport Business Group - Richard Worth, Chairman, America’s Cup Event Authority - Wolf Allisat, Executive Vice President Europe, Comscore - Jerome Pels, Secretary General, ISAF - Franck David, Executive Director, Multi One Design - Knut Frostad, CEO, Volvo Ocean Race - John Stork, President, International Council of Yacht Clubs - Staffan Salen, Commodore, KSSS (Royal Swedish Yacht Club) - Dee Caffari, Global Ocean Race - David Graham, CEO, Oman Sail - Christina Ioannidis, CEO, Aquitude.

David Fuller will moderate a panel on the first day of the forum entitled: The Value of Sponsorship in Yachting: Does the Sport Really Deliver Return on Investment? The session will cover brand perspectives of the sport and compare it to other sporting sponsorships available to marketing professionals.

David will also be involved with a panel later in the day titled: Internet and New Media: The Digital Highway to Growth. This session is designed to discuss issues around the measurement of digital and mobile media, how digital marketing can be used effectively to target the ‘right’ audience and what social media can bring to the sport of sailing over and above number of ‘likes’.

The World Yacht Racing Forum is held in conjunction with the Yacht Racing Designs and Technology Symposium which allows the technical aspects of the marine industry to be discussed.

There are several offers being made by organisers of the forum for delegates who wish to attend. Senior brand and marketing managers can attend the conference for free, while members of the yacht racing industry can get a 20% discount through Pilote’s marine business news site – yachtracing.biz.

YachtRacing.Biz will cover the forum and provide in-depth analysis of all sessions.

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a piece about the opportunities for PR companies to embrace SEO and deliver their clients better results. Since then, very few PR companies have changed the way they operate, however there is a new incentive to change – brands are waking up.

CEO’s and Marketing directors are starting to ask why competitors are above them on Google and Bing. Big brands who have competition from upstart businesses like price comparison websites are starting to notice that sales are down – and it’s not just because of the economy – it’s because someone else is stealing ‘their traffic’.

I still find people who call themselves digital marketing experts who don’t really understand the importance of SEO. As I wrote in the original article:

“SEO is not as sexy as witty creative. It’s not as trendy as social media or as cutting edge as an iPhone app, but my informed guess is that Google and Bing send more customers to your client’s sites than any of these marketing methods, and a lot more than mentions in printed press.”

PR Agencies and digital marketing agencies still have SEO on their menu of services, but in most cases it is a bit of an afterthought – if someone actually asked for it, they would scramble around and find an ‘expert’ who could help them out. SEO is not part of the everyday thinking of communications professionals and it really should be.

PR professionals are in the best place to deliver SEO for clients. Search Engine Optimisation best practise is all about content, which is something that PR people should be good at. If you know who your intended audience is, and you know what content is relevant to them and create it in such a way that they might want to reference it in their social media activity, then you are on the way to delivering SEO value.

A core PR agency competency is to be able to pitch a story to a newspaper or magazine. If you can do that, then you know how to pitch for a link from an authoritative website. Building relationships with influencers is a key part of SEO, so all your work building a following on Twitter and acquiring Facebook fans can add value too.

However, if you are still sending your press releases as PDF attachments, then you aren’t helping your client.

The same principles apply whether you are doing PR for a start-up in London, a sports team in Melbourne or a nursery in Mt Eliza.

If you are not using the right SEO keywords in your press releases, then you are missing an opportunity.

If you are not taking advantage of lazy cut-and-paste bloggers who are so desperate for content that they will publish your story with links already embedded verbatim, then you should be.

SEO, Content, Communications and Marketing are colliding, and to make the most of the resulting media landscape requires cultural change.

If you sponsor a Premier League footballer (soccer player), then there is a high chance that your crisis management PR gurus have to be on speed-dial, even with the ‘News of the World’ now wound up – but what about a female round the world sailor?

Sailing sponsorship is increasingly seen as a way for brands to be involved with high performance sport linked to technological innovation and sustainability. Sailboats don’t burn fuel the way a powerboat, a NASCAR or an F1 car does, but still use high end CFD processes and attract the world’s best engineers and designers.

When I wrote my Sailing Sponsorship White Paper back in 2009, the positive association of sailing was linked closely with environmental sustainability and it is something that the new America’s Cup is trying to deliver on. But in 2011, the relative cleanliness of the athletes is something that sailing can offer brands who have had their fingers burnt by sponsorship scandals.

For the most part, professional sailors are well educated and well spoken. Many are multi-lingual and in the world of offshore sailing, fantastic role models and brand ambassadors.

Of course, if you want to take a qualified risk on an athlete, there are plenty of young, ‘rock-star’ in the making sailors who can represent more edgy brands, but the men and women at the top of the game are a safe bet for any brand – from Offshore wind energy companies, to banks and financial services brands.

Maybe you don’t mind having your brand ambassador on the front page of the paper. Maybe all publicity is good publicity, but that’s not how sponsors of drug takers and adulterers have reacted in recent times. Maybe a little bit less coverage, with a bigger chance of your real brand values being promoted is a better story for the board.

Since 2008, yachtsponsorship.com has mixed news with comment, focussing on the commercial elements of competitive sailing. The ‘blog’ began as a way of communicating best practise to rights-holders, event organisers and sailors looking for sponsorship in a tough economic climate.

But the site has grown into a recognised source of information for a wide variety of decision makers involved with the sport’s top events including the America’s Cup, Volvo Ocean Race, Extreme Sailing Series and World Match Racing Tour.

David Fuller, who founded yachtsponsorship.com explained the reasons for changing the name of the site.

There comes a time when a brand has to make a decision – whether to proceed with a legacy brand that has some recognition, even if that brand may be limiting, or to become something that is more representative and scalable for the future. I think that yachtracing.biz is one of those brands that does what it says on the tin. We will continue to be the first choice for information about the commercial aspects of the sport of yacht racing and sailing, but we have some plans for expansion too.

YachtRacing.biz allows brands to follow specific sectors more easily, via RSS and other syndication methods. Competitive sectors like sailing clothing and apparel or destination marketing, can now find the news most relevant to them.

David says that the philosphy of the site won’t change too much, but new opportunities, including events are being investigated.

We take the view that our readers know the news. They have a good handle on what is going on in their part of the industry, so we have two roles:  one is to give them visibility of news that helps give more sense of the bigger picture and the second is to add our own brand of insight – interpreting what the news means.

YachtRacing.biz will also feature stories that are relevant to the business audience that are not specifically yacht racing related. A new lifestyle section will run in parallel to the business site. David says that this will not dilute the core purpose of the site.

We get a lot of press-releases and news stories that don’t make sense to run in our main business feed. However there are some stories that we think would be of interest to our audience. This is quite common for business publications to do – take a look at the Economist’s Intelligent Life or the FT’s ‘How to Spend It’ magazine. The reason that brands like Louis Vuitton, CAMPER, Foncia, Emirates Airlines, Audi and Volvo sponsor sailing is to reach a certain kind of audience. We talk to that audience on a regular basis.

YachtRacing.Biz is available on all the usual formats including:

• YachtRacing.Biz RSS Feed (f0r Google Reader etc)
• Yachtracing.Biz Email Subscription
• YachtRacing.Biz Twitter 
• YachtRaving.Biz Facebook

Last week, Forbes reported that NASCAR team, Roush Fenway Racing was looking at trying a ‘new’ methodology for attracting and retaining sponsors. The innovative tactic?

“to sit down with potential sponsors and walk through a process of  setting a specific objective and then tailoring the sponsor activity to meet it.”

It has to be said that not all NASCAR teams are so late to the Return on Objective (ROO) mindset. Teams like Penske use sophisticated b2b business club techniques to deliver their sponsors added value over and above the visual display value provided by cars or athlete uniforms.

My article last week on yachtsponsorship.com about the impact of the withdrawal of one of the biggest teams from the next America’s Cup due to lack of sponsorship, highlights the differences between old and new sports marketing. The people who have ownership of brands and their marketing budget are getting smarter and the arguments about gross equivalent media value don’t work anymore.

There are many reasons why a brand might feel uneasy about America’s Cup sponsorship. The biggest is that the organisers have changed the product significantly and are publicly looking to attract a different, larger, but perhaps less desirable demographic. The new America’s Cup product looks great on paper, but it has a hint of ‘new Coke’ about it.

The fact that Forbes and Roush Fenway Racing are announcing in 2011 that thinking about sponsor’s objectives is a ‘new’ strategy, should remind people that even sporting franchises that appear to be on top of  the game are still learning sponsorship best practice.

Asking a potential sponsor about what they want to achieve should be a given. At Pilote, we take it for granted that every sponsorship proposal is bespoke – customised for the sponsor and what they want to achieve. Selling facebook likes is great, but irrelevant if the target is to get more footfall through a store.

Digital sports activation allows rights holder and sponsors more opportunity to deliver against objectives, but first you have to establish what they are. If your agency is still selling you eyeballs, then it’s time to find someone else.

I’m using the phrase social technologies rather than social networking or social media because we believe that social networking is a very old process, ubiquitous in human civilization, but the technology accelerates and magnifies the tendency for humans to want to share stories.

The current darlings of the social technology world are platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkdedin (for the B2B market) and emerging location based services like Foursquare. While the penetration of broadband speed internet has fuelled growth, increasing access to mobile devices is the underlying trend that has really pushed social. Mobile devices with access to data solve the ‘problem’ of ‘How does anyone have time to do this?’

Sporting Clubs, though often conservative in approach, are well placed to take advantage of social technologies. In fact, sporting clubs like golf clubs and yacht clubs are long running social networks. The old technology that used to spread stories amongst the community was a mahogany bar and a couple of drinks, now the wisdom of the crowd can be disseminated electronically to a much larger, geographically dispersed audience.

By extension, sponsors of sporting clubs, whether amateur or professional, can use social technologies to develop a more frequent communication channel with a community and also benefit from highly targeted advertising mechanisms. Having used Facebook and Linkdedin to target specific communities in recent months, we’ve found the capabilities to be a marketer’s dream, but there is also a place for organic recommendation through such platforms.

For a sports club, whose revenue is a mixture of membership subscriptions, food and beverage sales, events and sponsorship – social technologies can create incremental income from each of these streams by increasing the frequency of contact with existing and new customers.

At Pilote, we specialise in helping sporting organisations and sponsors get the most out of the most relevant marketing technology. To those who ask us, “Is Social Media a fad?” the answer we give is – perhaps. But it is a fad that millions of people are embracing and there are opportunistic ways to engage with those millions of people. It would be a mistake to invest all your marketing budget into a single channel, and Social Media is no exception.

If we told you that we could target individuals who liked a certain sports team or marketing directors who had expressed an interest in America’s Cup sponsorship, wouldn’t you be prepared to devote a percentage of your marketing budget to engaging with those people?

We hardly ever think about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – and that is a mistake. While Social Media might help you engage with a known audience, or create some buzz, a large number of a businesses traffic still comes from search engines like Google or Bing.

As mentioned, SEO is not as sexy as zeitgeist catching creative. It’s not as trendy as social media or as cutting edge as location based services with augmented reality, but Google and Bing send more new customers to your site than any of these marketing methods. Check your analytics.

Most businesses say that being on the top of Google is one of their most important customer acquisition methods, but marketing consultants have never really been given the SEO tools to help clients take control of this essential promotional task. There are thousands of marketing and PR agencies that have SEO in their menu of services, but in reality, most of these companies don’t know how to do it.

SEO is important for delivering new customers.

So how important are search engines for driving traffic to your website? The following is a breakdown of where new visitors come from for one of our client sites.

• Google – 49.9%
• Direct – 16.4%
• Facebook – 7.5%
• Bing – 4.4%
• Yahoo – 4.0%
• Twitter – 2.8%

So whose responsibility is it to look after the 50% of new business that is delivered this way? Is it Marketing, PR or IT? The answer is that all these functions have a part to play in making sure that your business has the best chance of being at the top of the search engine results.

Marketing Agencies know how to do SEO – but rarely do

Luckily, for marketing and PR people, we already have the basic skill-set required to do SEO. At the heart of good search engine optimisation is the creation of relevant content for an identified audience. If you know how to do targeting and messaging, then you know how to come up with keyword phrases that your customers use to search for your products and services.

If you know how to pitch an article to a newspaper or magazine, then you know how to pitch for a link from an authoritative website. Building relationships with influencers is a key part of SEO, so all your work building a following on Twitter and acquiring Facebook fans can add-value too.

Ask yourself where you rank in Google for your chosen keywords – not your brand – something specific that your customers would type. Then ask your PR agency if they know what those words are. Are they working them into your press releases? Are they getting links to come back to your site?

If the answer is no, and you want to talk to us about how we integrate everything they never taught you at marketing school about SEO into an integrated set of tools that can take you from zero-to-hero or how we can manage your SEO to get you to the top of the search engines.

Talk to us about SEO for PR or Sports Marketing.

Featuring over 185 pages of key contact information and sailing CVs for some of Yacht Racing’s most influential players, the DARK BLUE BOOK gives those wanting to enter the market a ready made network of contacts from world champion and Olympic athletes to sponsors, suppliers and rights holders.

Decision makers from global sailing series like the America’s Cup, Volvo Ocean Race, Audi Med Cup, Extreme Sailing Series and Vendee Globe are featured alongside top organisations and media such as Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC), Scuttlebutt, Sailing-World and more…

David Fuller, CEO of Pilote Media, publishers of the DARK BLUE BOOK and the authoritative yacht racing business website YachtSponsorhip.com said:

Having worked in F1 and other sports where directories like this work well, we decided to bring the practise to Yacht Racing and the sport of sailing. The 2010 edition is twice the size of the first volume and we have received a lot of support from the industry, both in terms of entries and affiliates who are selling the book through their websites.

Denis Baddeley from sponsorship agency SB:MKTG says:

There is growing interest in the sport of sailing from sponsors. Some are looking for a more sustainable platform than motorsport and some are recognising that there is a desirable demographic that is connected to sailing. The DARK BLUE BOOK helps sponsors and agencies who are new to yacht racing get up to speed quickly which should benefit everyone.

The DARK BLUE BOOK is available exclusively online. Sports Marketing and sailing website owners and bloggers can receive generous affiliate revenue by selling the book.

It seems to be a formula that people consume easily though, so here are my 5 reasons why your business should not be using social media.

1. Because it’s new and cool.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there making social media pitches based purely on fashion. There’s a buzz out there. It’s new and improved. If you don’t have it, you are missing out. Every couple of years, something comes along that changes the way people behave. Just because something is covered by the media, does not mean that real people are using it as part of their everyday lives.

2. Because it’s massive. .

I guarantee you that if you have sat through a social media pitch, that you have been bombarded with figures like ‘If Facebook was a country, it would the 4^th largest in the world’. The country with the 4^th biggest population is Indonesia, yet my bet is that your business has no presence there. What’s more, you probably don’t have any plans to be in Indonesia any time soon. That’s because pure market size is not the only thing that matters to real businesses.

Last week there was a story about how Pepsico were going to use location service FourSquare for marketing purposes. The article reported that FourSquare has a million users. Let’s put that another way – there are about 308 Million people who don’t use FourSquare in the US alone.

3. Because your customers are interacting with each other on social media.

In 2008 there were an estimated 6.5 billion texts sent every month in the UK, but the vast majority were between individuals. There are very few companies (other than mobile networks) that have successfully used SMS text messaging for business.

Just because your customers and potential customers are talking to each other on social media is no guarantee that they want to interact with your business.

4. Because it’s cheap.

Anyone can set up a YouTube account. It doesn’t cost anything to create a Twitter feed or a Facebook page. Creating a LinkedIn Group takes minutes and you can blog away for free on all many of platforms.

Once it’s been set up, you can get an intern or an expert social media consultant to represent your brand assets the best way they see fit, despite in many cases not having any marketing or business credentials.

You’ve probably spent a lot of time and money to create your brand, why risk devaluing one of your most important business assets by cutting corners.

5. Because your competitors are doing it.

I’ve always had a dislike for consultants who think that their technology based model can be applied across industries and businesses without any need for modification. Look out for a social media pitch that tells you that you need to be on social media because there are others in your industry that are doing it. There are probably competitors of yours that do trade-shows or sponsorship or other outdoor advertising that you might not do. Me-too is never a reason to do anything.

1 Reason Your Business Should be Using Social Media.

There are many reasons why your business may benefit from using social media including; better customer service, increased brand awareness, targeted product positioning and understanding your customer’s requirements, but the number one, and only reason that your business should be using social media is…

Because it will deliver you revenue.

Social Media is just another weapon in your sales and marketing arsenal. It has a cost and it has a return. The only reason you should consider using social media for your business is if it is going to have a positive impact on the bottom line.

Value social media the same way you would value any other sales and marketing spend. What are your objectives? How do you know if you have succeeded?

If you are being told that engaging in the conversation is enough and hopefully over time it may lead to sales, then ask yourself how much of your marketing budget you are willing to invest in that hope.

If on the other hand, you are being told how social media can have an impact on key metrics within your business like; transaction frequency, basket value, margin, customer satisfaction and loyalty, market share, recall rate, cost per lead and return on investment, then evaluate those numbers against your current marketing options and make a business decision.

Topic One – The positives and negatives of an organisation (brand, governing body or rights-holder) getting deeply involved in social media

The use of the phrase ‘Social Media’ means a lot of different things to different people. For many, it is a catch-all for a few well known sites like Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter. For others, the definition is broader and includes web 2.0 enabled blogs and some gaming applications.

While there is no doubt that these platforms have a huge number of users, they are hyped a little by the media and those who work in the digital industry. Many sports organisations have reason to ask questions about the relative merit of different platforms, but I think that the time has come where the opportunities do outweigh the benefits.

To put this question into some historical perspective, rephrase the question to “what are the positives and negatives of getting a fax machine or a post box or publishing your switchboard number on your website.

According to figures presented by Comscore at the conference, Facebook is the largest site on mobile – bigger even than Google. This is no real surprise – mobile is a person to person communication media and Facebook is a person to person platform.

So to answer the question (something I was accused on Twitter of not doing on the panel)

Positives.

Social Media is another channel. Another touchpoint. Another mechanism to listen to and communicate with partners, customers and fans. At the very least, these mechanisms make it more convenient for your fans to receive your news and content.

The listening part is important. While some may focus on the negatives of being open to criticism (See Negatives) others see that the feedback channel is a great way to improve the product, to understand what works and what doesn’t and to adapt to that feedback. This is another way of saying that the voices are a diverse set of opinions that are perhaps more useful than the groupthink of old white males that usually make the decisions.

Social media provides an immediacy that other media cannot. This is not just what fans are saying, it is what they are saying now, and in many cases their location can also be determined. The insights from social profiles and monitoring of sentiment in conversations provide a level of demographic information that traditional registration forms can’t match.

Finally, there are demonstrable benefits of using Social Media for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Obviously the more times your team, club, organisation or sponsor is mentioned on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc with a link back to your site, the more highly it will score with Google, Bing and the like. This will become even more important as Google moves to include real-time results in it’s search mechanism.

Negatives.

Many of the negatives associated with Social Media are actually not problems with the technology. A lot of the negative perceptions of social media come from a misunderstanding about the true nature of who is using it and how it is used.

It is true that anything negative will be amplified and accelerated by Social Media. A larger group of people will be exposed to comments and if the correct procedures are not in place then this can get out of control quickly.

Many of the negatives associated with Social Media can be fixed with good business practises and policies, so here are some of the issues to consider.

The use of social media when done properly will require resources that may not exist in the organisation. There is no point in doing it for the sake of doing it, if you are going to engage in a conversation with your most important stakeholders via this mechanism, then you need to show them that you are committed and you take it seriously.

I disagree with the sentiment that you can “throw a rock out the window, hit a teenager and get them to run your social media programme.” Better to invest in training the people who understand your business, its products and culture to represent you and your brands online.

Social Media is two way. This scares a lot of businesses who are worried about criticism. Many sports organisations, particularly governing bodies have a tendency to be faceless bureaucrats, sitting behind gatekeepers and policy. But here’s the thing – people will use social media to criticise you and your policies whether you are there or not. You can’t stop it. You can’t control it. You can’t spin it. The best that you can hope for is that you can influence key people via participating to see your point of view.

Read Part 2 – Monetisation of Social Media for Sport