New Orleans natives and many from the Gulf south (like me) love the National Football League’s (NFL) New Orleans Saints. The Saints have been perennial losers, but recent successes (despite a disappointing 2008 season) and an infusion of rich new talent have the team and their fans hoping: could this be The Year?

Second to none in their passion for hometown teams, Philly fans reach higher highs and lower lows than most, according to sports commentators. Increasingly, however, it’s Web content management (WCM) that enables the respective fans in each city to keep track of their teams both on and off the field. In this article we’ll look at how neworleanssaints.com (the official team website) and Comcast Sports- Net Philadelphia are harnessing the power of the Web to draw already close fan bases even closer together.

The Saints’ (new WCM) Comes Marching In
Not long ago Doug Miller, senior director of New Media at the Saints, faced a bottleneck in creating site content. Only one person understood the WCM system and could post content – team news, videos, and photos – when trying to sell tickets and in other ways engage fans. “I knew we needed an overhaul,” says Miller, who spent months poking around various sites and was eventually drawn to www.seahawks.com, the official site of the NFL Seattle Seahawks. He liked it and cold-called Cypress Consulting (www. cypressconsulting.net), which licenses, installs, and performs training and maintenance for the Sitecore WCM solution.

Miller eventually interviewed nine companies but selected Cypress, he says, because the Saints weren’t going to be forced into a cookie-cutter mold. “[Cypress] spoke to every decision-maker in our organization from General Manager Mickey Loomis to Head Coach Sean Payton to owner and Executive Vice President Rita Benson Leblanc and each department head. They really did their homework, and this fact-finding mission really fleshed out who the New Orleans Saints are,” says Miller.

With a background in public relations, Miller admits he was a little nervous about the process, since the Saints are in the business of football – not WCM. But he did know, above all, that Cypress would need to put things in layman’s terms for the users. He was not disappointed. “They understood what we needed, how to do it, and how to explain it in a way that everyone involved in the project could understand.”

Who Dat Nation
Now, says Miller, Saints fans (collectively known to one another as “Who Dat”) have a WCM system that provides authoritative news and is a go-to resource for Saints fans, where they can purchase tickets, team paraphernalia, access multimedia (including video), interact with sports blogs, sign up for youth programs, and learn about literally every aspect of the team, including the performance and tryout schedule for the team’s cheerleading squad, the New Orleans SaintSations.

The Saints have sold out the Superdome, site of the team’s home games, for the next four years. And while the football games themselves are clearly the biggest draw, the capabilities of the new platform make it much easier to keep ticket information (news, layaway plans, pricing, etc.) organized and updated and, most importantly, help enable the franchise to capitalize on other, non-game opportunities for revenues.

Miller has an aggressive posting schedule, especially during the season: player profiles, training camp updates, opponent breakdowns, game recaps, video, picture albums, and more. It’s a great job to have, but that’s a lot of content. The Sitecore system is easy to use, he says, and enables him and his team of contributors to keep the content flowing.

The site is refreshed every two to three months just to keep up reader interest, and the ability to do this without relying on IT as the middleman has considerably sped the process. Posting is straightforward with a template for each type of content. Articles are written in Microsoft Word and transferred to Sitecore. Pictures or video content can be added via the media library by going through a checklist.

Most photos and videos are stored on a separate server and run through Photoshop for cropping/editing before posting. Once used in a story, images are saved in the Sitecore system as well, so a subset of the overall image library is already established. The Saints are currently investigating mobile content delivery.

Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia
If you had any doubt that Philadelphians are mad about sports, one glance at the Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia website will cure you of that affliction. It’s truly something to behold – an all-things-Philadelphia sports site: the Philadelphia Phillies (professional baseball), Eagles (NFL), Flyers (professional hockey), and “Sixers” (professional basketball), in addition to all NCAA college sports, “Fantasy Football,” and—soon—blogs, social networking, and still more.

Rolled out in October 2008, Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia is built on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform from Platformic (www.platformic.com), which has greatly streamlined the posting process. Vice president of Digital Media Rich Libero gives all credit to his predecessor, Troy Ewanchyna, who made the decision to go with a SaaS solution. Under a time crunch, the system was rolled out in three to four weeks, versus months. Libero walked into a good situation.

Still, managing the site is “a bit of a Mac-Gyver situation,” says Libero. Four people are dedicated to regularly updating content, with each wearing many hats: working within the construct of the content management system; performing editorial duties; reporting (occasionally); and working within Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia’s proprietary video system. One person is dedicated to multimedia. There are also a few pure content creators—team insiders for the Flyers, Sixers, and Eagles. Libero’s team can also tap into the newsroom and on-air talent to round out content.

The system itself is tremendously flexible. Platformics provides “a really large degree of control over the way that you can create your own pages and your own modules and populate them with content,” says Libero. Pages can be created from scratch or an existing page can be cloned and then tweaked—creating variants or adding modules.

The site breaks down, basically, to a middle section and a right rail that matches; the Eagles page has NFL-centric content, for example. On the right rail, the elements are mixand- match and are stacked: add a blog-only feed, a score/stats feed, Eagles-only news, NFL headlines, etc. These right rail elements are self-contained and are configured to pull content automatically into them.

Community, Commentary, Videos, and Mobile Computing
Recently, Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia has begun adding contextual content into its middle section: related video, links, and previous columns for frequent contributors, etc. According to Libero, “Those capabilities have been effective in lowering our bounce rates and adding stickiness and time spent on the site. The commentary stuff built into the tool is helpful to that growth too.”

Philly fans love to talk about their teams—and by the time you read this, the community aspects of the Comcast Sports- Net Philadelphia should be up and running. Platformics integrated its product with Pluck, a social networking site selected by Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia, to allow fans to create their own personalities, interact with blogs, rate stories, and upload user-generated photos and videos. Says Libero, “It’s going to be a full, soupto- nuts community. We’re going to cultivate and create an authentic Philly voice and neighborhood.” He also thinks that user-generated content and social media will create some interesting elements to attract sponsors.

Content-rich videos and mobile computing are the next steps for Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia. The mobile site, although still rudimentary as this issue went to press, was already generating a respectable number of page views, Libero noted, adding that polls, trivia, mobile alerts, and more are in the works—but that video is the very next step.

When Libero arrived in December, however, the first steps he took were to install the standard equipment that would become part of a digital media site because, he felt, you need to get to a place where video happens daily. “We’ve just started to scratch the surface of what that technology can do for us,” Libero adds.

What Works When it Comes to Web Content Management
While all businesses are different, common themes emerged from each organization’s experience. The following are goals and/or starting points you may wish to consider as you begin honing your WCM strategy:

1. Community. Both sites are looking to improve their community-building aspects.
2. Ease of use. Per the Saints example, bottlenecks are bad. You need to make posting as easy as possible so that anyone who needs to can post content to your site. Checklists and predefined templates (that users can change without IT intervention) enable various content elements (video, audio, photos, etc.) to be spliced into an article, enlivening it and making it more engaging to your audience.
3. Vendor responsiveness. A responsive provider can make or break your implementation, whether that’s a third party integrator, the vendor themselves, or your own in-house team. Miller is pleased with how quick Cypress continues to be. “They don’t just fix a problem,” he says; “They come back, explain why it happened, and create a plan to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Responsiveness also impacts the bottom line. If you’re worried about the next upgrade, or the last upgrade isn’t working, you’re not focused on improving your site, says Libero.
4. Unique design. Cypress appealed on the front end, Miller says, because “They knew we wouldn’t accept in a cookiecutter approach to the Saints’ site—and we knew that they were going to work with us around our mold.”
5. Know who you are. The Saints and Cypress took the time to identify who the Saints really were and what they meant for the community: New Orleans is a gritty, hard-working town where people like to have fun; there’s passion for the Saints (Who Dat nation); and there’s a business side to selling tickets and engaging the local business community. The goal of the website was to incorporate these three pillars into a coherent whole, says Miller.

Two cities. Two passionate fan bases. Both better served through smart application of Web content management.

Bryant Duhon is editor of Infonomics^® Weekly and with this magazine. He is also a huge Saints fan and firmly believes SuperBowl parties in February 2010 will involve disappointed Chargers fans and ecstatic Saints fans.