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The Top One Hundred Moments in Harness Racing to be introduced tomorrow, March 20, 2014.Click Here to read articleTo All SOA Members: Please see article below with regard to the New Harness Racing Website - The Top One Hundred Moments in Harness Racing to be introduced tomorrow, March 20, 2014. We suggest you follow this, participate and send in your stories. SOA of New York ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All -- Over the last few months, our social media marketing partner, Converseon, has been developing an exciting new online content hub designed to help engage with current and potential new fans in a more innovative way and fully leverages the power of social media. Tomorrow, we will announce the launching of The Harness Racing Fan Zone (www.HarnessRacingFanZone.com), which actually went live today with the announcement of interactive “The Top 100 Moments in Harness Racing” This site has several critically important benefits and is designed to help provide the industry with a place to better amplify marketing efforts, promotions and news, and help better brand the sport of harness racing to new socially-engaged consumers. Select key features include: • A compelling "social" brand experience: It has been said that a "brand is an experience that creates an impression." The Fan Zone is modeled after the "Fan Zones" of the other major sports, including the NFL and NASCAR, with similar functionality to allow fans to more deeply engage with the sport via social media functionality, videos, photos, plugins and more. It helps create the "major league experience" most online users have come to expect, and want, in a major league sport. The Fan Zone is designed to provide a first rate consumer experience and help interconnect with other industry websites and venues in a "hub and spoke" model. This is the one place we can bring potential fans and owners to help convert them. As such, the content, images, stories, and promotions need to reflect the "best of" the sport and the content team will work hard to help ensure that. It is important to note that this is NOT designed to replace your current sites, but rather augment, complement and unify efforts. • Connects and Helps Unify the Sport’s Social Presence: It interconnects with other key social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Vimeo, YouTube, Vine, Instagram and more to help create a more comprehensive Fan Zone presence for the sport. • Track and Industry Profile Page: It provides a page for your track or industry group to be profiled. This page can then link through to your website. • The Promotions Tab: Will aggregate and promote all industry/track promotions in one place so they are easy to find and participate in. Finally a place where the harness racing fan can find all the sport's promotions in one location. The first major promotion out of the gate will be the "top 100 moments in harness racing" which is in partnership with the Harness Racing Museum that was announced today. • What's New Tab: will collect/aggregate top headlines from key media sources including the USTA, harnessracing.com as well as the Daily Racing Form, and others so that users can see top headlines "at a glance" and click through to those properties to read the full articles. This is again not to replace those sites, but to help provide those sites with greater visibility and syndication for their content. • Live Conversation Streaming: Shows real time conversations about the sport so that they can listen or join in. • Interactive Map: Shows points on map for racetracks and where racing can be seen and experienced. While this is the US right now, we plan to soon expand it globally. • Owner, Fan and Horsemen of Week/Month: will celebrate the people involved in the sport and help show fans the personalities and stories behind the names. • Ambassador Program Signup: Provides a place for social media active fans to sign up and become part of the sport's ambassador program. Via the Ambassador program socially-active fans can win rewards, visibility, and points for helping to spread the word about the sport. • Sponsorship Support: As the sport turns up efforts to attract sponsors, the Fan Zone provides some key marketing and sponsorship support assets that sponsors have come to expect and embrace with other sports. Already we are packaging elements of this to become more attractive to key sponsors. The will allow participating sponsors to have banners, signage and integration opportunities at the Fan Zone. • In the Zone Blog: Will provide a forum for voices and discussion about what makes harness racing so great. • Share Your Story: Will allow fans to upload their photos/videos and stories to be featured in the FanZone (upon editorial approval). • Be An Owner: Section is designed specifically to attract to owners to the sport. Together, this platform will help us effectively unify, position and enhance the brand of harness racing while generating greater visibility, awareness and engagement. As you can see, it also provides a myriad of opportunities to easily and effectively amplify the efforts of individual tracks and horsemen groups and bring economies and efficiencies of scale to cross industry efforts. Eventually, it will grow to be on a global basis and will support other cross-channel efforts, such as television, to help make those efforts more effective. Current/new fans, horseman, sponsors, and even state legislators are all key targets for this effort which will help us demonstrate how the sport is investing in itself to help attract a new generation of fans. We will also be reaching out to the administrators of other harness racing oriented social communities to try to get them involved. Together our efforts will be stronger, and more impactful and meaningful. The Fanzone is currently in version 1.0 and will continue to evolve over time with new and exciting functionality and content. We hope that you're as excited as we are with this initiative as we now have for the first time some major league level digital assets to leverage. We welcome any input that you have for improvements. You can contact Dan Leary at the USTA (direct – 614/917-2033 or dan.leary@ustrotting.com ) to share your ideas. We look forward to connecting. Mike Tanner USTA Executive Vice President & CEO Dan Leary Director of Marketing and Communications USTA 750 Michigan Avenue Columbus, OH 43215 614/224-2291 ext. 3233 dan.leary@ustrotting.com Click Here  Â Â Â Â News Archives |
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