Yesterday I shared some insights from Elliot Katzman on the difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0 from a business and investment perspective. The Little League baseball program serves 7500 leagues with 200,000 teams who all have a chance to compete in the world’s largest sports event from a participant perspective, the Little League Baseball World Series. There are approximately 100 employees but they coordinate the activities of over 1,000,000 volunteers in over 100 countries. This is a connection and collaboration challenge of grand proportions. In the past much was done in a manual manner with many hand written roosters passed into the central office to be re-transcribed, recorded, and monitored.
Now these teams and the central office are connected online through an application develop by MyTeam, now part of the Active Network. Every team needs an information officer to retain their charter. The volunteer information officers collect team data and input it into the online system. The resulting database does not have to be reworked by central office and is available for those who need the information. When there is a change in schedule at the local levels, coaches can do much of the coordination online and through an auto phone call and response system. As an aside, this system was created by brute force programming when it was developed in Web 1.0 times but would be much easier and less costly to develop now.
I was a soccer coach for eight years for my daughter’s team and can appreciate the time savings here. Little League volunteers also write game summaries and provide photos for much richer documentation for the participants. I used to send such stuff to the local paper and know how much it was appreciated. In the age of Flickr and YouTube the awareness, interest, and opportunities for such user-generated content have greatly expanded.
This system also creates a direct marketing channel that helps fund the system. For example, on the planning board is an application that supports parent participation and provides an activation marketing channel. For every game a parent is usually required to bring drinks. With the planned application, the coach can recommend where to get these drinks and offer a savings coupon for an appropriate brand. This is an online marketer’s dream as you go from direct marketing to activation marketing with the means to easily track success as coupons are used. Web 1.0 was about brand marketing, Web 2.0 enabled more targeted marketing, and now this application goes beyond that to support more active engagement that is both highly targeted and leads to direct consumer activity that can be tracked.
A common means of communication using user-generated content has greatly improved the lives of the central office, the league volunteers, and the children themselves. This type of coordination puts responsibilities and greater sense of participation into the field and with the users. Many companies could benefit from following the example set by the Little League. This system is also used in other sports and more information can be found at the Active Network site.
If you go to the Little League site now you will find the Pairings, Schedule Set for 2007 Little League Baseball World Series. Also listed with be the following:
Finding a Local League - www.littleleague.org/findingaleague.asp
Find It Now ! - www.littleleague.org/finditnow.asp
Latest Rule Changes - www.littleleague.org/rules/index.asp
League Officials - www.littleleague.org/leagueofficials/index.asp
This type of information would have been invaluable for me as a soccer coach 15 years ago. I am sure it gets a lot of use now. This post and yesterday's post were republished in Social Computing Magazine. 
enterprise 2.0 
web 2.0 
enterprise social media
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