New Media Strategies Attends Blogs with Balls

New Media Strategies Entertainment practice member Kyle Scriven attended Blogs With Balls last weekend, a social sports blogger and new media gathering featuring speakers and panelists specifically focused on sports fans, writers, sites, teams, athletes and companies; and their ability to maximize new media outlets for promotion and advancement. Here's his recap of his experience.

I’ll be the first to admit, conferences and conventions aren’t really my thing.  Maybe it’s the subject matter, or the fact that many of the ones I’ve been to are held in bland hotel conference rooms. Even as someone who loves food, the enticement of a free meal isn’t usually enough to guarantee my attendance.

However, when I got wind of the Blogs With Balls conference, my interest was immediately piqued. First of all I thought its name was sheer awesomeness, and secondly it was about sports. If you couldn’t tell from my previous post, I fancy myself somewhat of a sports aficionado. I did some research about who was organizing it as well as who was scheduled to speak and my interest only grew.

In recent months I’d found myself in contact with various sports blogs for some of the campaigns we have here at NMS, including a recent campaign we have been working on with NBA Digital/Turner. It seemed like an excellent opportunity to get in the same room with many of the people I’d been trading emails, tweets and Facebook messages with, but also a great way to gain a better understanding of what goes through the minds of people involved with sports media. 

Leading up to the event I wasn’t sure what to expect. Was it going to be 50 guys in the basement of a bar, drinking and shooting the breeze about sports? That would have been fine with me, but to my good fortune it turned out to be much more. To list out the speakers would take its own post, but here are some of the notables: Dan Steinberg of D.C. Sports Blog, Sarah Spain of Mouthpiece Sports, Jeff Pearlman, Greg Wyshynski of Puck Daddy, Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated's Extra Mustard, Nathaniel Friedman aka Bethlehem Shoals of Free Darko and The Sporting Blog, contingents from Sports Illustrated and ESPN (including Josh Elliott, David Amber and Amy K. Nelson) as well as many more – and that’s just the speakers. As well as the 300-plus people that showed up just to network and learn.

There were eight panels with various speakers on a wide variety of subjects; topics ranging from trying to predict the future of Sports Media (featuring panelists from some of the larger blogger networks out there, such as SB Nation, Bleacher Report, Fansided, Uproxx and Fantasy Sports Ventures), to tips on monetizing your blog and making it your full-time job (sweat equity was a big topic here…really need to work hard), and culminating in a rousing discussion by a panel of people involved in more traditional forms of sports media, focused on their feelings about blogs and vice versa.  This easily became the most contentious panel of the day with Dan Steinberg, Jeff Pearlman and Bethlehem Shoals taking center stage (A good recap of that discussion is linked here).

Standout speakers in my mind include:

Spencer Hall from The Sporting Blog, who was probably the funniest out of  all who spoke. He opined that some forms of traditional media miss story angles and various parts of the fan experience that people would find interesting.

Bethlehem Shoals was another who never hesitated to speak his mind regardless of the topic or question asked.  His thoughts centered on quality of work, stating that if you aren’t putting out worthy content, you shouldn’t be blogging.

The conference was wrapped up by keynote speaker Gary Vaynerchuk, who proceeded to give one of the most colorful-yet-poignant keynotes I’ve ever heard.  His basic advice was that the best content would always rise to the top.

Another huge perk of this trip – a few of the attendees of Blogs With Balls got the chance to tour MLB Network Studios the night before the conference. This might have been the coolest thing I’ve ever experienced, and playing Wiffleball with former MLB All-Star Harold Reynolds is something I’ll probably end up telling my grandchildren. Thanks to Lorraine and Jeff at MLB, who made us feel more than welcome.

Blogs With Balls 1.0 was the brainchild of Don Povia, the man behind the curtain at Hugging Harold Reynolds. To hear him tell it, the concept spawned from hanging out with some blogger friends and just shooting ideas around over a few beers. However, it’s obvious that much more work and thought was put into it than that. He and the rest of the team at HHR Media Group did a wonderful job organizing it and hopefully we can all look forward to many more years of this event. All in all it made for a great conference, great quotes (many of which I can’t repeat here) and a great chance to place names with faces and join in the discussion about the changes in sports coverage driven by new social. I can’t wait to be there next year.