I spent most of the PSFK’s San Francisco conference furiously typing on my phone about Riccardo Ricco, so I’m glad that they’re putting the sessions online. Here’s a panel talking about social media use for brands:

There was a lot of talking about how awesome social media is, but here are the two most useful points that I’ll be working into my projects:

• Be valuable to consumers and be very specific. Example: Special K created a microsite called “2 weeks, 10 pounds” instead of a general nutrition portal.
• Look outside the PR/marketing team for employees who are fluent social media users. Social media is conversational, so look for people who are used to talking to customers.

The panelists were George Parker (AdScam), Rohit Bhargava (Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence), Lynn Casey (Team Noesis), Adrian Ho (Zeus Jones), and Mark Lewis (DDB). More videos from the conference are here.

Perhaps my favorite sportswriter, Salon’s King Kaufman wrote a couple interesting pieces this week about what it means to be a fan. His point, in a nutshell, was that the idea of “hardcore” vs. “bandwagon” fans is misguided. Both groups are just consumers of sports entertainment, where a winning team is a good product. Some consumers buy tickets and hats and stuff whether the product is good or bad, but most only buy when the product is good.

King was talking about American team sports, primarily baseball, but it’s an interesting thing to think about relative to cycling. Of course, cycling fans realize that teams are crucial to how the sport functions economically and tactically. But the emotional experience for fans is about individual riders or national identity, but rarely about the concept of “team”.

Stefano Garzelli fan club by Mike Knell

Of the spectators at major races like the Tour who are actively rooting for anything specific, a lot cluster in official and unofficial fan clubs of certain riders. This is more common among people from the traditional cycling nations who have a lot of riders to choose from, and a lot choose to support a rider from their home region whom they follow from team to team. On the other hand, plenty of fans, especially from non-traditional cycling nations, support their country in general; you’re more likely to see Norwegians waving their flag than waving a poster of Thor Hushovd.

So where to do teams fit in? Some have loyal fan bases, but I think that’s most often about nationalism as well. Euskaltel-Euskadi and Rabobank are perhaps the clearest examples. CSC and Garmin-Chipotle are two other cases, although much of the loyalty they engender comes from their anti-doping programs and progressive images. Still, they have strong national identifiers. Even though CSC started only one Dane at the Tour, Bjarne Riis is a major hero in Denmark and his incoming co-title sponsors (Saxo Bank and IT FACTORY) are both Danish. Garmin and Chipotle are both American companies, and the team’s identity as a whole is clearly an American one.

Columbia has the same new-school persona and anti-doping ethos, but they’re a formerly German team run by an American and that started riders from 8 countries at the Tour. Are they too multi-national? Are they not mono-national enough? They’ve been through enough rebrandings lately that it’s probably to early too tell, but wresting the mantle of “America’s team” from Garmin won’t be easy.

If you accept that having a loyal fan base is having a good thing for a team, it seems like playing on national pride is the way to go… as long as you’re good enough to embody that pride.

I got an email from CSC-Saxo Bank’s list a couple days ago that this was their fourth consecutive year as the #1 team in the world. Extremely telling is that they’re referring to Cycling Quotient, a comprehensive but entirely unofficial ranking site run by a few Belgian fans. Now that we’ve got the UCI’s ProTour and the Historical Tour run by the Grand Tour organizers, Cycling Quotient will be the best system out there for the foreseeable future. Ah, politics.

2 Days of Pigeon Point on Flickr.

I’m taking a couple days off this week. The plan is to ride to the Pigeon Point lighthouse, stay tomorrow night at the hostel, and ride back on Thursday. I’ll probably end up taking transit part (or most) of the way home since the 90 mile ride there is more than I’ve ridden in the last few weeks.

From Lake Merrit, I’ll go up to Skyline, down Redwood Road to Castro Valley, Palomares Road to Niles Canyon into Fremont, across the Dumbarton Bridge, through East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford campus, Sandhill Road to Old La Honda, 84 to Pescadero Road, Butano cutoff to the coast, then a couple more miles down Highway 1 to Pigeon Point. Here’s the route.

Picked this up from Mike today. Looking forward to more good things to come out of working with Cinelli, BTI, and MASH.

The red car parked behind the gate in the background is an example of the many differences between me and a good photographer.

Starting with some pointed questions at Lance’s Interbike press conference and continuing in an interview with Cyclingnews, Greg Lemond has been touting an anti-doping plan that would return a positive test when a rider’s power output exceeds what his VO2 max indicates as possible for him or her.

It’s more of a concept than a detailed proposal, but it seems to be based on the idea that power output can be manipulated by doping while VO2 max cannot. Although the logic behind the Lemond plan is sound, implementing it would ask as many questions as it answers.

What if WADA and AFLD can’t agree on an exact number for the ratio of power to VO2 max that separates clean from dirty? I can’t envision either one of those organizations giving in to the other, but a compromise would mean that politics are adjusting the science. If they each run their programs with a different set of numbers, then there’s the possibility that a rider could be considered clean by one agency and dirty by another. Although the recent UCI-ASO peace treaty gives the UCI drug testing authority of the Historic Calendar, the AFLD still has legal authority to test anyone competing on French soil. It’s a controversy waiting to happen.

And when do we raise the threshold, and by how much? Fans in any sport always think that their era’s athletes are the best, but every sport gets more competitive when training evolves, equipment improves, and the talent pool grows. All of those things are happening in cycling, so we can’t have a system that doesn’t allow for tomorrow’s clean athletes to be better than today’s. But it’s impossible to know when that leap forward happens except in hindsight, which means that some riders will have to be wrongly punished in order to keep the system up to date. “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette” is not a good basis for a system that’s supposed to ensure fairness.

Team Inferno is going pro next year as Kenda Pro Cycling presented by Spinergy and touting an “100% American” roster (including staff). I know and like those guys, but the flag waving seems really out of place with cycling culture. Internationalism is part of the sport’s appeal.

From their press release:

“While the program will miss its international contingent dearly, the concept is one that Inferno believes is important. Many teams have collapsed in this pained economy and as such, fewer teams will exist domestically in 2009. This means American racers will be without a home, and to have talented racers from abroad take the few openings that remain simply is not in the best interests of American cycling. This sport is experiencing resurgence in America, and Kenda Pro Cycling p/b Spinergy aims to have Americans at the helm.”

From South Park:

My latest column for ROAD came out at Interbike and talks about the recent reshuffling of teams and bike sponsors. Also, Neil has embedded a couple videos from my Interbike lifestream on his blog, here and here.