NBA Best Practices: Minnesota Timberwolves Bring Engagement through Fan Photos

There's one thing that's a constant at events: people take photos. So how do you build upon this behavior? How do you make it even more cool to do something you were already going to do? Check out the approach taken by the Minnesota Timberwolves.

We'll start on the T-Wolves' official site (linked here, shown below)

Scroll down the page and you'll see the Fan Zone section, with Fan Photos called out, here:

The fine print's a little tough to read, so here's what it says:

"FanChatter Photo Sharing enables fans at Timberwolves games to share their own mobile photos on the jumbotron, wolvesnation.com and timberwolves.com. Find yours."

Intriguing. So you take photos and share them via your mobile and they will show up online and on the jumbotron in game? It sounds like a more current version of the crazy fan cameras that most teams leverage during timeouts to keep people engaged.

Let's dive in. Clicking in takes us to the Fan Photos home, here.

I clicked on "Find Your Photos," which brought up the window below. Simply enter the email address or phone number you sent the photos in from and you'll find your pics.

Next, I checked out the individual game galleries here.

So the real questions are what does this mean and how could it be better? The Timberwolves have uncovered a nice system -- take pictures at the game and they will be aggregated as part of the Timberwolves' Game Gallery (either online or at the event). That's cool. It is a visual way of documenting your night alongside others who were also there.

But how to make this better? I see 2 big things:

1. What does this add up to? Can we take these photos and juxtapose them against the game action? Said differently, what would the timeline of the Timberwolves-Lakers game look like through the visuals provided by fans? Would we see an emotional up and down of fan energy through a game? Would it be tense at the end of a close game? The possibilities feel limitless.
2. How do we leverage the fact that fans are submitting pictures via email or mobile? I mean fans already have the pictures so there's not a huge value in going to the site to claim your photos. But if we add a social dimension -- ie: put a T-Wolves Facebook claim to yourself in the photos, it would both tap into social networks for growth and it would get a sense of who the fans were who were claimed more often -- these fans are either at more games or more active during the games they are at (or both). And that is a big value to the T-Wolves... and the rest of us!

Come back tomorrow as we check out another best practice from the NBA. And as always, you can follow me on Twitter (I'm @pawlow34) or on Facebook (Digital Hoops Blast).

Thanks!

Andy