The National Football League (NFL) is the biggest business in sports. Established in 1920, the NFL sets the standard for a successful profit-making sports league. It has been called one of America's best-run businesses by BusinessWeek magazine. The NFL knows that its success depends strongly on its positive relationship with the media-news organizations that cover the sport on television, radio, the Web, and in magazines and newspapers. The NFL has worked hard to provide information to the media efficiently to increase coverage of the league, games, teams, and players. Recently the NFL set out to improve its business-tobusiness transactions with its media customers. The products that the NFL provides to media include game video, highlights, team and player stats, and other league information-all digital products. The NFL was one of the first sports organizations to implement a media-only Web site. Media companies originally paid for a subscription to the information provided on the password-protected site. In 1997, the site was state-of-theart and unique, but ten years later the site is out-of-date and inefficient compared to what is being provided by new technologies. The NFL decided to invest in major improvements to its B2B system. The system that the NFL worked to design uses an extranet to provide secure access for media customers to massive amounts of NFL information custom-designed to suit each need. The NFL required the system to be secure, robust, scalable, and flexible to allow for continuous growth of users and content. The NFL calls the resulting system the media portal at NFLMedia.com. The portal provides a "one-stop-shop for concise, intuitive, searchable, and immediate consumable league, game, and team information that helps reporters write better stories." The new portal is also easy to administer and maintain. As with many development efforts, the NFL solicited suggestions from its customers, the media that it serves. Personalization is an important new capability. Each user has a unique profile that keeps track of the user's history and interests and automatically provides the information that is of most interest to that user. For example, the Chicago Tribune is offered news that focuses on the Chicago Bears. The NFLMedia.com site provides a wealth of information, including current news and press releases, a link to the archives, league standings, and links to each of the 32 team Web sites. The site includes information on prominent events, history, policies of the NFL, press credentials, calendars and schedules, community relation activities, league statements and transcripts, and much more, according to the cited article. All of this information is organized so that it can be custom sorted. Much of the information is labeled for "Media Access" only, allowing reporters to get scoops that are otherwise unavailable to the public. The NFL employs a number of people in its PR department to filter information that continuously pours in from league departments and transform it into content for the media site. A Web content management system helps to simplify and streamline this task. Departments posting stories to the site can specify run dates determining when the story is available to the media and for how long. The PR staff adds metadata content tags to each article so that the information can appear on several related sites in different contexts. On game day, the site displays a special page that draws information from many locations within the NFL systems, including game schedules, injury reports, and team standings. The new NFL media portal offers improvements for both reporters and those that manage the resource. Reporters find it much easier to find timely information to fuel their stories. About 3,500 media staff signed up to use the new service within the first month it was offered. This fosters goodwill between the media and NFL. The NFL PR staff appreciates the automation that allows them to easily manage the flow of information to the portal even while traveling. As increasing amounts of products are digital in nature, streamlining the process of acquiring those goods and automating the task of assembling them is key to success for the vendor.
Discussion Questions
1. What makes NFLMedia.com a B2B e-commerce system?
2. Why has the NFL invested so much in NFLMedia.com? What benefits does the investment provide the NFL?
Critical Thinking Questions
1. What improvements were made to NFLMedia.com that the press appreciates?
2. What other portals might the NFL consider for providing information and services to other groups?