Nike+ : Yet Another Good "Structured Collaboration" Example

Good article in Businessweek Monday about Nike+, the social performance tracking service for devoted runners.  Excellent example of "Structured Collaboration"  for more useful and "brand-safe" user-generated content ("UGC").

• valuable information shared: performance data (mileage, etc.)
• logical groups to share within (running buddies, virtual races) 
• ease of contribution and consumption (data synced when you sync your iPod, charts make reading data easier)  

Businessweek notes members have logged 93 million miles so far, and that Nike's share of the US running shoe market has  gone from 48% to 61% in two years.  

 

Next up, Nike Baller for basketball players.  Follows all three rules as well, and takes #3 one step further by being implemented as a Facebook app to go where its users are.

One thing I like about Baller is that it's designed so that useful information can readily flow from it.  For example, see this graph (data is illustrative) of what you can readily produce out of the way it captures and organizes information.  If you're a Nike marketer with access to this information, you want to be talking to the guys that (as Guy Kawasaki says of political conservatives) are "high and to the right":