Nike and Google

n Businessweek.com just a few days ago published an article on an emerging social networking site called Joga.com created by the partnership of Nike and Google. Joga is simply a invitation-only web site for soccer fanatics around the globe, which will soon be running in 140 countries and 14 different languages.

Like any other social networking sites, Joga is a free network where members will be able to create web sites and send emails, photos, and video clips within the Joga community. The only difference is that this particular social networking site revolves around the world's most popular sport only: soccer (or everywhere else in the world, futbol).

There have been many sponsored athletes such as Ronaldino and Freddy Adu to back this new initiative as well. Depending on how Joga goes, Nike and Google will most likely create additional social networking sites such as for basketball, baseball, skateboarding, etc as well.

The only concern for Joga is that users will have to be convinced that is not some extended marketing arm of another shoe company. Nike aims for Joga's purpose seems likely to stay connected with the young males who increasingly get their information from digital sources and promote Nike's new soccer-marketing campaign, "Joga Bonito" (play beautifully) to reach those young soccer customers. Not a bad move from Nike to utilize this new networking site to promote their products and sponsorships to users (customers for Nike in some sense) who are their main target market segments.

Rather a simple idea and yet have the potential to have a very powerful presence around the globe in the social networking arena, could Joga become the next facebook? What do you guys think?




http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2006/tc20060320_591107.htm