I've lived in Seattle for 26 years (not counting a year spent in Philadelphia as a kid) and have never seen my city as enthusiastic and engaged as they are right now. The closest approximation I can make to the experience of being in Seattle right now is New York just after the events of 9/11. When I visited some 20 days after the attacks, strangers were swapping stories on the subway, cars had temporarily ceased their incessant honking and pedestrians had suddenly become not only respectful of each other, but acknowledging, too.

Although the circumstances are quite the opposite, the feel of Seattle's urban crowds is similiar - everyone smiles at one another (particularly the 50-60% of folks wearing Seahawks buttons, hats, coats, shirts or other apparel), we all talk about our team in elevators, in cafes, while waiting for the bus or drinking our lattes at a crosswalk stop. It's a remarkable thing to watch the mentality of a large group of individuals shift due to a local event. Of course, two teams go to the Super Bowl every year and I'm forced to ask myself- is it always like this in every city whose team makes a run? The short answer is no.

Seattle has some very special, unique circumstances that have helped to create the buzz:

• Seattle is among 7 out of 32 teams in the league that has never been to the SuperBowl before
• Seattle's other major sports teams (the Mariners in baseball and Sonics in basketball) haven't been to their respective championship games but once (Sonics in 1979)
• The Local Media has Gone INSANE - it's all Seahawks, all the time, on every radio channel, website, newspaper, blog and TV station
• And, finally, the point of this blog post - Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder and Seahawks owner)'s savvy use of fan involvement and customer evangelism marketing strategies

What did Paul Allen do, specifically, that created this incredible atmosphere?

(from USA Today)
...Allen in 2003 corralled one of the hottest sports marketing execs in the nation, Tod Leiweke, now the Seahawks' CEO. Then president of the Minnesota Wild, Leiweke had orchestrated sellouts for every game of the expansion NHL hockey team's first three seasons; ESPN in 2003 ranked the Wild tops for stadium experience and second for fan relationships among 123 sports franchises.

Leiweke brought in popular former Seahawks players to mingle with fans at golf tournaments and other events. He lowered the costs of game programs and accelerated promotions for sales of season tickets and team gear. And he had a flagpole installed prominently in the south end of the stadium.

Before each game, Leiweke arranged for a guest celebrity, often a former player, to raise a 12th-man flag to the roar of the crowd. The flag-raising has become a staple of TV coverage. "Symbolically, we wanted to give life to this idea that the 12th man was truly a part of the very being of this franchise, and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy," Leiweke says.

Along with smart coaching and staffing decisions, Allen implanted the idea in Seattlites that they could make a difference in the team's success. For those unfamiliar with NFL football, 11 players from a team are involved in each play. The figurative "12th man" is the fans, whose noise and silence can strongly affect the play on the field. Seattle's most famous landmark, the Space Needle, went so far as to erect a "12th man" flag atop its spire in recognition, not of the team's accomplishments, but of the fans.

Warning: The paragraph below illustrates why Rand is way too obsessed with football
In football, a play is called from the sidelines by the coach to the quarterback (the guy throwing the ball) who then relays it to team members. When the team "lines up" to begin the play, the quarterback must often recognize weaknesses in how the defensive players are situated and "change the play" by yelling to his teammates. The quarterback also yells out a count and at a designated point, the ball is snapped and play begins. A noisy crowd can disrupt both play changes and snaps, resulting in penalties and discoordination for opposing teams. The Seahawks fans are infamous for this and, in fact, Paul Allen's design for Seahawks Stadium uses audio engineering to enhance the level of noise on the field.

So, how can we, as online marketers, follow Paul Allen's example and create raving lunatic fans out of our customers?

1. Find a niche that people are naturally passionate about - something that inspires and engages. Any sector can achieve this, just look how Apple created passion with their products or MySpace created evangelists with their service. Even a bookstore (like Powell's in Portland) can create passion.
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2. Use geography or another self-identification system that people take pride in as a method for boosting the effectiveness of your targeting. If you're in a sector without a lot of internal passion, help to create it by banding together like-minded folks and building a source of pride (like the Quilt-Sewers Association of Iowa or the Real Estate Bloggers of New Jersey).
    
3. Identifying the elements that are keeping customers and developers apart - do the people creating the product have the same passion, idealism and desire as the consumers? If they don't, it's time to mix those who have passion into the mix. You can do this for free by interviewing prominent bloggers, writers or personalities in a sector. Typically, these are people who love to give feedback.
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4. Engage people on your site. Show users that you're passionate about your service or your products and that you love to serve them well. Use testimoials with photos - drive to visit your happiest customers and video tape a meeting. Use feedback systems that incentivize response. Make your website a place where people can go to feel good about their involvement with your company.
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5. Make the site, service, product about your users - issue press releases that constantly state how user feedback, user involvement and user participation are what made you successful. Never take personal credit, always give it out to the "fans" of your company. The Seahawks are experts at making sure that every time a player, coach or media outlet talks about the team, they mention the fnas as a reason for  success - this is an easy thing to copy verbatim and use to promote your service.
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6. Just as Allen implemented engineering to create a louder stadium, you can make your site and business more effective by creating an environment that breeds success. If you're serving up e-commerce, using a structure that makes a customer feel like part of your team is critical - use your "thank you for purchasing" pages, email confirmations and even random phone call follow-ups to help indoctrinate the idea that your customers are part of your "team", competing against the soulless corporations that take their customers for granted.

The lessons of customer evangelism are detailed in a book I just started reading, accurately titled "Creating Customer Evangelists." With the web becoming more and more of a social platform, those who utilize these techniques are going to be reaping greater and greater rewards with time. I'd love to hear your ideas or examples of how you've instituted your site's or company's "fans" to help market or improve business.