I contributed my first guest opinion piece to the Sports Business Journal this week, explaining how the Boston Celtics are getting data and ROI out of Facebook with 3-Point Play, our basketball prediction game.

Celtics 3-Point Play was a first-of-its-kind NBA team Facebook application when it launched in 2009. It’s helped the Celtics collect data and drive ROI through database growth and ticket sales over the last three seasons.

The game is in its third season on our Facebook page, and it’s been a big success since launching in October 2009, when it was the first NBA team application on the social networking platform. The game has been tweaked a bit since then, and we recently integrated 3-Point Play into our pregame show’s broadcast to help drive signups.

I’ve presented on this topic at several conferences around the country (and even Australia!) over the past year or so, but figured that the case study would be valuable for professionals around the sports industry.

You have to have a Sports Business Journal subscription to read the piece, but if you’re serious about sports marketing, you already have one, right?

Sports Business Journal: Moving beyond like: How one team monetized Facebook base