With a short post on Back of the Net, Larry Miller let the cat out of the bag on TICO Score. Yes, folks it is coming and it will be insanely great.

In short, Larry’s post was:

For a few months BOTN has been telling you that a superior tournament ranking system to the one currently in place will be coming. BOTN is happy to be able to give you the first look to TICO scores, a system for ranking tournaments without the influence of advertising, or ownership of rankings by tournaments.

Independent, free of politics, honest.

The scoring analogy of TICO scores is your FICO Credit Score. It has a base number and a ceiling number. It can go up or down depending on your credit performance. TICO scores works the same way.

Parents/Player and Coaches will be the people evaluating your tournament. If they have good things to say your score goes up and if not it goes down. No outside influence from sponsors, friends, etc… Just your input from a detailed on-line form.

BOTN is excited to give our community a first look at TICO scores. The links at the the top of the page are hot to help you navigate. Please understand the complete TICO Score website will not be ready for another month or two.

So, just keep watching for the latest TICO Score news.

The really short answer is no. Most teams do not find soccer tournaments by searching on Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com etc. Now, for the really long explanation and supporting documentation.

First an article by Bob Carrigan, president of IDG Communications that appears in the October issue of OMMA Magazine, the sort of beacon for the online marketing world (banners, ads, search engines placement, etc.)

With all the discussion — and anxiety among media companies — about “world domination” by the major search companies, you might think that nearly all activity on the Web begins with search. While the amount of traffic from search engines is clearly on the rise, many of the sites at my company, IDG, are starting to see a trend that a lot of publishers whom I speak with are also seeing: Traffic from organic search is leveling off as a percentage of total traffic, while traffic from direct-navigation visits is increasing.

If you need to take a few minutes to read the whole thing, go ahead; we’ll still be here.

Basically, the search engine traffic we are seeing from the search engines is a search on your tournament name. We are also seeing searches for common locations, like the name of the park you are playing in, the key sponsor, etc. But, all of this traffic is generated because the team knows where they want to play and is searching for YOU, not something like soccer tournaments in Ohio in May.

Our advice: If your soccer tournament does not already have a separate domain that is specific and similar to your tournament name, get one. And make sure it is what your teams know you as. For example, your official tournament name might be The ABC Corporation Kick the Grass Soccer Invitational, but if your guest teams are saying thing like, Are you going to the Kick Grass this year? you probably want to register www.kickgrass.com (don’t search for that name, it is already taken and parked by a cyber-squatter hoping to make a few bucks.)

Do not rely on your soccer club web site to market your soccer tournament. The fastest way to get your soccer tournament to show up in the search engines is to use a domain that specifically describes your soccer tournament to your potential audience. And make sure your web pages use your name frequently and in the title of every page. Or, just sign up with TourneyCentral and we’ll take care of all these details for you.

I ran across this post from another blog and it got me thinking about how close we are to serving up sponsor ads and DEALS to mobile devices.

Make My World Clickable by Steve Smith. It’s a good read.

It is deadline time for one of our tournaments and the person in charge of applications sent out a broadcast email to all the teams that have yet to pay the application fee. The message was essentially; ‘pay your fees or we will not consider your team.’ Since they are overbooked in all divisions, the leverage was easy to apply.

Within minutes, a flood of email responses came in. I just sent the check, My club treasurer is sending it today, Please don’t cut us, the check was sent yesterday, I’ll FedEx you the check, etc, etc. This continued pretty much all day, with a bubble of emails coming in over lunch. I suspect more will come in tonight when people get home.

What amazes me is that this is the same audience, when asked to do something via email, like fax in their rosters or confirm their hotel rooming lists, will claim with absolute certainty that they never got your email and it is your fault they were not able to comply within the deadline.

Our advice: When the referee blows the whistle, you don’t get another five minutes to attempt a goal. Everyone is busy, but don’t take excuses. Teams that are organized and comply by the deadline are a pleasure to have at your tournament. Make your appreciation known. Write the coach of the team manager a personal note, thanking them for their organization and respecting your deadlines. Keep this up year after year and pretty soon, you may never have to deal with those teams that suck the energy away from you and your staff.

On the other side, when you do have teams apply who consistently pay late, who demand special hotel treatment, who never show up prepared to register, who ask for early morning registration… turn them away early. Let them know specifically why you are turning them away.

Don’t let teams rob you of your energy and time. You need every precious drop of both to run a soccer tournament as it is.

It’s Monday morning between 5:00am and 9:00am and every newsletter I have subscribed to, new tournament listings emails, etc., etc., are now flying into my email inbox. Since I have also received lots from spam from the night before, my inbox is quite full. In addition to that, I have three project deadlines and a conference call. After all, I’ve had a whole weekend away from the office!

In short, I don’t have time to read the newsletters, even though I’m almost fairly certain that they contain things that would be valuable to me. But, I don’t have time and I just delete them.

Our Advice: Do not send critical emails about your tournament on Sunday night! Most will end up caught in the I don’t have time for this net most of us struggle with on Monday morning. Monday evening, or Tuesday-Thursday mornings are much better times to send email that you would like acted on quickly or that you would like people to read and save.

Our press conference on the Facebook launch. Click on the video still to watch the conference OR click here to watch it full screen on YouTube. You can also leave comments for us!

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal today (and on CNN, and FOX News, and on every other news program everywhere) about Amazon.com opening up their new music store. The BIG news is that the music would be free from DRM (Digital Rights Management) software and would be cheaper than Apple’s iTunes store. (Currently, iTunes has about 90% market share of digital music; the iPod has about 70% market share of digital music players.) All of these news people were giddy about someone finally toppling Apple as the market leader.

It won’t work and here’s why: When you buy an iPod and music from iTunes, you just plug in your iPod and your purchased music just transfers to your iPod. No saving, copying, transferring, etc. To the average user, it just all happens magically with iTunes. With Amazon.com, you purchase, download, mount your music player, transfer your song…. you get the idea.

What does this have to do with running a soccer tournament? What if you invited teams to play and undercut all the other tournaments in your area by $100.00. You would probably get a lot of teams. But when they showed up to play, they had to line their own fields, hang and anchor their nets, contract their own referees, inflate the ball… you get the idea.

Our advice: Like Apple, recognize the value of the entertainment you are providing and price it accordingly. Don’t back off your price and don’t compete on price. But, follow through with the value the teams expect. If you are a higher price point in your market, make sure the fields are manicured, the registration is top-notch, the referees are qualified, the fields are lined and the staff (volunteer or paid) is courteous and knowledgeable. Oh, and a really kick-butt soccer tournament web site wouldn’t hurt either!

On my daily afternoon walk with my dog, Rufus, we came across this empty lot with one tree on it. Taped to the tree was a letter from the City of Englewood claiming the RESIDENT was in violation of some ordinance or other that regulates grass longer than 8 inches. (The grass wasn’t, we are coming out of a long period of no rain, but that is another post entirely!)

If you ask the City, they will have claimed that the message was duly delivered to the property in accordance with the statute governing the delivery of notices, blah, blah, blah… But, the reality is it is a letter taped to a TREE! Any reasonable person would quickly come to the conclusion that the notice was not really delivered to the person intended to receive it.

How does this matter to a soccer tournament? Quite simply, the rules of message delivery have changed and continues to change. Pre-Internet, we had the US Postal Service and Ma Bell. Yesterday, we had email. But tomorrow, email will become as unreliable as taping a letter to a tree. You can send the email, but there is is an ever-increasing chance the recipient won’t get it. Coaches change emails, set spam-filters way too-high, get temporary emails just for the tournaments, don’t pick up email anymore, etc. And, with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, email is becoming less and less relevant or wanted except as a notification message.

Our Advice: Don’t tape letters to trees with your email notices. If you send out a notice that asks people to reply or do something, track compliance. Most people will act within hours of being asked to do something simple via email. Then, for those that don’t, start your follow-up process, which might be another email, a phone call, etc. (The TourneyCentral.com sites are being outfitted with some really cool alternative systems.. stay tuned!) You don’t need to over-communicate with your guest teams by sending out volumes of email, just the right communication at the right time. And, delivered to the right tree… I mean, person.

The soccer tournaments just hit a tipping point with real-time scores this weekend. Over 14% of the traffic in the past three days (Fri, Sat and Sun) was generated by smart phones such as Blackberrys, iPhones, Treos and other web-enabled phones. This is up from almost nothing Memorial Day weekend.

This is a tipping point at such a low percentage because we saw the same thing with the adoption of broadband, which pushed the high-traffic-day from the day after the tournament at work to consistently high levels throughout the event. Almost overnight, the day shifted back as more homes got broadband. Similarly, we saw the same thing with photo sales decline as a result of lower-prices consumer cameras that were capable of taking high-quality photos. A double-digit percentage of use indicates a major behavioral shift.

Teams are sending emails to the tournament FROM THE FIELDS if the scores are not now updated within minutes of the games ending. The tolerance for most people appears to be about an hour and a half wait-time at this point, but by this time next year, that will be about half, if at all.

Typical patterns for people who send complaint emails tend to be a very targeted search for specific division results. While not entirely pinpoint accurate, the pattern appears to be a constant reloading of the results page every 30 seconds or so after the conclusion of the game. When the scores do not appear to be updated regularly, the emails start.

Our Advice: If you don’t have a system to report scores in real-time, GET ONE NOW! The internet is no longer confined to a computer people check when they get back home. Your teams are always on-line so treat your web site as something teams will be accessing all day, every day. Tournaments will be divided by the haves (real-time scores) and the have-nots (no real-time scores) rapidly. (www.tourneycentral.com web sites have real-time scores built into the modules.)