Soccer tournament app-itis

Tournaments

Paul Smalera (@smalera) — formerly with the New York Times, now the Ideas Editor with Quartz — tweeted this out last year and it stuck with me.

In many ways, it reflects life on the ground with soccer tournament players and their families that supports the behavior patterns we have been seeing here at TourneyCentral.

As I stated in an earlier post, while you and your crew live and breathe your soccer tournament 24/7/365, teams and players don’t really care about your event except for the three games they’ll play — four or five if they get lucky and advance out of their group. They care about getting the schedule on time, finding food nearby and they really do care about getting the score correct. But not much else.

It’s a phenomenon we here refer to as the “90:00 minute attention span.”

They won’t download your app because they don’t want 5+ apps on their smartphones, one for each of the soccer tournaments they will be playing in this season, each with different features in different places, implemented differently. Instead, they will be using their own Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and other social apps to document their tournament experience.

Is it fair? Probably not. It would make your job easier if everyone was on your app. But they don’t care about your job; they care about their lives and your event is just a 90:00 minute sliver in that life.

Our Advice: Instead of imposing your app on your teams, find out how they want to receive your information. Is it through twitter? facebook? email? messaging? all of the above? Do that. While you are tuned into their needs, tune into their accounts (not in a creepy, stalking way; but a more connected way.) Notice they took a really cool photo and ask if you can share it through your channels. (Make sure you get parental permission first)

Do some special live broadcast with Periscope and ask them to hashtag their Instagram and twitter messages with your tournament hashtag. Show some love by liking and commenting.

Teams are also probably more likely to connect with your tournament from their own accounts they are comfortable with as they can control whether or not you can send them notifications. When they are playing in your event, they can turn notifications from you on by following. When they are done, they can unfollow (or keep following but turn notifications from you off.) They are in control and don’t have to trust you with their data or access.

If the goal of your app is to connect with your teams and squeeze one more minute of attention from them, ditch the app and focus on your teams’ networks. That is where they live.

Looking to get started with social media for your soccer tournament? We wrote the book.

Periscope for your soccer tournament

Tournaments

Shortly after publishing the post on Meerkat, twitter released its own video-streaming app called Periscope. Since the two tools are so familiar, we’re just republishing our blog post, replacing Meerkat with Periscope. You decide which you want to use.

A couple months ago, a state soccer association asked how they might live-stream video from the site as the soccer games were being played at their tournaments. While possible, the costs to pull that off were over whelming.

Not so any more.

Hot on the heels of Meerkat, Periscope has been taking the Internet by storm, even being used by broadcast and cable TV to provide some behind-the-scenes look at how TV news comes together.

What is Periscope?
Periscope is an iPhone App (Android coming out soon hopefully) that turns any iPhone into a broadcast video camera. Basically, you download the app, log in with your twitter account and press the stream button. You can also get fancy and put in a title for your streaming session or enter a delay time to start counting down when your session will begin. When your twitter followers have also downloaded the stream and turned on notifications, they will get a notification that you are either live or you have set a delayed stream. They then click on the link in your twitter timeline to start watching whatever you are pointing your camera phone to.

There are other features like flipping the cameras around to point toward you, a chat button that functions like twitter as well as a “hearts” button. Once you are done streaming, you can save your stream to your camera or just let it disappear, much like Snapchat. It gets saved to the twitter servers for 24 hours and then disappears.

Our advice
Firstly, build out your networks. Since Periscope relies on a strong twitter network, you should focus on there. Running up to your tournament, set up some behind-the-scenes meerkat sessions such as a welcome message from the tournament director or a Q&A session where you encourage questions be submitted live via meerkat.

Visit an advertiser/sponsor and periscope the experience. Ask the owner/manager to invite the teams or welcome them. Do this before, during and after the tournament.

Invite parents to live-cast the games during the entire weekend. Post a large banner with the periscope logo and a white space where anyone willing to live-cast can put their twitter handle so fans and players can connect and watch each others’ periscope. Convert this into a front page, sticky story so people can find and follow the live video streams from your tournament.

Assign someone from your tournament to be the official periscope stream from the tournament. Video games, the HQ, interview vendors, show the action, show the fun. Show the teams that decided to go to another tournament instead of yours how much fun they are missing!

I’m sure there are all sorts of other ways you can use periscope for your event. Feel free to share them with us and we’ll post your creativity right here.

Meerkat for your soccer tournament

Tournaments,

Editor note: Meerkat was killed off by its creators in 2016. It will be missed. Use Periscope for live streaming instead.

A couple months ago, a state soccer association asked how they might live-stream video from the site as the soccer games were being played at their tournaments. While possible, the costs to pull that off were over whelming.

Not so any more.

Introduced at this year’s SXSWi, Meerkat has been taking the Internet by storm, even being used by broadcast and cable TV to provide some behind-the-scenes look at how TV news comes together. It was even used by Kasie Hunt of NBC to interview the Press Secretary, Josh Earnest recently.

What is Meerkat?
Meerkat is an iPhone App (Android coming out soon hopefully) that turns any iPhone into a broadcast video camera. Basically, you download the app, log in with your twitter account and press the stream button. You can also get fancy and put in a title for your streaming session or enter a delay time to start counting down when your session will begin. When your twitter followers have also downloaded the stream and turned on notifications, they will get a notification that you are either live or you have set a delayed stream. They then click on the link in your twitter timeline to start watching whatever you are pointing your camera phone to.

There are other features like flipping the cameras around to point toward you, a chat button that functions like twitter (and goes out to their twitter timeline) as well as a like button. Once you are done streaming, you can save your stream to your camera or just let it disappear, much like Snapchat. It does not get saved onto the Meerkat servers (they say…) so everything is like live TV.

Our advice
Firstly, build out your networks. Since Meerkat relies on a strong twitter network, you should focus on there. Running up to your tournament, set up some behind-the-scenes meerkat sessions such as a welcome message from the tournament director or a Q&A session where you encourage questions be submitted live via meerkat.

Visit an advertiser/sponsor and meerkast the experience. Ask the owner/manager to invite the teams or welcome them. Do this before, during and after the tournament.

Invite parents to meerkast the games during the entire weekend. Post a large banner with the meerkat logo and a white space where anyone willing to meerkast can put their twitter handle (we’ll make a downloadable, printable PDF for you soon) so fans and players can connect and watch each others’ meerkast. Convert this into a front page, sticky story so people can find and follow the live video streams from your tournament.

Assign someone from your tournament to be the official meerkat stream from the tournament. Video games, the HQ, interview vendors, show the action, show the fun. Show the teams that decided to go to another tournament instead of yours how much fun they are missing!

I’m sure there are all sorts of other ways you can use meerkat for your event. Feel free to share them with us and we’ll post your creativity right here.

TourneyCentral 2015 Challenge Coin

Score gold at the 2015 NSCAA

Tournaments

It’s almost as cool as real gold. Get your free 2015 challenge coin by visiting our booth at the NSCAA.

Booth 307 — sharing with Premier Athletic Advertising — so check out their calendar of tournaments for your team while you are there.

And ask about TourneyCentral, of course. They use our software for many of their soccer tournament events.

See you at the NSCAA next weekend.

Texting is dead, long live the message

Tournaments

Every so often, we get approached by a tournament who wants to have teams sign up to get scores as text messages on their phones. While tournaments have the ability to send text messages out to teams using the Team Apps Module, that feature is rapidly deteriorating.

Here’s why.

Texting (SMS) using a web browser is just really an email trick, one that the cell phone companies would really we rather not do and are making it more difficult with each passing year. In order for texting by the web to work, we need not only the cell phone number but the provider. This is something the team provides upon application if they want to get text messages from the tournament.

Therein lies the rub. Brands have misused trust so much that nobody wants them to be part of their inner text messaging circle. Or — more accurately — to NOT text them. For better or worse, your soccer tournament is seen as a brand.

But this is TourneyCentral so we have a solution, one that is more in-line with where texting is going long-term.

By this time next year, texting will be dead and messaging will have taken its place. It’s a subtle distinction but messaging allows the user to control the messages locally and not rely on a service to “take them off the list.” When the user no longer wants to hear from you, *poof* you’re gone.

One popular messaging service is Twitter. Twitter is versatile enough so that even teams who don’t want to sign up for the service can still get “text” messages from you.

Our advice: The first step is to set up a twitter account for your tournament. People with twitter accounts can follow and get either notifications or text messages when you tweet. People without twitter and don’t want twitter can text to 40404 and put FOLLOW yourevent in the message. (UNFOLLOW yourevent when they want you to go away)

When you update your scores, there is a Tweet button on your confirmation screen. You have to be signed in and this will compose a tweet that you can then send to anyone following you, with a link to your mobile web app.

– Market your twitter follow (or 40404) to the teams.
– Tweet your scores as they are updated
– Tweet anything like DEALS or weather
– If you want to get gutsy, tweet photos using your phone (or Vine)

Check out our blog in more depth. We’re all over social media for soccer tournaments. Here and here for some specific ideas.

Social Media for Soccer Tournaments

Social media examples for soccer tournaments

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Readers of the touchline are quite familiar with our advocacy of using social media for soccer tournaments. I love the electric energy that comes with our events pushing the social media envelope, and @NASABuckeyeCup and @StrawberrySoccr are killing it!

Buckeye Cup
Along with updating scores on twitter as they were updated on the website, the Buckeye Cup also promoted their vendors on site. Take a minute to scroll through their twitter timeline, but the coolest thing I woke up to on Sunday morning was a pancake vendor. A pancake vendor!


The Buckeye Cup also linked its twitter account to its Facebook page so updates to twitter were also posted there, giving participants a choice on how to follow the real-time action.

Strawberry Soccer Invitational
I have to admit, when I first saw this technique, I was very impressed at the ingenuity. The hack was so clever that I had to go poking around to see how Dave pulled this off. We’ll probably even build in support for the javascript so it doesn’t have to load for each post.

When the Strawberry posts a Facebook post, they grab the code to share it and post as a news story on their front page. That way, they can share the photos and post in many venues and they cycle in and out based on the dates of the news story.

Here is what a sample looks like on the front page. You can check out the entire front page on the Strawberry Soccer website.

strawberryfacebook

These are just some social media examples for soccer tournaments that we hope will spark your imagination. We can’t wait to be surprised by what else you will do with your event.

Using Instagram for soccer tournaments

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A picture is worth a thousand words. That statement is at the core of what Instagram is. Instagram is one of the quickest ways to share a photo or moment across multiple social media platforms.

It’s easy too. For the most part you take a picture, add a caption, then share.

this guide will step your through using Instagram for soccer tournaments. Currently Instagram can only be setup through your mobile device, which is ok because you use your photo to upload photos into your profile.

Step one: Download Instagram to your phone from either iTunes or Android store

Step two:InsagramSignUp Here is where you have a choice. You have the option of signing up with your tournament’s Facebook page, or with email. (I suggest using a tournament gmail.com that you have set up instead of clicking the sign up with Facebook button. It is easier to know where your gmail is reaching out to and how things are connected instead of using a secondary social media tool to connect to a third-party app.)

Step three: Enter a user name and password. I would suggest using the same handle as your Twitter account to keep a sense of continuity throughout your social media presence. (If you chose sign up with Facebook account, this is where you will enter you Facebook user name and password.) When you press next, it will ask for your full name and mobile number, both of which are optional. These might make sense for a single person wanting all of their friends to find them according to their phone number, but it really doesn’t make sense for a tournament.

Step four:instagram02 Editing your profile. This is a standard short profile. I suggest using the same content from your Twitter profile for Instagram. Once you have finished your profile, you are almost ready for some awesome Instagramming.

Last step: Here is where Instagram becomes important. It can post to your Twitter and Facebook automatically. In your Settings > Share Settings you will find the ability to link to Facebook and Twitter. Just click on each and it directs you to a page that will ask you to connect the two services. Click ok and every time you take an image, you will be able to click on which services you would like to share the image with. The image also saves to your mobile device.

Instagram is really that simple. There are a few key things to remember about sharing photos on Instagram:
Always use a caption to describe what is happening. You aren’t there to be “artsy”, you are there to build content and experience about your tournament.

Hashtags are important. They are the easiest way for people searching topics to find your photos. #soccer #soccertournament and #yourtournamentname are always good hashtags. If you are featuring your sponsor, you may want to use #sponsorname as well. Try to limit the number of #hashtags to two.

You can have more than one person in the organization signed into to your account at a time, but remember the internet moves very quickly. Always know that you can trust the people connected to your social media accounts. Make sure they verify the accounts they are connected to before sharing content.

What to photograph
Moments. Any moment can make a great photograph. A coach thinking about the next play. A player eating pizza at your registration. A volunteer helping a coach. A referee assignor assigning games. Your scheduler updating scores.

When choosing what the photograph, try to capture the spirit of your event. Showing people having fun doing the most mundane things can give your event a sense of whimsy. Or, if your event is more competitive, show the struggle of putting together the perfect schedule, the perfect event.

Don’t forget your sponsors. If you have sponsors at the field, make sure you take lots of photos with their logo shown in the background. Encourage your guest or host teams to photograph themselves at the sponsors place of business. It may be a small gesture, but your eagerness to capture them in your official “record” of photos could mean the difference between a “yes” or a “no” for a sponsorship next year.

Be creative and have fun with photos. But also have a policy and release for kids, especially those under 13. Know the laws and err on the side of caution*.

*This is not legal advice. You should consult your legal counsel.

Hope Foundation for Greater Dayton

Partnering with a nonprofit at your soccer tournament

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Partnering with a non-profit organization is a great way to connect with your community. However it can get challenging.

When working with a non-profit, know what will truly help their cause. Listen carefully, as most will not assert themselves aggressively. For example, collecting canned goods for a food pantry might seem to be helpful, but finding transportation and distribution for the goods could become more of a hassle (and more costly!) than a cash donation to the organization. Most non-profit organizations could use donations more efficiently than the tangible items that are donated at the fields.

While it is up to you to determine how best to partner with a non-profit, once you have crafted a relationship, TourneyCentral has a lot of tools to help you push your message out. (An example of these features can be seen on the MASC tournament site. They partnered with the Butler County Special Olympics for their 2014 event. Check out what the MASC is doing!)

Our advice:
1. Use DEALS. You can add to five non-profit, community-based organizations like Special Olympics, parks dept, museums, etc., that do not involve ad placement or in-kind donations free of charge. They would appear under the DEALS and in the sponsors just as your paid placement woudld. You can rank them so that they always appear at the top of the list.

This includes as much content as they want to provide, including a deal, link to their donation page, a flyer (downloadable pdf), a video, twitter, and facebook.

2. Include news stories on the front page. Our latest software update allows you to make one story sticky, i.e., always appear at the top. The news story can include photos and a video as well.

3. Use the broadcast tool to send out a special email to the teams that only include the charity..this can be a rich HTML email (we can help with that…)

4. Use your twitter, facebook, vine, Instagram and Google Plus accounts. Promote, promote, promote. Be generous.(Start here if you are new to social media.)

Regardless of how your program shapes up, do something cool enough for us to write about (like the MASC) and keep us in the loop. We love bragging about our TourneyCentral soccer tournament events.

Advice on this article offered by Scott Sliver. Scott Sliver (Sly-ver) is Executive Director of The Hope Foundation of Greater Dayton. On twitter, he is @hope4dayton or @scottsliver and by email scott@hope4dayton.com.

Prepping up the 2014 NSCAA

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TourneyCentral is pretty excited to be at the 2014 NSCAA again this year, housed in with the Premier Athletic Advertising folks and their family of tournaments in booth 839.

The show opens this evening, but here is a sneak peek at us getting things ready for you. Stop on by and say hi!

Vine logo

Using Vine for your soccer tournament

Tournaments,

Editor’s note: Vine was killed off by Twitter in 2016. You may want to use Instagram Stories or Snapchat for short video clips instead. We updated The Game Through Glass for Instagram Stories.

Video is hot. Short video bursts are even hotter.

The new attention span for online video is anywhere from :06-:15 seconds thanks to Vine and Instagram. We’ll cover Instagram in the next article, but for now we’ll focus on Vine.

To use Vine, you will need a smartphone or a tablet with a camera and a twitter account. It is app-based so it resides mostly on your phone or tablet. You shoot, edit and post videos with your phone.

First, the technical stuff:
Step one: Sign up for a twitter account if you don’t already have one. It will make thing a lot easier. You should be using twitter anyway.

Step two: Go to the app store on your phone, (iPhone or Android) search for the Vine app and download it.

Step Three: Log into the Vine app with your twitter account.

vine opening screenWhen you first open the Vine app, it will ask you to log in using Twitter. Select your twitter account and you’ll open up to the main screen. The key icon you are looking for in the camera in the upper right corner. Press on this.

The app will then open to the shooting screen. You can toggle the front and back-facing cameras with the icon in the lower left, but until you get the hang of it, it’s best to just choose one or the other.

To shoot a video, just hold down on the screen. When you lift your finger, the camera will stop, then start again when you touch the screen. It is a bit tricky at first, but you’ll find as you get better at it, you can do all sorts of really cool stop-motion effects.

You can save clips for later, re-order them, etc. as you get better and want to push the app to its limits. the only thing that you can’t control right now is the sound, but Vine might fix that is a later release.

vine03Once you are satisfied with your video, press on the forward arrow, fill out the caption, toggle to Twitter and post. (You can also post to Facebook, but since Facebook is not entirely secure on phones, we just re-post manually from our Twitter feed. The choice is yours.)

What to shoot with video
By far, the hardest part about using video for your soccer tournament is deciding what to shoot or what story to tell. You may think that :06 seconds is not a lot of time, but if you don’t plan your story, it can be an eternity to fill up. As an experiment, shoot a Vine just of you, staring silently into the front camera.

Kinda a long video, isn’t it?

Some ideas:

  • A welcome message to the teams. Why your tournament? Say it in :06seconds. Once posted, you can embed the video into your about page or front page news.
  • Sponsors. Take your phone into your sponsors and invite them to invite the teams to their place during the tournament. You can post that video into the DEALS page.
  • Show some behind-the-scenes. Teams love to see how things come together.
  • Promote your people. Show your scheduler working on the game schedule, the referee assignor prepping equipment, the nets being raised on the fields.

Once you start getting the ideas flowing, there will be no end to the number of stories you can tell, all at :06 seconds at a time.

Next up: Instagram

the front door of your soccer tournament

Finding the front door to your soccer tournament

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The first thing a good real estate agent will tell you to do when listing your house is to paint the front door so it stands out from the rest of the house. A visible, easy-to-find front door says, “Welcome, this is the way in.”

Your tournament website should do the same thing. Unfortunately, many soccer tournament sites are so intent on fancy design, featuring sponsors and whatever else that they forget to paint the front door. A team is left searching around, wondering “How the heck do I apply to this tournament? When is it? WHERE is it?”

I often wonder how many teams just give up and apply somewhere else.

From time to time, we get requests from a tournament director to “jazz up” the front door, to make their tournament look different from everyone else.

“Why,” we ask, “are your applications slowing down? Are teams finding it difficult to apply?”

“To the contrary,” they say. “Applications are consistently up year over year. Your software is easy to use and everyone knows how to apply, get schedules, maps and scores easily.

“So why are you asking us to obscure your front door?”

Our Advice: Simplify. Remember your mission of making it easier to get teams to find you, apply quickly and find game schedules and results easily. On every contact point on a TourneyCentral website, we post the where, when and how much right at the top of the page. The Apply menu option is always on the main menu of every page. Nothing is more than one click away.

Instead of focusing on the next whizz-bang whirly-gig thing to set your tournament apart, focus on your content. Make sure your news is up-to-date and timely. Make sure your schedules are correct and posted as quickly as possible. Update your scores as soon as your can after the game ends. Promote your sponsors and advertisers. Use your social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) often and earnestly.

Each of the TourneyCentral tournaments has the same tools. What you do with yours is what will set you apart.

Doing twitter right at your soccer tournament

Tournaments

Many parents and players are using social media channels these days so why not make it easy for them to keep up with your tournament in real-time? It’s a quick and easy way to let teams and parents know standings, scores, photos, and possible schedule changes. Twitter is a great tool to keep everyone involved in your tournament all weekend long, even after the final games have been played.

The Thunder United Classic used twitter effectively this weekend, specifically doing these four things:

1. Tweeting photos in real time
Opening up the event, the Thunder United Classic hosted a skydiver carrying the American flag onto the fields. They tweeted a few pictures of his landing. Sunday before the finals, they tweeted out pictures of the trophies.

2. Tweeting score updates as they occur
As new scores arrived, Thunder United Classic wasted no time in tweeting that they were available. They also gave the bracket information in the tweet so the teams knew exactly which ones were available.

3. Tweeting sponsor and advertising deals
Thunder United Classic made sure that teams and parents knew about their sponsors by tweeting which ones were at the venue.

4. Retweeting sponsor tweets
They showed support for their sponsors by retweeting and expanding their network reach to the desired audience.

Becoming real-time allows teams to tweet about how great the tournament went and they can even give your sponsors a shout-out. Encourage sponsors to also get in on the action by tweeting about specials and congratulating winning teams. By encouraging sponsors to use Twitter, it can boost the sponsors’ interaction with the teams and make your tournament even more personal and sponsors will be ecstatic to return the following year.

Your year-round soccer tournament

Tournaments

The last game on the last day of the tournament has just been played and you are tired. This has been the busiest year yet and you are ready to take a vacation, kick back and not think about your soccer tournament for several months, maybe longer.

You may want to re-think that strategy. For good or bad, because of the Internet, your soccer tournament is now a 365/24/7 event.

While it’s true that soccer tournaments are 90-minute attention span events, that doesn’t mean you can ignore your event for most of the year. The Internet never takes a break. It is easier to keep pushing off a little bit every week than to get going from a dead stop. Besides, you’ve worked hard to attract sponsors and advertisers to your tournament. It is easier to keep them year over year than by courting them anew every season.

Our Advice: There are a lot of small things you can do during your “off season” that will let your guest teams — and maybe more importantly your sponsors — know that you have not fallen into a deep slumber. Here are just a few to get started.

Do like The Junior Cup did recently and roll your event forward to the next year as quickly as you can. The tournament director realized how much work he had put into getting key sponsors and did not want to start from scratch for next year. I suspect he will do all of the stuff below to maintain the momentum.

Post up news to your front page, even if it is only a holiday wish. There are eleven US Federal holidays and even more non-official holidays. It shows the teams that visit that you are engaged. But be sure to have a short news items ready to publish the day after the holiday. Nothing says “tumbleweed and ghost town” faster than a Happy New Year message in mid-January.

Tweet. Be topical for your tournament or soccer. Or comment on the goings on in your town or something one of your sponsors is doing.

Do a Vine or Instagram video. A Vine is only :06 seconds worth of video, but you can say a lot in :06 seconds! Download the app and take a look around at what brands are doing. Be clever, be targeted, have fun. (Instagram is :15 seconds, but more time doesn’t mean less focus. Be engaging.) Then, do another, and another….

Post Facebook updates and photos regularly. Again, be interesting and try to avoid dry scheduling updates, questions and polls. Link to your sponsor pages and figure out how to draw them into your event more.

There are probably hundreds of other things you could be doing, all taking only a few minutes of time. Try them out; we’ll be watching for creative marketing.