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.)

Soccer America has gone and done it again! They published an article we wrote for their Grassroots Soccer Biz newsletter entitled ‘Getting In The News: 8 Simple Rules For Success’.

I’m not going to print the whole thing here (you are subscribing to the newsletters, right??) but it starts out like this…

Your soccer organization – whether a club, tournament or team – requires press exposure to help you build value for your sponsors and potential player or team base. However, it can be much more than getting a team photo in the local sports section. It can include a leap onto the newspaper city pages or the A block of the television news.

Here are eight simple rules for getting your soccer organization the press coverage you want. Read the whole thing…

Our press conference on the Labor Day soccer tournaments. 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!