Category Archives: Tournaments

Snapchat of Major League Soccer

Tournaments

Early this year, all the teams of the MLS joined Snapchat. While I found several posts that listed the accounts, I couldn’t find an easy database of snapcodes to shoot and add to my follow. So, I made one.

Just open your Snapchat app, mouse over the snapcode to reveal the team name and point to the snapcode of the team you wish to follow. Hold your finger down on the screen until the follow pops up. Follow one or all. We added the MLS and TourneyCentral accounts at the end of the list.


legit soccer tournament

You’re legit!

Tournaments

“You’re legit,” he said as we were about to hang up after a lengthy conversation about using TourneyCentral to manage his first-year soccer tournament.

“Thanks,” I replied back as I thought to myself ‘what an odd thing to say.’ But as I was hanging up, I realized it may not have been an entirely odd thing to say from his point of view.

He was tasked with starting up a brand new soccer tournament. He had never managed a soccer tournament and during our conversation, he quickly realized this was not just a “throw a few teams together and play some games” venture he may have assumed early on. His questions during our conversation led me to believe that TourneyCentral was not his first phone call, but we may have been his most informative, the one he felt most comfortable with. In short, the one that wasn’t lying to him to get his business.

“You’re legit,” he felt compelled to say as we said our goodbyes.

I think people in general, have a fear of being lied to. But they also want to trust you. They want to feel you respect their needs, their “kerosene pickle” so to speak. The astute client or coach is constantly looking for clues to not trust you but they are also looking for clues to make them feel comfortable that they are making the right choice. But throughout the process, in the back of their minds, they think, “How easy is it to back out of this if I say ‘yes?’”

I don’t know whether or not my caller will sign with TourneyCentral or if he will launch his soccer tournament at all. I hope he does, but if not, at least he will have gone into the event (or not) with his eyes wide open and asking the right questions. A modern soccer tournament has a lot of moving parts and is no longer just the fun, friendly gathering of a few teams on a weekend it was thirty years ago. A lot of people enter into a soccer tournament with basic expectations that must be met for the event to be successful. At least he will know that much and TourneyCentral will have been the one that set him on the path.

Our advice: When establishing your soccer tournament online, build trust through the depth of your content and the straightforward presentation of information. In short, be legit.

Write a lot of content and post a ton of photos, on your social media channels, your front news page and/or a tournament blog on Medium or WordPress. Don’t be afraid to show the soccer tournament community and your community at large who you are. Be discoverable.

Be honest and straightforward. Let other decide for themselves if your tournament is the right fit for them. Don’t sell something you are not just to get them to participate in your event. In the end, neither of you will be very happy.

If you are a first-year tournament, we put together a quick guide for first year tournaments as well as a short video.

using eventbrite to make tickets available for your soccer tournament

Soccer tournament event tickets using Eventbrite

Tournaments

Membership has its privileges. So do ticket-holders. A ticket to a sporting event says “I have a seat.”

You know the teams participating in your soccer tournament, but do you also know who else is attending? You hope coaches share information about your sponsors, advertisers with parents, players and fans, but are you sure?

Selling tickets would help you manage that vast data you are not now getting, but who would buy a ticket to watch their own kid play in a tournament they have already spent lots of money to participate in? Asking teams to fill out roster data online is always a bit of a dicey game as many won’t due to COPPA laws and other privacy concerns.

But what if you were to be able to get names and emails of parents attending, by simply making soccer tournament event tickets available… for free.

With Eventbrite, you can. (see the real event page we set up for the adidas Warrior Soccer Classic in May)

Our advice

Set up your event on Eventbrite and promote the ticket page to accepted teams and the general public. The benefits to you are:

  • An extra level of traction for Google searches on your event when local media outlets compile a calendar for events in your area.
  • Deep dive into who is at to your soccer tournament and what they are interested in (in addition to their kid’s games, of course)
  • You will also be able to build a marketing list that will make you more valuable to sponsors and advertisers.
  • An incentive for ticket-holders. A free sticker when they present a valid ticket at the HQ would be an exceptional premium. You can buy thousands of stickers from Sticker Mule for pennies per and have the added advantage of the teams advertising outside of your event. (check out our Snapchat code stickers here)

Some caveats exist, however:

  • DO NOT SELL, RENT OR LEASE THE LIST to anyone. Ever. Manage it internally. If an advertiser wants to send out an offer to the list, do it for them.
  • Make sure advertisers and sponsors adhere to YOUR format policies and their creative matches YOUR criteria. Their offer may be valuable, but your list is infinitely more valuable.
  • Guarantee the ticket-holders privacy. Take that trust seriously. Word will spread if you abuse it.
  • Make sure you explicitly state the free ticket is for the ATTENDEE, not the participating team. It is probably best to only publish the Eventbrite page AFTER you accept teams to avoid any confusion about whether or not a team applied.

Be clear that the tickets are for attendance only. Guard your ticket-holders privacy at all cost. Have fun with the premiums. This is only the start of what you can do for your soccer tournament event when you start “selling” tickets.

Why your tournament website should be smaller

Tournaments, ,

Most websites have way too many pages! A website today is not the sum total of everything your tournament is online — a very different way of looking at websites from even a few years ago. The rise of social media is why your tournament website should be smaller.

The website needs to give the who what where when why and be the authoritative voice for the your tournament; also, for operationally critical data (sponsors, applications, schedules. The other media stuff needs to live on the outposts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope, Snapchat etc with the website simply validating the authen- ticity of the content. The outposts are where people live now, wanting your tournament to meld into the rest of their lives, not the other way around.

Your online schedule is a hook for media where you can hang photos, videos, profiles, blog posts, etc. A schedules immediately gives your media context, i.e., who, where, when, why. Use that organic context to your advantage. The absolute hardest part of shifting to social media channels is convincing folks to let go of about 90% of the website pages. You just don’t need them!

Your tournament is now mobile and real time. Your participants, their fans and your supporting commu- nity is not waiting until they get home to look up scores, searching for photos, etc. They are doing that in real time as they experience your event.

Social is mobile
Because social = mobile, you should be staying on the mobile apps as much as possible, even signing up for accounts using them. For some — like Instagram and Snapchat — there is no web site; everything is done through the app.

Social media channels priority
Running a tournament is all about making the best choice for what works for you. While it would be great to be everywhere on every social media channel, it’s probably not possible.

Here is the list of social media channels in the order of priority that I think you should be working. In a year, this list may change but going into the 2016 tournament season, these are it.

  1. Facebook
  2. Twitter
  3. Instagram
  4. Snapchat
  5. Periscope
  6. Vine
  7. YouTube
  8. GooglePlus

Our advice: At minimum, the modern tournament should be fluent in the top four channels to be visible. How much you want to work each channel depends on the manpower you can direct into each. Some of the content to these channels can be automated, like scores and news updates.

Important: Implement the social media tools in order and completely. For example, don’t try using Vine or Periscope if you haven’t yet set up a Twitter account. It will frustrate and scatter you.

Don’t get so hung up on the volume of people using specific social media channels. It doesn’t matter if one billion people are using Facebook if only your guest teams and local community are willing to connect to your tournament there.

Focus on building your networks where it makes most sense to you. It is better to do fewer channels more deeply than to be everywhere but anemic and unfocused.

Broadcast and interact like everyone in the world is watching you. If you are doing it well, local print and television will ask if they can use your content. If you are doing it exceptionally well, national media will.

There are also other channels that you can explore like Tumblr, Reddit, YouNow, YikYak, FourSquare, Digg, WeChat, etc. But these eight provide a strong core of social media for your soccer tournament. Keep in mind that each channel requires more time and effort to maintain and you should only start with more if you are committed to keeping up these accounts.

Excerpted from The Game Through Glass: Playing your youth sports tournament on social media

Snapchat and Periscope updates

Tournaments

Just when we’ve written and published the definitive guide to using social media for your tournament, The Game Through Glass, Snapchat and Periscope made changes. The changes are good and will work well to extend your on-field coverage even more so they are worth knowing about.

Snapchat
Snapchat now supports URLs and we’ve integrated your Snapchat account into your TourneyCentral Web Maintenance Module>Variables
Put your snapchat handle into the snapchat field and the link will get built on the sidebar of your desktop as well as the social media bar in your mobile app. When a user clicks on the snapchat icon from their phone, it will open the Snapchat app and add you to their friend list.

IMG_9799 IMG_9798

Periscope
Periscope is now in-line with your twitter account. When you start up a Periscope stream, it will pop into your twitter stream as a live video. Your audience does not need to follow you on Periscope or even download the app to watch your livestream (though to comment, they will need to)

Get on Social
Two more reasons why your tournament should be on social media and bring your tournament fans closer to your event.

2016 NSCAA Coin

2016 NSCAA in Baltimore

Tournaments, ,

We’ll be at the 2016 NSCAA in Baltimore, Booth #208

Stop by to say hi and pick up your commemorative coin. The double-wide booth is being hosting by Premier Athletic Advertising which is your complete soccer tournament solution, from managing your entire event through building community relationships in your local area. They also rely on the software TourneyCentral hosts to provide a seamless, quality experience for your guest teams.

We’ll also be featuring the authoritative book on using social media for your soccer tournament, The Game Through Glass.

Free coin, free snapchat sticker, great book at a reduced price. We’ll see you in Baltimore!

Forget me. Abby Wambach

Tournaments

This is a powerful ad. Watch it.

How many times have we witnessed a coach who hung on too long, a director who never let go, a staff that did not groom the next generation to take a tournament into the next generation?

Why do we do this? Why do we do the things we do? To ensure our own legacy or ensure that our accomplishments are a solid stepping stone for the next generation to move the sport of soccer forward? Why are you producing your soccer tournament?

Developing a young staff to take your place is the best way you can ensure your soccer tournament will thrive. Let go; let others soar knowing you did that.

Something to think on.

tournament branding

Tournament branding chasing someone else’s cool

Tournaments

For strong tournament branding, resist the urge to copy others

The most frustrating request we hear regarding tournament branding is something that goes like, “I was just as such and such tournament and they did this really cool thing. Can we do that?” While the answer is almost alway, “Sure, we can do that for you,” my first question is, “Why do you want to be like everyone else?”

Google is currently running TV spots for its phones with the song “It’s a marshmallow world in the winter” as the jingle. Last year, Target used the same song to feature its holiday season.

Whenever I hear the song, I think Target and my head gets confused as I try to remember the product that Google is now advertising and it just doesn’t look like a Target ad. Then I get irritated because it wasn’t what I had been conditioned to expect through a previous, well-placed campaign.

I get it; Google saw the Target spots and thought, “Wow, that’s pretty catchy. Our OS update is called Marshmallow (though nobody know that or cares.) We should do that for our product.” It was a great set of ads for Target, well-produced, that pulled folks into a fantasy holiday season they need in order to suspend reality long enough to want to go shopping. “Come to Target where we have created this alternate universe of contentment and warm hugs in a cold world.”

Nothing kills creative like a forced repeat. Creativity is a spark of timing and vision, not just copying someone else’s great idea.

Our advice: Don’t copy other tournaments’ marketing or branding. Just because it worked for someone else, doesn’t mean it will work for you. Paradoxically, the better the first tournament was at their tournament branding, the more YOUR marketing will remind teams of them, not you. Resist the urge to copy others.

If you offer teams a different experience they can get no place else, why would you want to copy someone else? Learn from their marketing, but be true to your tournament brand.

Here’s the spot from Target in 2014:

2014 Target Marshmallow World Spot

Here’s the Google Phone spot they are now running:

2015 Google Phone spot

Soccer tournament social media jobs training program

Tournaments, , ,

The core skills that every information-age worker needs today to compete in the modern ecomomy are; photography, videography, writing and social media.

Playing soccer on a team in a competitive league gives young people critical skills that will serve them well throughout their lives. A smart tournament can also give young adults an opportunity to hone critical job-market skills by opening up their social media accounts to them to “practice” skills they will need when they search for a job.

Because there are many different channels within social media, the opportunity to bring on many people to manage different channels is almost infinite. Of course, like any good team, you will need a coach to coordinate, monitor and guide your media team.

Social media has a ton of potential to add to your tournament brand but it is deceptively a lot of work. It is intense and fast-paced but you have the potential to give someone one heckuva resume reel!

If you do it right, your tournament can be a competitive social media jobs training program where the best media minds can not only learn new skills but give back a deep, rich online space for your tournament event.

Using Snapchat to increase real-time engagement with your soccer tournament

Tournaments

Snapchat can increase real-time engagement with your soccer tournament by tapping into the real-time energy and your teams’ FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) Despite its beginnings as a teen-aged peer-to-peer network for questionable photos that would “disappear” after being viewed once, it has matured into a solid platform for showcasing a soccer tournament.

You access Snapchat exclusively through the mobile app, available on iOS and Android. Once you download the app, the interface can be confusing and unfamiliar, but this is by design. The kids don’t want the olds to be able to use it easily and intuitively. But once you figure it out, you’ll be snapping like a pro. Fortunately, Snapchat has a pretty detailed user guide. We’ll run down the basics for you to get you up and running.

The basics

Let’s get you up and running. There is really no prep work needed for Snapchat as it assumes you will be using stuff that is happening now in front and behind you. The only think you will need is a unique email address for the tournament that you are not using for any of your personal Snapchat profiles.

1. Download the app and launch it.
2. Press the Sign Up bar at the bottom
3. Fill in your user name (it will tell you if your choice has already been taken) your email address and a birth date. (you must be over 13)
4. Read and agree to the privacy policy (you can’t really opt out or change things…)
5. And you are now ready to send your first “snap.”

You can — and should — always add your snaps to your story and send them to your phone for archiving, but it is important to know that snaps disappear after being viewed. You should strive to create each snap as a self-contained mini story that has no history or future. Eventually, your continued snapping will build a story, but each user can and will dip in and out of your stream at will. Remember that and build around it.

Lurk a little

Before you begin to send out snaps, it is best to start following some people first and get to know their style, what they snap, their voice, etc. Here are some snap codes for some snapchatters we think are using the medium effectively. (some language, just so you are aware… this is all real and raw. Also, if you are having issues isolating the snapcode, just click on it and it will pop up by itself.)


You can also follow tourneycentral on snapchat, but we will probably just be snapchatting you using snapchat! If we see you follow us, we will follow back.

1. To add a snapchatter by snapcode:
This page on snapchat.com shows you how to add by snapcode. Basically, login, point your camera at the snapcode and hold down on the screen.
Snapchat snapcode

2. Watch the snapchatters for a few days to get a sense of their style, what you like and what you think you can adapt to your tournament event. You access their snaps by pressing on the purple square at the lower right corner of your login screen. If there are no snaps, you will see a “hamburger menu” with three lines.

Are you getting the hang of the interface? It is a bit different — as a reminder, this is by design to frustrate older folks away from the app — but press on and the connection with your tournament audience will be incredible.

As you watch the snapchatters above, you will see they use filters and geofilters (location/event overlays) video, slo-mo, reverse video, text and drawn overlays. When you find yourself asking, “Hey, how did they do that?” navigate over to this page on snapchat.com and find out.

3. Get brave and start looking for folks who snapchat soccer and start adding them. Be sure to read our guide about building out your social media networks.

4. Publish your snapcode in a news item on the front page or as a sponsor on the sponsor page.

What to snapchat

By now, you should be ready to just dig in and start snapping. What to snap, what to snap?

1. Your snaps are a part of your tournament event and must be consistent with your brand. Will you use just one spokesperson on snapchat or will there be a team? Will you “tag team” the snaps or have pre-planned programming hours where one person hosts a block of time? Will you invite guest teams to be “interviewed” on snapchat? There are no right answers, but you should think about this ahead of time.

2. Don’t be too programmed. Nobody likes being marketed to, especially on snapchat. If your audience senses you are “playing to a script,” they will drop you quickly. Just be yourself — or at least the self that is the tournament brand.

3. Design a day. Tell mini-stories about your tournament as the day progresses, before during and after the tournament. Show what is it like to organize the paperwork for registration, schedule games and referees. Take snapchat out to the fields on prep day and show the field lining, the nets going up. Interview the volunteers. Have a sneak peek at the tshirts at the HQ tent. Show the picking process for the shirt pre-orders, the late-night pizza for the hard-working volunteers.

4. Show the activity behind the scenes. Your guest teams want to be invested in your success as a shared experience. Give them that, let them in on the know.

5. Invite your advertisers, vendors and sponsors to run a promotion on your snapchat stream. It could be as simple as producing a short video in real time with the vendor of a popcorn stand at the venue saying “Stop at the Kettle Korn stand at Grantham Park, show us the next snap with the promo code and get $1.00 off” then create a photo snap of the vendor’s logo from their booth with the promo code handwritten across it.

6. But mostly, have fun!

This is an excellent article about being a brand on Snapchat by Frankie Greek.

Social Media for Soccer Tournaments

Building out your soccer tournament social media network

Tournaments, ,

You have all the tools to participate fully in social media for your soccer tournament. Now, let’s put this all together and start building out your tournament social media network.

Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat accounts from all your coaches.
Follow all your coaches on the various channels and encourage them to follow back.

Comment on their postings. The more your coaches feel connected to your event, the more they will want to participate.

Draw boundaries. If you will not reply to game change requests, referee dissent, etc on the social media channels, let them know that, but give them the proper channel such as your contact page on your website. Don’t just leave them hanging.

Parent twitter and facebook accounts
Encourage the coaches to have their parents follow the tournament channels early, especially twitter and facebook if you will be sending scores out that way. Few things motivate parents to follow your tournament than knowing they will be receiving scores there. Be sure to place a disclaimer on any follow request that only 13+ should follow back.

Do not follow parents back. Your relationship is ultimately with the head coach. If you follow a parent back, they may take that as an invitation to engage with the tournament directly.

State associations
Follow your state association. Congratulate achievements as you see them.

Sponsors and Advertisers
Follow your current AND prospective sponsors and advertisers on all your channels. When they are having a promotion, comment (but don’t stalk them.) Pass along the promotion to your teams; it is a good reason to contact them and shows your sponsors you actively want them their placement with you to succeed.

Frequent their establishment as a customer and comment on your experience. Share this list with your coaches/team parents and encourage them to do the same. Be a good citizen and they will want to support your soccer tournament.

Prior to the tournament weekend
Make sure you send out and post your social media activity. If you will be doing a live Meerkat or Periscope show from the HQ roving golf cart, let teams know this. Ask that they follow you and watch out for the cart as you might capture them warming up, playing their game or generally having a fun time. Let them know you will be stopping often and conducting ad hoc “interviews.”

During the event
Yes, you will be busy but you can’t use that as an excuse to not engage in social media. If you have prepared properly, you will have a community team in place already whose only job is to engage with your teams on social media channels.

Make sure the social media team knows the boundaries you have set. It is not “just twitter” or “just facebook” anymore; anything said on your social media channels is done as an agent of the tournament.

Make sure the social media team has a robust data plan. Few things are a buzzkill like running out of data halfway through the first day.

Plan for an all-day meerkat or periscope live broadcast. Whatever happens on the fields, happens in your social media channel. You may also encourage local TV stations to tap into the stream and use appropriate footage to showcase your tournament.

Send up a steady stream of snaps to snapchat. Also, scores, advertiser updates, coupons, etc.
The trick to using social media during the live event is to select the tools you can support and pace yourself, but you should be in several channels. Don’t put all your effort into just Facebook. However, you do not want the social media team to become too ambitious and become overwhelmed the first day. The first day will also be the lightest, with a buildup as teams discover your activity. Prepare for a surge in @, replies, RTs, reposts and questions.

Display the #hashtag everywhere, on the golf carts, at the HQ, on the staff shirts, at the concession stands, on the field signs. Encourage parents and players (U13+ only, please) to post their photos with the hashtag.

Your social media team should be constantly searching for your hashtag and/or event and pulling in photos, tweets and posts, commenting and RTing, etc.
Here are some basic activities for your front page soccer tournament news.

After the event
If you have done a good job during the event, you will see some residual traffic over the next few days as your posts and team/player/parent posts are shared. Keep engaging! You may well be tired, but push through and stay as real-time as possible.

Dormant time.
There is no dormant time. Soccer tournament marketing is a 365/24/7 endeavor. Re-read this page and start all over again for next year as soon as you can.

A common theme throughout using social media is be a good citizen. Follow back, engage lightly and appropriately, don’t sell, interact. Be human. Never get comfortable with your follower count on one platform… what’s hot this year may be nonexistent next year. You want a healthy cross-over audience on each channel. Be prepared to switch focus as a new social media channel emerges (don’t worry about staying current… just follow TourneyCentral for the latest social media trends.)

Follow TourneyCentral on our channels below. Chances are, if we are doing something cool, you’ll want to get in early.

     

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.