Are these jerseys the new 2011 Sounders kits? David Falk, from the Seattle Examiner, has reports that they are. Read his article here for the full story. Otherwise, what do you think? Fact or Fallacy? Cool or meh?
Blog
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2010 Sounders – The Power of Scarcity and Supply & Demand
Remember back to just before the 2009 MLS season started. There was a buzz around the Sounders. At first we weren’t sure what to expect. A sold out Thursday night opening match was electric. More games sold out. Tickets were impossible to come by. More seats opened up. More sell outs. Barcelona, Chelsea and the MLS Cup brought record crowds. It seemed that the team could do no wrong.
It was the perfect storm. A soccer enthusiastic public desired something positive to come from their city’s roster of not just losing, but atrocious, sports teams. That pent up demand, combined with a short supply of tickets, drove incredible buzz and success.
But perfect storms don’t last forever, and now the Sounders have to accept the bad that comes with the good of success. 2010 has been an interesting years for the guys in rave green. It’s a pretty interesting litany of environmental demand issues:
- Key injuries got the team off to a slow start.
- Spring optimism (which turned out to be very misguided) made the Mariners relevant for a brief period of time.
- The Barcelona and Chelsea games were replaced with Celtic and River Plate.
- The team’s European superstar was either whining, moping, in trouble with the front office, or hurt. We never really knew what it was – except he wasn’t drawing fans
So naturally demand fell. And that may have been fixable. But then at the same time, the Sounders faced a problem that no other American sports league has to face.
Supply rose.
The Sounders qualified for what’s called the Concacaf Champions League. Now this as marketed as the marquee invitation for North American and Central American teams. It’s a chance to compete in real matches against top talent from Mexico, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, etc….But in reality, it’s a kind of weir tournament for anyone to get too attached to. You see, you qualify in 2009 to play preliminary games in 2010 to make a championship round in 2011. You could have literally turned over your entire roster between qualifying and playing in the finals.
But the other thing it did was add 4 new mid-week home games to the tail end of the season. And these games weren’t part of your season ticket package.
Now, factor in that the Sounders qualified for the U.S. Open Cup Final, and are hosting it. That adds another game, and a very exciting one at that. That’s extra game #5.
Now, just for fun, throw in that the Sounders promised a 3rd free “Friendly” to season ticket packages. Here comes Chivas from Mexico, to play a friendly at the most unfriendly time of the year – right before playoffs. Imagine the Huskies scheduling a practice game with Nebraska the week before the Apple Cup. Yeah – not much sense to it.
There are 15 games in the season, starting in Mid-March. Most of those are on weekends, so by the time August comes around, some fans are feeling a touch of soccer fatigue. A playoff race can reinvigorate the base and get them out to the games they bought a good 10 months ago.
But adding another 6 home games to the season – that’s 40% for you math majors – when kids are in school and youth leagues are firing up, is just an unfortunate turn of events. And that is why you saw 11,000 people last night. Even your most ardent supporters and look at the home calendar:
- 9/29: Meaningless CCL game
- 10/2: Important MLS game
- 10/5: Important US Open Final
- 10/12: Meaningless Friendly
- 10/15: Possibly important last MLS home game
- 10/19: Meaningless CCL game
So what’s the 2011 solution? Because if they win the U.S. Open Cup, they’ll qualify again for next year. And that schedule won’t change, so you’ll be in a similar bind. Here’s what I’d do:
- End the pre-season with a match vs Portland as a free ticket to season ticket holders.
- Reduce down to 1 mid-season friendly, but make it a good one.
- Let season ticket holders buy all 4 CCL matches for the cost of one game.
Now, there’s an economic issue with the CCL thing, in which the Sounders probably have to pay the CCL on every fan that enters the stadium. So, a 4 for 1 deal is going to cost them money. So they’d have to renegotiate some part of the concessions deal to make the money back. It’s not a perfect plan.
But the overall lesson is one of supply and demand. And once you lose scarcity, it’s hard to get it back. And the same people who wanted to go to the game they couldn’t go to, don’t want to go to the game that no one wants to go to. It’s a delicate balance. Interesting to see how they solve everything, now that a few land mines got thrown in their path.
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Arizona is coming off one of its biggest wins in recent seasons, 34-27 against No. 9 Iowa.
The Wildcats were ranked for a few weeks last season, but before that it had been since 2000 that they last made the Top 25.
The last time they were ranked this highly in the regular season was 1998. Arizona finished that season No. 4 in the nation and was in the top 10 for the final six weeks of the season.
“Those are character-building drives,” UA coach Mike Stoops said late Saturday night. “Those are perception drives. Those are program drives.”
Bug Wright caught a 4-yard touchdown pass from Nick Foles with 3 minutes 57 seconds remaining to give No. 24 UA a wild victory.
The Foles-to-Wright connection capped a 9-play, 72-yard drive and put an exclamation point on a game that included a blocked punt, a blocked extra-point attempt, a 100-yard kickoff return and two interceptions returned for touchdowns.
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Everything is Broken – How to Fix It
I’m not sure which books Seth Godin would have been between in 2006 when he gave this Ted talk. But the lessons are still valuable today. Worth the 20:00 if you have it today.
Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
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My New Favorite Social Tool – Flavors.Me
Nothing revolutionary here, and I may be a little late to the ballgame on this one. But I’m having a lot of success working with Flavors.me as a super simple, 10 minute way to build out nice looking web properties.
There’s nothing genius in the concept, but the execution is unbelievably quick and easy. In about 20 clicks, you can aggregate together all your social feeds, upload background pictures, change the font colors, and – if you choose too (I haven’t yet) – grab a custom url. So if you publish for multiple blogs, in theory you could grab all the rss feeds from those blogs, and suck them into your single Flavors.me page. There’s real value in the system if you are struggling with clients who have multiple locations, and can’t decide if they should have different url’s, different Facebook pages, etc… This gives you a nice aggregation capability.
For personal branding, I can’t think of anything much easier. Get your resume, photos, designs, feeds, reading lists, etc… all dragged into one place for an employer / client to look through, and save them the hassle of google.
Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.
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2 Weeks with the iPad
(Reposted from the Social3i Consulting blog.)
I’m not necessarily a gadget guy. I like the toys, but I’m generally towards the tail end of the early adopters. For me to spend a lot of money on something, it needs to be good enough to justify replacing the time and energy I’ve already invested on something else.
I usually get pushed over the edge when I see that someone I respect has adopted the technology into their everyday life. So a few weeks ago, after I watched one of our clients taking notes on his slick little tablet, I went forth and joined the iPad nation.
Here are some notes now that I’m two weeks in:- Super solid notetaking device. Easier and less intrusive than a laptop. Easy to share notes with everyone in the room.
- Love Keynote. Easy to make presentations on the fly. In fact, I was even able to build a quick soccer field in order to diagram some plays and show my youth team the starting lineup and subs.
- Love Flipbook. Super cool app for turning my Twitter and Facebook feeds into a mini-magazine.
- Haven’t downloaded spreadsheet apps yet. This is a glaring hole so far, as I’d love to quickly run numbers.
- Netflix is fantastic. It’s the easiest way I’ve ever seen for me to just quickly turn on a device and catch up on whatever series I happen to be watching all the way thru.
- Also, when I’m at my desk I find myself just using it for monitoring email and Pandora, so I don’t have to bother with having it open on my desktop.
I haven’t really gotten into games or anything yet. Also, I can’t say I use the browser or email any differently that I’d use my iPhone, so that’s not a real differentiator. And I’m just starting to get into the speech recognition stuff, but I haven’t really nailed that yet.
Overall, it feels like there’s a decent learning curve between making the device a really cool photo album and a fully functional work device. More to come.
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Intentional Acts of Destruction
A friend of mine recently told me, “Your blog sucks. If you aren’t going to write about business, then you need to write about personal stuff. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Now, I didn’t want to get into a debate of the value of SEO and owning your own brand name, so I took the point to heart. So this post gets a little into a little bit of personal opinion on business.
I’ve waited a long time to write about this, mainly because I don’t want to embarrass anyone, and I want to keep the players in this story anonymous. I’ve worked at a lot of places, and as a consultant I’ve been inside a number of organizations and groups, so I’ve changed some characteristics in order to hide the true identity of the players here.
Let’s begin. I was recently told a tale by a long time colleague of mine. This colleague wove a story about sharing drinks with an ex-coworker of mine, who likely didn’t know the two if them shared a connection with me. My colleague was caught off guard when this ex-coworker said something along the lines of, “I like to use jedi mind tricks of people I work with. If I don’t like them, I’ll wait for them to have a really bad idea, then I’ll tell them it’s a great idea so they’ll go forth with it. Then when they fail, they look dumb. It’s really pretty easy to do.”
My colleague was pretty aghast, and he was especially shocked since this woman was involved with HR back in the days when I worked with her. It led us to a discussion about “Intentional Acts of Destruction” inside companies.
Sure, nothing the woman did was illegal. But what kind of long term issues did it cause for her company and group, to push forward ideas that were not in the best interest of the business? What kind of resource drain was it for any man hours to be spent on research or exploration? Where could those man hours have been better spent?
But more importantly, how many people think this way? Maybe if you have one employee who does this, it gets cancelled out by the mass of the organization. But suppose there is one person in each group who thinks this way?
Furthermore, as a manager, how do you decipher the evil from the ignorant? If you want to allow your employees a lot of blue sky to fly in, how do you know when an idea is being endorsed by the rest of the team because they believe in it, or because it’s part of a sabotage effort?
We couldn’t answer any of these questions. But we agreed that it was one of those management problems they don’t teach you in business school. We like to think that we can follow a handbook, and that we work with well intentioned people who have the best interest of the team at heart. But the reality is that some people don’t. And the hard thing is, unless they drink in bars and share their misguided thoughts with others, we never know who endorses our ideas because they agree, and who is looking to execute an Intentional Act of Destruction. It’s a good lesson for all of us to keep in mind when we head into the office.
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Nike “Write the Future” Postscript
Fun little side note here to what is probably the most successful guerilla YouTube ad ever, Nike’s “Write the Future. Now, we’ve all seen the actual ad about a gajillion times. I’m not sure why I was interested in digging in here – probably because I figured they created all the audio in a studio. But it turns out the main theme from the spot (other than the use of Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher drum rift in the beginning) actually comes from a 1970’s Dutch band. The Dutch band were even the ones who had the yodeling. Check it out here.
