Soccer 2.0: Germany vs.Greece as seen by Monty Python!

A very clever video from Monty Python on Soccer philosophy... There are many more like this on Gary Ireland's vlog listed on the right hand side.

Where in the World are Laure Manaudou and Hope Solo?

Laure Manaudou is a French Olympic, European and world champion swimmer. Hope Solo is a goal keeper for the US Women’s National Soccer team. Both are very successful athletes whose notoriety has reached far beyond their respective sports. Laure Manaudou‘s new found fame was generated by a humoristic piece entitled “Laure Manaudou Sex Video” on YouTube that drew more than 1M viewers. The joke is that the video was about monkeys and fortunately not about Laure Manaudou. Because of all the attention it garnered, Laure Manaudou was also in the top 5 searches on Technorati for quite some time…

As for Hope Solo, she gained tremendous publicity through her temporary exile from the U.S. Women’s National Team. Indeed, her exile became the dominant story line at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Unbeaten Hope Solo was benched by the coach in favor of veteran goalkeeper Briana Scurry just before a crucial semifinal game against Brazil that the US ended up loosing. USA today reported that this incident drove up ESPN’s ratings and filled blogs and comment pages with a passion not seen since the big USA win at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup and Brandi Chastain’s jersey toss. In addition, there was a back-story to this incident recounting Hope Solo’s relationship to her father and his tragic passing a few months before the World Cup.

I’m relating these two “soap” stories to illustrate how public attention – though ever so short term- is driven by what I’d call the phenomenon of “Tribal Voyeurism”. I believe that it is critically important for B2B marketers to research and understand the mechanics of “Tribal Voyeurism”. Indeed, the glaciers between the B2C and B2B worlds, if they ever existed, are definitely melting! They’re melting not because of global warming but because, as noted before, of the ever increasing use of social media tools in the enterprise. Moreover, the hyper-mediatized “prosumer” has been completely saturated and become indifferent to the un-imaginative, un-inspired gobbledygook prose dished out by the vast majority of B2B marketers, and is hungering for a more genuine and entertaining style of communication!

I’m by no means suggesting that B2B marketers should become unsavory, voyeuristic, and soapy, but rather that they need to learn to appreciate and accept how professionals access and evaluate information. There are many successful companies that have succeeded in attracting and keeping the public interest either through style, meaning or both. This includes the likes of Apple, Salesforce.com, Facebook, PG&E (yes, the utility company), Interface and many others. So, break the mold. Create. Imagine. And have some fun!

Youth Soccer and Viral Marketing

My beloved wife and I spent our weekend watching one of our daughters compete in the Norcal Cup soccer tournament. I have two daughters and both of them have recently joined a terrific club in Palo Alto called the Union Football Club (UFC). UFC (www.unionfootballclub.com) is run by a family of former soccer professionals (Gary, Carine, Simon and Vic Ireland) very close to the Women’s US National Team, Stanford Soccer and Julie Foudy. They support the “Right To Play” program: Right To Play is an athlete-driven international humanitarian organization that uses sport and play as a tool for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world. Right To Play is committed to improving the lives of these children and to strengthening their communities by translating the best practices of sport and play into opportunities to promote development, health and peace. Also, UFC recently had John Owens, assistant academy director from Liverpool FC, as a guest coach.

My point is that this club is actively connecting on a worldwide scale. So, how is it possible for a relatively small soccer club to run such a quality program with global reach? This is the question that I was pondering while driving back from the game…

My first thought was that due to their total passion and dedication for the kids and soccer they had created a very viral marketing program by default! Then, I decided to check how those who had coined the term viral marketing , actually defined it. According to Steve Jurvetson, the term was coined in a Netscape newsletter in 1997 and defined loosely as “network-enhanced word of mouth”. One of the critical elements of viral marketing is that every customer becomes an involuntary salesperson by using the product. So far, so good, UFC is definitely viral as every player tries to bring their friends over! Technically, it’s called usage affiliation. However, Steve Jurvetson goes on to say, using Hotmail as an example, that their subscriber base grew from zero to 12 million users in 18 months, and that from a memetic engineering perspective, viral marketing takes place when an idea spreads like an adaptive virus.

All right, all right, may be it doesn’t have quite the necessary scale to be called viral marketing. May be it was just plain silly of me to try to codify this club’s success in marketing terms. What really matters is that the coaches have tremendous skills, dedication and gumption and that the kids love them. Now that I think about it, a more appropriate analysis should have been framed in the context of “Zen and the Art of Youth Soccer Coaching”, an exploration into the Metaphysics of soccer quality!