Dan and Jason are passionate and articulate, and in transfer-speak, they are smart acquisitions with great future potential. More than the blogs and communities that they’re bringing on board, we’ll have two more smart brains working with us in the background to make Football Media better.

And while we’re on the subject, here’s how you can join Football Media.

1. Democratisation of access

People will access content in a myriad of ways. Mobile, RSS, Website, YouTube, Audio are just the surface. You’ll see a lot of syndication, aggregation, widget-based content use, mashups, data-driven content, casual games, interactive apps, etc etc.

Search engines. Other bloggers. Twitter. Facebook. Retail stores. Product lines. Competitions.

There are 101 different ways to access your brand, and knowing how to tap all of them will determine how many people you can reach (and if you’re looking at the bottom line, how much money you can make).

2. Aggregation of content

It’s not so much that the big keep getting bigger but that the small sites are more likely to stay stuck at the same level than the big sites, and the good writers keep migrating to bigger platforms (more exposure, more money) therefore reinforcing the strength that big brands have.

In football we’ve seen this happen with Goal.com hiring many good bloggers, OleOle tapping up several good blogs and The Offside building their model around attracting bloggers to setup their own blogs on their site.

This will keep happening in the next few years. The trick is to know how to benefit from this.

The approach is different from generic sites (non-team football news) and specific sites (team-specific or very topical sites like Footy Boots and Kickette).

For a site like Soccerlens, it pays to go the Goal.com way – create new sections, bring in dedicated writers for each section and then promoting, promoting, promoting. The breakthrough for sites like SL & EPL Talk will come when they get a financial breakthrough (to accelerate growth) or just do an outstanding job in growing organically by differentiating themselves on a particular product (i.e. what EPL Talk is doing with their podcast).

I wouldn’t dream of starting a brand new football news site now though – it’s way easier to buy one and build from there.

For team sites / niche sites, it’s a different story. I’ve got an idea (it’s evolutionary, not revolutionary) and hopefully you’ll see it in action in the coming months on the Football Media network. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll share it here.

But regardless of whether you’re a team-specific site or a generic football news site, you need to take care of two things right now:

• Giving your target audience more ways to access your content
• Figure out to access a much larger platform of readers than right now – either through partnerships, through rapid growth or through mergers. You might not like it, but you need to build fast or partner with someone who is growing fast. Everyone else will get left standing still.

He is best known as the host of the podcasts of EPL Talk and Major League Soccer Talk, although he’s done quite a bit more in the world of football – he was host of the American Soccer Show on Champions Sports Radio Network (2007-2008) and has been a prolific football blogger on EPL Talk, MLS Talk, Soccerlens and lately on The Kartik Report and the Manchester City Blog.

Based on the terms of his ’signing’, Kartik will stop writing for Major League Soccer Talk and The Kartik Report on January 31st, 2010. He will also quit EPL Talk after the 2010 World Cup in South Africa this summer. This is mainly due to the overlap in his role as the PR director for a football league and his position as a commentator on the same league / footballing region.

He should be able to continue writing on the Manchester City blog (fingers crossed).

This is a fantastic opportunity for Kartik and I’m really happy for him – he’s worked his socks off and while there are aspects of his work that polarize opinions, there’s no doubting his knowledge and professionalism and he should be able to put those qualities to good use in his new role.

Good luck mate.

Here’s a full list:

NewsNow

The unchallenged, all-powerful director of traffic in football blogging – NewsNow is to football what Google is to general websites.

It’s not without faults – and an over-dependency on NewsNow can be bad for your blog health, and with so many websites already in the index the criteria for listing is continuously being raised higher for new sites – but it’s the #1 source of aggregator traffic as far as football blogs are concerned.

Get Listed in NewsNow.

Footy 24/7

A no-frills, easy to use English Premier League news service that covers the most interesting blogs for EPL teams. With a few tweaks this could be the #1 rival to NewsNow in the coming years.

Get listed in Footy 24/7.

Football Filter

Footballfilter.com is a dashboard for the best football sources and content on the internet – articles, news, images, videos, podcasts (which can be played via the site itself), blogs and forums all centralised onto one page via rss feeds.

Like Footy 24/7, Football Filter is the closest potential rival to NewsNow but they’ll need to step up their game to get similar traffic and mindshare.

Get listed in Football Filter.

Other Football News Aggregators

There are several other smaller (in terms of the traffic they send) football headline aggregators. These include:

• OleOle (Submit)
• Very Quiet (Submit)
• 3nil (Submit)
• Soccer Blogs (Submit via Email link in menu on site)
• Clever Football (Submit via Email link on site)

If you know of any football news aggregators that aren’t on this list, send in the link and we’ll add them.

A big thanks to Michael Heald of Fully Illustrated (who’s also designed the new version of Soccerlens) and props to Nicolas Pin of Snowy Day Design who did all the behind-the-scenes implementation.

Let us know what you think in the comments below – praise or constructive criticism are both equally welcome.

This isn’t as big (or far-reaching) as Setanta going bust but it’s worth remembering that just two months ago Perform Group, Omnisport.tv’s parent company, partnered with Kentaro to bring the England-Ukraine World Cup qualifier live online to hundreds of thousands of England fans.

Kentaro / Perform / Omnisport declared that project a success – and Omnisport’s mailing today was again careful to thank users for helping making Omnisport a ’success’ – so the big question is why are Perform winding up Omnisport? Two possible answers:

One – the business was hemorrhaging money, which is quite possible given high costs of license fees and the fierce competition from illegal free streams available online.

Two – the business was a success, and Perform will now export the model to a partner that already owns the online rights and run it white-labeled for them.

Given the current economy and some obvious flaws in Perform’s model (charging per game, not doing enough to compete effectively with illegal streams, no fan / community engagement), the signs point to #1, and that’s a shame – I’m looking forward to be able to watch live football online, legally, at a reasonable cost, and Omnisport’s failure will make other potential investors in this model warier than before.

Back to the pubs then – or you could always watch football live online – for free.

Update: I’ve learned today that Omnisport.tv will be relaunched under a new brand – let’s see how that goes.

Make no mistake about it, social media is changing the way in which we interact with the internet and the way we interact with each other. Websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, amongst the great monoliths of cyberspace, are making our lives more closeted and yet more open to the world than ever before.

Social media does not only change and manipulate (both positively and negatively) the way in which we socialise on the individual and collective levels, it has also spilled over to influence communications between and amongst particular worldwide groups of people and organisations bound by common interests. The media has been radically democratised and football has been influenced to as great an extent as any other worldwide pastime or profession.

Leading The Revolution

At the forefront of the social media revolution are the giants of internet communications, digital societies of their own allowing all corners of the world to interact at all hours of the day. As I’ve already briefly mentioned, the leaders in this field are the likes of MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. If you’re not already familiar with these websites then you might want to read these brief descriptions:

Facebook: Set up a profile complete with information about your favourite films/music/books, upload a flattering photo of yourself and away you go. Of course, with millions of people now using Mark Zuckerberg’s massively popular creation, it’s likely that quite a few of your friends are also on the site. Locate them and you’ll be able to follow their updates and have a nose through their latest pictures at you leisure.

MySpace: Similar in nature to Facebook, although MySpace has gained itself quite a reputation for launching the online careers of several notable bands and artists and, as a result, has slightly more of an indie, alternative feel to it. It is, to use a relatively needless analogy, Facebook’s slightly cooler, more fashion conscious older brother.

Twitter: More of a “micro-blogging” site than a traditional social network, Twitter, one of the more recent additions to the ever-growing world of social media, is fast establishing itself as a major force in the way people communicate. The favoured social media tool of those in the public eye, Twitter is useful for keeping up-to-date with your favourite celebrity’s recent activities or updating your friends on your recent movements, all done through the medium of pithy 140-character ‘tweets’.

The Changing Face of Football Media

“This social media stuff”, you may be thinking, “is all very well, but how does it relate to football?” Well, in answer to the question, it has facilitated a huge growth in the scope of the football media, both amongst professional writers and in the blogosphere, where fans and observers of all kinds make their views known across the world via social media.

The traditional print media and the large broadcasting networks have been quick to adapt and make social media a central part of their football coverage. Not only do the newspapers and networks such as The Times and the BBC have Twitter feeds connected to their official football websites, individual journalists have also embraced the revolution. Henry Winter, football correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and Sean Ingle, The Guardian’s sports editor, are just two examples of high-profile figures in the print media crossing over into the social networking sphere. Some scribes such as Spanish AS reporter Guillem Balague, have gone further and established their own independent websites.

These outlets allow the role of the modern journalist to become increasingly multilateral. Those who are paid good money to write about football are now not only able to reach a wider audience with their work, but their readership is more readily able to reach them. Readers, through innovations in social media, are able to engage with those who guide and shape football opinion and, in essence, hold them to account over their judgements on the game. As a result footballing debate has been democratised and diffused, journalism gradually becoming a more outwardly driven process with public opinion now playing a more significant role than ever before. Social media allows those in the traditional media to tap into the organic football opinion and discourse which arises from a global football fan base and make their coverage more dynamic as a result.

Clubs & Players

It is not exclusively newspapers and networks that have taken advantage of various social media platforms. Individual players and clubs, both great and small, have established a strong internet presence, with several high-profile players preferring the more personal nature of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to the relative anonymity and sterility of an official website.

When Frederico Macheda announced himself with the winning goal in a superb Manchester United comeback against Aston Villa in April his Facebook profile suddenly became the focus of a great deal of attention. According to The Times, the young Italian went from having 640 ‘fans’ to well over 20,000 overnight. Stories like Macheda’s are indicative of a new era of greater accessibility. In an era when sports stars and other celebrities can seem distant and aloof, social media is quickly giving the stars the ability to communicate more freely with their fans and give people an insight into the much coveted lifestyle of the modern professional footballer.

The recent Confederations Cup was another watershed for the use of social media tools in football. A significant number of the USA squad (who eventually lost out to Brazil in a thrilling final) had Twitter accounts and kept their followers informed of their progress on a regular basis. Jozy Altidore, Freddy Adu and Brad Guzan all updated regularly to give a unique perspective on what it’s like to be involved in a major tournament. They also used their newfound platform to express their thanks to those who supported them, something which elite athletes are not always able to do through the more traditional modes of media.

Social media continues to get ever closer to the live action, with footballers not only “tweeting” before and after matches and training, but even during the very events themselves. Aly Wagner, a player for Los Angeles Sol in the Women’s Professional Soccer League, recently became the first ever professional footballer to “tweet” from the substitutes bench during a game. The power of Twitter in football knows no bounds! We can only speculate as to what her manager may have thought…

As I’ve already briefly touched on, clubs have also come to establish themselves through a variety of social media outlets. A great many clubs, from the great to the small, have begun to use online social networking to increase their internet presence and further expand and inform their support. From Liverpool, Arsenal, Internazionale and Chelsea to Luton Town, Kidderminster Harriers and Swindon Town, social media sites are awash with football clubs reaching out to their fans and placing an ever-increasing emphasis on supporter inclusion and interaction.

The Blogosphere

Official sites, pages and feeds are all very well, but some of the most entertaining football writing can be found on the thousands of high quality football blogs scattered across the internet. It is these blogs of fans and armchair pundits alike that are the very lifeblood of the footballing social media scene. Arseblog, The Republik of Mancunia, Real Madrid Talk, Kopblog and Harry Hotspur are all classic examples of the wit and incisive analysis that have made such fan-driven sources of comment so popular. They pithily summarise the passionate feelings of the everyday football fan and, despite in the main not being written by professional hacks, are often home to some of the finest sports writing around.

Few of these blogs however, are stand alone websites, most of them forming part of an online community such as the hugely popular OleOle or Footbo. These websites and others like them serve as an online base for football fans and have managed to create an atmosphere of relatively sensible, reasoned debate despite their focus being a sport fiercely competed along cultural, geographical, even tribal lines. They serve to consolidate several forms of social media into one easily digestible package tailored very specifically for the football connoisseur, and, with blogs a key part of what they can offer, are central in guiding opinion and developing intelligent debate between football fans around the world.

Audio & Visual

Of course, football based social media is not just confined to social networks such as Facebook, it has several branches, two of the most notable being video uploads and audio content. YouTube, as anyone will tell you, leads the way in terms of video-based social media and has come to have a significant influence on football coverage on the internet.

If you’re able to set up a rudimentary profile and know how to upload the odd video, then YouTube can act as both a rudimentary social network and a great source of footballing entertainment. Emmanuel Adebayor, Manchester City’s Togolese centre-forward, has his own YouTube channel, bringing the world an insight into what it’s like to be to widely lambasted, occasionally sulky, often dancing professional footballer.

Chelsea also have their own channel, making the most of the added exposure YouTube can bring, the majority of videos giving a light-hearted take on the goings on behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge. A number of leading football brands including Nike and Adidas are also present on the video sharing site, using the resource to pilot new adverts and promote their links with the game. YouTube adds colour to the world of football social media, providing fans with comprehensive television-like coverage of their favourite players, clubs and brands. It also takes less time and effort to use, simple searches can reap thousands of fascinating results, something which has endeared it to internet users since its genesis in 2005.

Online audio content is also a key facet of the new generation of football media. Radio shows such as BBC Radio 5 Live’s World Football Phone-In have diversified to cover a number of online formats. The World Football Phone-In, which gives members of the public a chance to ask questions about football to experts from various corners of the globe, has its own Facebook group and also brings out a weekly podcast featuring the highlights of each weeks show. Other podcasts such as The Football Ramble and The Guardian’s Football Weekly have also branched out to utilise social media, showing that, despite threats arising from the huge popularity of the more democratised modern media, audio content and other forms of traditional media are not being left behind in this age of exciting, new and bespoke football coverage.

Written by Chris Mann.

Also Read:

US Football Twitter Directory.

You can follow Football Media on Facebook and Twitter, and also join our football writers group.

Many of you will have come across PR people in your football writing careers and may have developed positive or negative perceptions of the industry and its people based on those experiences. Here at Football Media we’d like to help you make the most of your relationship with PR.

Public relations is the marketing discipline which looks after a company, brand or individual’s contact with – and image in – the media. While the digital age has ignited a frantic landgrab between a number of disciplines, PR can be said to own many of the key areas including media relations and, increasingly, blogger relations. It is also making strides in search, social media and other growing areas of the new marketing mix.

PR and you

The PR industry is ever-evolving and becoming increasingly versatile and complex. But from our side of any partnership with public relations, it effectively has two roles. First, it should respond to incoming requests for news, comment, review items or content. Its second role is proactive and is the “selling-in” of news items or feature proposals to media titles. Within both there are nuances, but most contact with PR (outside genuine relationship-building activity which is all too rare) falls into one of these categories.

The football media being as it is, it’s most likely that you will be contacted proactively on most occasions, and this is where PR’s perception often suffers. It can involve cold-calling and blind emailing – it’s not sales, because they want you to write rather than buy, but it can feel obtrusive nonetheless.

However, unless you’re interested in commenting only on events on the field, you’re probably better off cultivating a good rapport with at least a few PR contacts. Despite their job dictating that they must send you an unsolicited email once in a while, the vast majority are very sharp, very smart and – whisper it – very useful (disclosure: I work for a global PR agency, but not in a media relations role). This is because they can send you a note when they have juicy content and also because of their reactive role.

PR, Football Media and you

With that in mind, it’s good to know who you might want to get in touch with and who might want to get in touch with you. But just to make matters a little more complicated most brands of all sizes will be looked after by an agency, and this is no different for football brands. Often there is no easy way to work out which agency looks after a company’s PR, so to make things run more smoothly we have decided to open a collaborative database for brands and their agencies.

You can view the document here, and it has also been embedded below.

The first column is a list of brands which are either directy involved or somehow synonymous with football. The next two columns contain the names of PR agencies which look after those brands. In most cases these slots are currently occupied by either the global or UK agencies, but it is important to be aware that there may be other agencies involved. It is a complex industry characterised by complex structures.

Just to add another layer of confusion, we’ve also included a column for media buying agencies. These are the guys who buy your advertising space and get you involved in affiliate marketing. Again, we think this information is useful.

Caveats

Please note that this list is not perfect. It does not contain every football brand, a few of the agency details will be out of date (companies change agencies all the time, for a variety of reasons) and in some cases the brands will have different agencies for each area of their business. As such, amendments to the list may be required. There is also the issue of geography, and having been initiated in the UK the list will contain mostly UK or global partners. There are also many gaps, left in as “would like to know” items. Sorry about that.

The simple fact of the matter is that the only way to guarantee the veracity of this information is for it to be added as a result of recent and up-to-date experience. It’s not easy to accurately find out which PR agency a company uses for its football brand without (a) it having recently changed, (b) having been contacted directly already or (c) just knowing. That’s where you come in.

Why, with imperfect information, have we gone ahead and published the spreadsheet? Because we think this will benefit from being a collaborative effort. We can only add in what we know from having been contacted and what we could establish from the very sketchy information available from educated Googling. So let’s help each other. You can edit the document above with changes or additions, and we’d be grateful if you did.

How to update the grid

Here is your step-by-step guide to adding your information:

1. Sign into Google. If you don’t have a Google account, you really should sign up. It has some superb tools for bloggers and writers and definitely comes with my seal of approval
2. Click on this link to access the spreadsheet. Everybody with a Google account has editing rights
3. Add/edit the brand name in the first column, the PR agencies in the next two, or the media buying agency in the fourth. If you’ve been contacted directly by any of these brands, please state “In-House”
4. If you are adding a brand, please add your name to final two columns. If you are editing an existing item, please add your name to the final column only
5. Click “File” and then “Save & Close”
6. What’s in it for you? The bottom of this post will include a (hopefully) growing list of acknowledgements. When you edit the spreadsheet, please leave a comment here and we will add your chosen site to the list. Furthermore, you can be satisfied in the knowledge that you have helped others

We hope this document can develop into a really useful tool for football writers everywhere but we can’t do it without you. If you have any comments or suggestions, please get in touch. Happy hunting!

The reason this is news for other than footballing reasons is because the match will not be shown live on TV – instead, it will be shown online as an exclusive Internet-only offering.

Why is this not on the telly, you ask?

The media rights to the game were sold to Kentaro (a sports rights company) by the Ukrainian FA. Kentaro in turn sold on the rights to Setanta, but after their collapse the rights reverted back to Kentaro. Instead of trying to sell the rights again to a TV channel, Kentaro decided to trial an online-only format for this game, and have partnered with Perform (who already have experience in selling premium video content online) to execute this idea.

Kentaro has had no offers from UK free to air or pay-TV broadcasters and has decided to seek the widest possible online audience.

Will it work? Kentaro believe that it will, and Perform have put their significant weight behind the idea of charging for streaming live matches online (as well as highlight packages) through their Omnisport.tv portal for quite some time.

As reported in the Guardian earlier this month, Kentaro and Perform approached a handful of online newspaper websites to strike a deal where the publishers would be able to stream the live coverage free of charge and would receive a share of the revenue generated from the event. Perform (Omnisport) generates revenues through pre- and post- ad rolls in their video content, and this model in simple terms is their standard affiliate agreement that they have in place at Omnisport.tv. This would also mean that newspaper websites would be charging their viewers to see the game on their websites.

According to Simon Denyer, chief executive of Perform, the biggest UK newspaper websites have a combined audience of around 24 million users. To give you an idea of how those numbers stack up, the Football Media network has a combined audience of about 5 million users.

“The strategy is to have around 10 big publishers with [sites] which have between 2 and 5 million unique users in the UK,” Denyer said.

According to Perform, the Ukraine-England game will be a one-off event and not be channeled through Omnisport. The game gets its own website – www.ukrainevengland.com – and the marketing push for the event will go live starting 5th October, with the initial (early-bird) pricing pegged at only £4.99.

£4.99 for a no-consequence qualifier? There’s a significant debate here around whether rights holders in football should be turning to the Internet to offer legitimate premium content (discussed in detail elsewhere on this site), but for me the initial sticking point will be the price. You can buy an year-long subscription to ‘illegal’ streams for £9.99. For as many games as you want to watch, from around the world.

Compared to that, charging £4.99 for a game doesn’t make it a great deal for fans to ’switch’ over. But then again, they’re not targeting the hardcore fan – they’re after those fans making the transition from TV to Internet.

And in that scenario, £4.99 is nothing.

by Adrian Clarke

I’d always imagined FIFA’s Zurich headquarters to be vast and ever-so-slightly space-age in its design and it didn’t disappoint me on either count when my taxi pulled up with little over 15 minutes to spare before Coca-Cola’s official launch of their sponsorship of the 2010 World Cup.

Tucked away high in the hills that drape over the beautifully quaint Swiss city, the well guarded home of world football’s governing body is every bit as perfectly immaculate, tranquil and modern as I expected. A vast reception, the size of half a football pitch greets visitors and it is here that I perused a gleaming trophy cabinet holding ten of their 11 major international prizes (the World Cup was missing) before being whisked upstairs in an ultra modern lift to the spectacular second floor auditorium.

Here, sat flanked my a hundred or so other invited media guests from all corners of the globe, we watched ESPN broadcaster Ray Stubbs host a 90 minute presentation from Coca-Cola that involved FIFA president Sepp Blatter, Coca-Cola chairman Muhtar Kent, Coca-Cola’s chief marketing officer Joe Tripodi, FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke and Cameroon legend Roger Milla. The event was organised to launch their 86 nation six month World Cup trophy tour, their sponsorship of the ‘Best Player Goal Celebration’ award for next summer’s World Cup finals, their new catchy anthem, as well as Coca-Cola’s marketing campaign for next summer’s tournament.

Interesting speeches from all five distinguished guests interspersed a slick and informative presentation which included a special guest appearance from the ‘real’ World Cup trophy itself. Admittedly, my eyes were constantly drawn towards the trophy I, and most other boys, dreamed of one day lifting, but in between periodic flashes of John Terry lifting it above his head next July, I did attempt to concentrate on the proceedings in hand!

Highlights included Sepp Blatter squirming at a number of tricky questions from the floor, his microphone failing to work and a comical, albeit slightly embarrassed Roger Milla attempting to recreate his famous 1990 celebration dance around a strategically placed corner flag! It was nevertheless an impressive launch.

After acquiring an obligatory souvenir snap of myself with the World Cup trophy (while being watched intently by a ‘gloved’ security guard just in case I ran off with it!) I was whisked upstairs to interview African legend Milla. It was particularly satisfying to be granted the second one-on-one of the day, shortly behind FourFourTwo and it was indeed a pleasure to speak with the amiable 57-year-old – via a translator – who gave an animated and interesting interview, which can be found here on Soccerlens.

A lovely buffet in the cafeteria adjacent to a stunning full size pitch followed (with a selection of delightfully fancy desserts my own personal favourites) and before I knew it, it was time to go home, leaving Mr Blatter and co to get back to their day job overseeing the world’s greatest sport.

by Adrian Clarke

World football’s greatest football trophy is set to embark on its longest ever global tour, with FIFA and the Coca-Cola Company taking the real solid-gold trophy to 86 countries on a 225-day journey that will allow thousands of fans to enjoy a rare close-up view of the authentic World Cup Trophy.

“Through this event, we are really engaging football fans on a global scale, giving them the unique opportunity to have their picture taken with the most prestigious prize in world football and to embrace the excitement surrounding the FIFA World Cup,” said Sep Blatter.