Auctions Beta Site – let the bidding begin

Published February 20, 2012 Membership 5 Comments
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We’re launching the Members Auction site in Beta to get your feedback.  We want to know what you think, the good the bad and the bugs.

Take a look around the site and try bidding for the items, they’re real auctions after all. If you spot something that you think could be better or you have found a bug, drop us a note at mcfcgeeks@mcfc.o.uk or reply to this post. Include your browser so we can recreate what you see.

So what is Auctions all about??

The Auctions websites is where you can bid on amazing money can’t buy experiences, tickets or uniquely Blue items, but here’s the best bit… it’s free – there is no cash involved in bidding.

Who can take part in Auctions?

As a member, you will have acquired a certain number of auction credits, based on your spending with Manchester City since the start of the season.  These credits are what you bid with.

Open to all members– Whether you are Superbia, Platinum, Gold or a Blue member – you can take part now in the auctions beta web site.

If you’re not a member and you would like to take part – it’s just £10 to become a Blue member.

There are a few things worth noting about the City auctions web site.

Auction credits should not be confused with loyalty points – they are entirely separate.

Your credits can be spent on the auction site, whereas your loyalty points will continue to grow over the seasons as they always have done – untouched.

When you sign in, using your normal log in details, Supporter Number and password, the number of auction credits you have earned will be displayed. There’s a list of them in the My Account section too.

If you need to change your email or password you can do so via mcfc.co.uk or mcfc.co.uk/tickets

Have a look around the site – see which lots currently available you are interested in – or see what’s coming up soon if there’s something you want to save your auction credits for.

There are two types of auctions. The highest bid and the lowest unique bid.

For a highest bid auction – the supporter who bids the most auction credits by the time the auction closes, will win the prize. For the winner, the number of auction credits they have bid will then be deducted from your total. Similar to ebay.

We will then contact you with any further details necessary to collect your prize.

For the lowest unique bid – simply guess the number you think will the lowest unique number out of everyone who takes part.   It will cost you a set number of auction credits to make guess, regardless of whether you win or not.

When the auction closes, the supporter who guesses the lowest number, which no one else has also guessed, will win the prize!

The auctions site unfortunately is not open to our supporters under 18 – however, prizes are transferable so look out for prizes specifically for the juniors in your family.

Most of all – the auctions web site is just for fun.

If you would like to know more about the techy side of the development, we will follow up with a more detailed post once all the feedback is in.

We hope you like it!

The results are in. Or are they? Search.

Published February 10, 2012 Search 2 Comments
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As part of ongoing enhancements to the site over the last few months, we identified search as a key function with room for improvement.

Ever since the site launched in 2009, and until just before Christmas, the mechanic behind our site search is Lucene, an out of the box solution configured to display results by “Relevancy and Recency” across all of our content. On the face of it, a logical mechanic. But what are users searching for?

The lion’s share of top ten searches consists of players, and the “Relevancy and Recency” solution failed to deliver relevant results. Why?

A typical example.

A search term such as “Micah Richards”, would likely return results in the following hierarchy,

  1. Other players profiles
  2. Non related articles/videos (and plenty of them)
  3. Micah Richard’s player profile

Why would the Micah Richards player profile appear 3rd in the hierarchy of results? For a number of reasons.

Volume, we’ve posted thousands of news and video items on the site since 2009, and that’s on top of merging content from 2005 onwards from the previous site.

How is relevancy and recency defined?

Relevancy is the number of times a search item is found within the title, summary and body copy of piece of content posted on the site, all of which have equal value.

Relevancy also discounts the tags associated to a piece of content.

Recency, is simply the latest content item.

Based on this definition, the algorithm created the following chain of events…

Dear Recency,

I’m pleased to inform you that I have 16 mentions of “Micah Richards” across my article’s title, summary and body copy.

I hope that see you this fit and relevant, and prioritise my response above the lions share of other Micah Richards content items.

All the Best

Relevancy

reply – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Dear Relevancy,

Hang on a minute, there you go again assuming you should come top of the tree…

What you fail to understand is that you were posted on the site in January 2011.

Since then, I’ve been inundated with articles that mention you once or twice, hundreds of them…

I don’t care if the article is a match report, or another players profile that refers to you in the body copy, or indeed a news item, that’s exclusively about something else that only mentions you once.

At the end of the day, they’re more recent, and must be prioritised above you.

No hard feelings.

Recency

Something needed to be done.

We want to return relevant and recent search results, particularly around the most popular searches. For that, we required a solution that would fix the short-term issues immediately, but with long term flexibility.

Our creative and development agency Aqueduct proposed that it would be possible to improve search without having to strip out and integrate a whole new service.

Searching for Balotelli

New search using "balotelli"

How could we build upon the current system?

1) Automated weight relevancy

We could apply weighted relevancy on article template fields (behind the scenes) so this would not be noticed by editors. The hierarchy of this relevancy would “score items” in this way.

  1. Title
  2. Summary
  3. Links in content (if relevant to the term searched for)
  4. Term in content

*note the enhancement here, beforehand, a,b,c,d carried equal weighting.

Should a user perform a search that has the search term in the Title, this will weigh higher than a content item with the term in the Summary.

Should a search term be contained within Title and Summary, then this will have a combined weighted ratio and thus put the article higher than if the term was just being used in the title.

On this basis, the user would be presented an article item at the top of their search results, with a date that is in fact older than the second placed article. The reason for this would be the search term was contained in both title and summary.

2)     Link terms to a taxonomy

We would also have a football taxonomy that we can link to and instruct the the algorithm through code and simple logic. This taxonomy would be based upon terms that users may logically search for, and where that item would be stored within the site category.

As an example, if a user searched for something containing the word “goal(s)” logically the content item would more than likely be within:

  1. Match Report
  2. Matchday Centre
  3. Player Profile
  4. Team News

This would instruct the algorithm to first look into the above 4 categories as a priority then, to scan the rest of the site.

3) Presenting Search Results

Search results have always been “jumbled”, resulting in a scenario whereby if a user runs a search, the date-ordered results are displaying as unfiltered content types.

We would introduce additional filters to allow users to re-order search results from ‘content types’ into ‘date order’

4)     City Recommends

Essentially a pre-defined selection of results based on the users search term, touching on the manual manipulation option. Think Google sponsored ads, this is an ideal piece of functionality to present popular content or partner offers to our users.  Try searching “Dzeko” or “Silva” on the site.

Why choose this option?

  1. No overhead to content editors
  2. Minor administrational needs (for the taxonomy)
  3. Ability to fully control the taxonomy and how it weights the category and terms
  4. Not re-inventing the entire search system
  5. Easy to enhance and build upon moving forward

What’s up next for search?

  1. We need to integrate recency into the search results by tweaking the automated weight relevancy
  2. We need to apply the taxonomy to key search terms in order to boost relevancy when viewing “all” returned results.
We’ll keep you posted.

John Kearney

New head of MCFC geeks

Published January 16, 2012 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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The mcfcgeeks team has done a huge amount in the last year and I’m delighted to announce that we’ve capped that off by appointing a new Head of Digital, Russell Stopford.

Don’t we already have a Head of Digital? Well, over the last year you might have picked up that I’ve been the interim Head of Digital. I’ve got a family in London and we thought it was important to have someone Manchester-based, so I happily filled the role till we could find the right person – and now we have. Russell has an excellent pedigree and I’m sure will be posting here soon.

I’m delighted to say that I’m staying involved with the club in a roving role looking at  digital business development, new products and innovation.

The progress over the last year has been great, but if I know Russell, then 2012 will be even better than 2011.

To all those who tweeted, emailed and even wrote in to me over the last 12 months, thanks for making it a fantastic year.

cheers, Richard

@richardayers

The Match Day Experience: a Social Media trial goes live

Published December 8, 2011 Match Day , Social Media 2 Comments
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Twitter on a City Square big screen

#blueview tweets on a City Square big screen

If, at first,  you don’t succeed… then trial trial trial again. Or, learn from your mistakes, try again with a different approach and have a lot of fun with the second go. That’s what the phrase should be.

Ten days ago I wrote about the experiment we ran with getting tweets live onto screens at the Etihad stadium on a match day. An experiment in using social media, twitter in particular, to engage football fans in the run-up to a Premier League match – integrated into our pre- and post-match entertainment schedule. It was a good experiment in that it showed up lots of the challenges.

Last weekend, when MCFC played Norwich City, we gave it another go. 

This time, rather than showing a conversation between two selected fans, we implemented a filtered twitter-stream based around the hashtag #blueview.

We had Mass Relevance’s Tweetriver auto-filtering the ‘fire-hose’ of twitter, and we set it to reject RTs, tweets containing links and profanity. All tweets were held for moderation. With some things it’s better to be safe than sorry – especially if you’re just getting it off the ground.

Tweets stacked on screenTweets were displayed in a ticker-tape when there was live video going out – and in a stack when there was no action on-stage in the pre-match entertainment. We specifically focused on 1pm – 2.30 pm and 5pm – 6pm in order to avoid connectivity issues – but, of course, that means we missed the bulk of the audience.

Where were the fans?

  • on their way to the stadium
  • across the world
  • in City Square
  • inside the Stadium

How did they use it?

  • Opinion
  • Well wishes
  • Jokes
  • Birthdays
  • Banter
  • Interaction with presenters
  • Abuse (non fans)

Fan feedback was excellent. Lots of people were delighted to get involved and have a voice. User Generated Content, eh? It doesn’t always have to be citizen journalism.

Numbers

      • Tweets using #blueview: about 2,000
      • Percentage published: 21%
      • Percentage rejected: 43%
      • Remaining awaiting moderation: 36%

This 43% of rejections was largely made up of RTs and mentions. Those awaiting moderation are partly made up of duplicate messages where people repeated themselves or others, but also shows us that if we want to get more through the system, we need to speed up/add some resource to the moderation process.

The split of pre/post match tweet volume was 2/1.

Users: we identified just under 1,000 individual twitter authors.

Fans' tweets on the big screen behind the City Square stage

To put this into context, the stadium capacity is 47,700 seats.  An estimated 25,000 pass through the Square on a match day (although many will be immediately prior to kick-off) and the City Square capacity is around 5,000. The number of people who would have been in City Square more than an hour before the game would be in the region of a few hundred at any one time. So, it is reasonable to assume that although the factor of people tweeting to see themselves come up on the screen will have played a part, with 1,000 twitter authors, factoring in the penetration of smartphones (c31% in general population) overlayed with the usage profile of twitter… it shows that there’s some desire from people who aren’t at the stadium to take part in the atmosphere of the day.

So, will we do it again?

Yes. In fact, we just did at the Bayern Munich game. Will we do it consistently from now on? It seems like a good idea – the use of social media, smartphones and twitter is likely to rise, but the key factor is whether the fans want it.

What’s next? More experiments, more failures, more learning, more trials, more successes.

Any thoughts or comments are always welcome – either in the comments below or via @mcfcgeeks or mcfcgeeks @ mcfc.co.uk

The Match Day Experience: a Social Media experiment

Published November 26, 2011 Match Day , Social Media 2 Comments
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MCFC City Square fans outside the Summerbee bar

City fans outside the Summerbee bar in City Square

Pies, beer, football – that’s all you need for the perfect day out. At least, that’s the view of some people who think that media and technology are a distraction – both in terms of the organisation of a football club and also the fans’ experience on the day.

Last week I was speaking at the inaugural How-Do Sports Business and Marketing conference and I listened to Robert Elstone, Everton’s CEO, speak about the importance of the match-day experience for fans. He was very clear about doing everything he can to ensure that when you turn up at Goodison, you have as good a time as possible.

Where he and I differ is that I believe that digital media has an increasingly important role to play. Robert said he wasn’t convinced and felt that there were more important things to focus on for now – and as he’s infinitely more experience in football than I am, I’m sure he’s right – for Everton. Digital media can be an addition to the excitement, not an alternative.

I know some diehards feel that nothing should distract from the action on the pitch, but my bet would be that it won’t be long before some fans are using handheld devices during the match to add something to the game.

image copyright engadget.

Football isn’t like many US sports where there are long breaks mid-play that give you time to check up on the last play or the stats or watch a replay (like with FanVision)… but I think it would be foolish to bet against services being used by a large enough audience in the near future. In fact, if you include the use of SMS, then you could argue that handheld devices and their communication capability has already changed a match-day. How many people do you know who are in touch with mates at other grounds during the game?

Now, putting aside the fact that all stadia act like Faraday cages and so getting a signal (never mind 3G) can be nigh-on impossible, and assuming that this will change, then it’s interesting to consider how social media might affect the fans on a match day.

[as an aside, thanks to all the @mcfcgeeks twitter followers who continue to ask about our progress with boosting signal or installing wifi in the Etihad stadium - we're working on it and it's a high priority for me so it's good to hear your needs]

I wanted to experiment with social media on a match day. So we decided to run a test using twitter, discussion between two blogger/supporters over twitter, and integrating that into the pre-match media that we run in City Square.

As an experiment, it was a great success.

As an enhancement of the match-day experience it was, well… rubbish.

If you follow me on twitter, or @vickistansfield or @mcfcgeeks then you will know how much we try to be open and straight-talking with fans about what we’re trying to achieve as well as sharing with the digital community about our plans and progress. So, in that spirit, I wanted to share with you the case-study that we put together to debrief this experiment.

You can view or download the Manchester City FC Matchday Tweets Case Study_MCFC vs NUFC 19.11.11.

Our project manager, John Kearney, comes to some clear conclusions about what didn’t work and why: the conversation was out of context, it wasn’t live enough, you couldn’t interact with it … to name a few. But he also comes up with a series of recommendations which gives me hope for trying this again and making it work better next time.

Our American geek friends are particularly fond of a phrase that sums up our approach here – and it’s one we’ve taken to heart in the @mcfcgeeks team: Fail Better. Working with new technologies, new forms of social interaction, and integrating them into such a well-developed experience as the warm-up to a Premier League football match is never going to be easy, but we’re experimenting, learning and innovating…. and that leads to success.

When I wrapped up my talk about engaging a fanbase online at the How-Do conference, there was one thing I should have added: The reason why we feel like this kind of thing is important isn’t just to do with being innovative for the sake of it; it’s not because we like spending time and money on the latest digital fad; it’s not because we want to find a way to make money out of fans. The reason why we do this is because our fans deserve it.

City fans use mobiles and facebook and twitter and foursquare and and youtube every day, just like everyone else, and if we can give them more access to the club they love via those platforms, we will.

Pre match live streaming trial, City v Newcastle

Published November 19, 2011 Video , Live streaming Leave a Comment
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We’re back in Premier League action today and for the first time on the site we’ll be trialling live streaming of our pre match build up.

City Square, Summerbee Bar

City Square - Summerbee Bar

City Square was launched last season with a café, bars, covered staging area, and big screens galore. It has given fans, including my Dad and me, somewhere to go close to the stadium prior to the match. I’m setting off shortly to start the pre-match ritual – pint in Summerbee’s bar, watch the big screen build up, argue about the team line up, Manc burger and then to the seats.

From 3 hours prior to the match the big screens show everything from highlights, interviews, features etc as you’d expect. Then there’s good stuff – live footage of City Square, teams arriving, giving away prizes and hospitality upgrades to fans and interviews with players past and present, celebs, team announcements as they’re read out from the tunnel – it’s impressive if I say so my self.

So we want to show the rest of the fans who can’t make it to the ground, local and international, what great content is available before a match. The site already has a Match Day Centre, which regularly receives double the stadium capacity in traffic, and post-match interviews and report but we want to give that sense of anticipation and excitement that builds prior the whistle blowing.

If you want to take a look between 1pm-3pm 19th Nov, City v Newcastle, here you go: http://live.mcfc.co.uk

We’ve also been keeping an eye on the impact our changes in October have made to the site. This is always tricky given the other factors which can affect our traffic. News stories, matches, international weeks, transfers all affect the traffic but we have seen some nice increases in dwell time and video usage – especially interesting given the international break when we normally see a bit of a drop off.

The video player on the site is now served in HTML5 to iOS devices allowing iPad and iPhone users to view video in the site. It also delivers the related videos in the player, similar to YouTube. As such we’ve seen an increase in people watching videos that normally would have dropped off the radar – Micah’s fridge for example saw a small surge in traffic when normally it would have long since tailed off.

More changes are to come in this area which we’ll update you with over the next few weeks.

Last week I headed down to that there London for the ‘Lovie Awards’ winners’ party – which boasts a concept I think more awards should adopt in so much as everyone present was a winner. It was great to turn someone and say “so what did you win?”. The YouTube speeches will be available shortly, thankfully filmed at the start of the night so we’ll post a picture of our new haul of awards as soon as they arrive through the post!

Finally congratulations to Richard Ayers who received a DADI award for Individual of the Year, and for adding Joe Hart’s signature “Deeecent” to the acceptance speech, as requested by fans on twitter. Well done!

Hope you enjoy the live streaming – any feedback to mcfcgeeks @ mcfc.co.uk.

Victoria

Weeknote 2

Published November 11, 2011 Weeknotes 2 Comments
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I’ve been off for a couple of weeks and return to find we’re making good progress on more product roll-outs – with improvements to the search system (both algorithm changes and results page template upgrade) coming along. We’re also working on adding a ‘playlist’ element to the video on the citytv homepage which is shaping up nicely.

The site improvements have had a couple of weeks to bed-in and we’ll be getting stats back soon on how people reacted. More video views, for starters I’m sure, because we’re now offering options of related videos.

I’m itching to mention a whole bunch of new services for fans that we’re going to deliver – but I hate jinxing things, so I won’t mention any of them until they’re about to launch – and then it’ll be a sneak preview for readers of this blog. Suffice it to say that we think they’re going to be appreciated by fans, and will stick to our mantra of giving fans more and more access to the club – just like our youtube deal.

Wristbands, cards, rfid and social media

On a totally different note, I noticed this rather interesting article “What happened when a hotel armed social media-loving clubbers with RFID wristbands?” by Kevin May on Tnooz.

It’s something we thought about when putting together the ‘clever card’ with this year’s new membership scheme. We’re working on a range of ideas of how to use the technology best – in a way that gives something to the fans as much as the club – but bearing in mind that all our membership cards at the Etihad use an rfid chip in them to give holders access to the ground – then it’s a short step to thinking about what kind of social media integration we might do. Or my feeling is that there’s more than social media to be done – there’s fun to be had – fun that makes more of match day – and not just in the ground, but across the network of properties that the Club owns.

Anyway, having said I don’t like jinxing things, perhaps I’ll stop there. But, as ever, we’re interested in any thoughts you might have on good uses of this technology. Usual contact points: mcfcgeeks [at] mcfc.co.uk and @mcfcgeeks, or talk to me on @richardayers.

One final thing:

We’re up for an award – tonight at The Drum Awards for Digital Industries (@dadiawards) in Leeds, where there are some really great entries in a whole range of categories. Our iPhone app, developed by our builders at Aqueduct is one of the finalists in the Use of Mobile category, but it’s well worth checking out some of the other creative work.

Also, we’re delighted to be honoured with two Lovies – the first European awards from Internet Week Europe. We got a silver award for the website in the Sports category (there wasn’t a gold award in that one) and another silver in the News category for the iPhone app. Which, as they say, is nice.

 

 

 

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