In the isolated silo of club comms, I don't think this bloke can be doing a bad job, they have improved. Nothing the club proposes other than full sale is going to please most fans, but why are we singling this guy out?
Also, there is no way this is damaging his parent company's reputation, no way at all.
Worth trying to remain objective in this, though I still want them out.
Is the current CAFC website fit for purpose? No it isn't. It's slow, hard to navigate, doesn't have the right features and frequently suffers breakdowns of critical functions (notably ticket sales).
Would it be better for the club to go independent again? Quite possibly. There are risks and there are costs, but the benefits to fans and club alike may well outweigh these. I'd like to see it happen.
Is the current poor website the cause of the missing thousands? No. The poor navigation and dysfunctional ticket sales areas may result in a few tens of missing fans, but at the end of the day the vast majority of fans who are interested know when the matches are and how to get tickets. Ultimately though we know that any such claims are utter nonsense, because the other clubs all use the same web provider and they are not experiencing crowd shrinkage on anything like the same scale as Charlton.
Will a new website create a turnaround in club fortunes? Absolutely not. The club is in a shocking mess because of the total and utter incompetence of Duchatelet and Meire. Fans are staying away out of frustration with, and protest against, their regime. The regime are incapable of delivering competitive football, they have broken all bonds between club administration and club fans. Nothing with invigorate this club until these jokers depart.
Is Meire really keen on online feedback? Oh yes, so keen in fact that she instructed to PR guys to get it all removed from Google search lists, so that all that it could be buried and ignored.
Is the rubbershowtoms website really 'the most exciting thing coming out of Charlton'? Unfortunately, I think it probably is.
In the isolated silo of club comms, I don't think this bloke can be doing a bad job, they have improved. Nothing the club proposes other than full sale is going to please most fans, but why are we singling this guy out?
Also, there is no way this is damaging his parent company's reputation, no way at all.
Worth trying to remain objective in this, though I still want them out.
Yes, in his small section of the club, the new website is I guess quite important. Obviously it's small fry when you look at the bigger picture, but then if the club is secretly up for sale, there's probably not a lot they can say anyway
The ten year deal for the generic EFI site runs out this summer.
The club is planning to bring the website I. House which if you're head if comms is a big deal.
The site should be a lot better, more flexible and more specific to CAFC.
So for example the comms team borrowed all the museum's old videos and DVD so that they have a library of clips available.
Not actually heard what Rubashow has said other than CharltonKeston saying it was nothing like what is being claimed.
Hence the request for some facts.
Do the old videos and DVDs come with broadcast rights? Can we assume they have the rights issues sorted?
The club has a non-exclusive share in all the rights to its own matches, certainly from the Premier League era onwards. I doubt if it was written into the TV deals of the 70s and early 80s as nobody would have foreseen the clubs having much use for those rights at that stage, but in practice I don't imagine there there would ever be a problem with the TV companies. The older newsreel footage is more questionable, particularly as we bought it for the centenary DVD in 2005. I wouldn't know for sure at this stage if there were any rights included beyond the DVD in that, although I would think not, and it's extremely unlikely anyone at the club would either. They may, of course, have done a separate deal.
Win football matches. Get promoted. Be successful football wise- or at least seriously attempt to achieve this. That is the way to obtain consistently high attendances.
You could have Bill Gates and Google tailor design a personalised website for the club but so long as the footballing success is not a priority or achieved then there will not be a significant rise consistently higher attendances.
Get the football part right and the crowds will flock.
This is not complicated and how it cannot be grasped after 3+ years is ridiculous.
In the isolated silo of club comms, I don't think this bloke can be doing a bad job, they have improved. Nothing the club proposes other than full sale is going to please most fans, but why are we singling this guy out?
Also, there is no way this is damaging his parent company's reputation, no way at all.
Worth trying to remain objective in this, though I still want them out.
Yes, in his small section of the club, the new website is I guess quite important. Obviously it's small fry when you look at the bigger picture, but then if the club is secretly up for sale, there's probably not a lot they can say anyway
I'm inclined to agree with this - anything truly meaningful (as if they were going to do anything fitting that description anyway) will be on hold pending a sale. Faffing about with a website that i suspect not that many people use except to buy tickets isn't going to upset a propsective buyer's plans, but comitting to millions of capex on the training ground would.
In the isolated silo of club comms, I don't think this bloke can be doing a bad job, they have improved. Nothing the club proposes other than full sale is going to please most fans, but why are we singling this guy out?
Also, there is no way this is damaging his parent company's reputation, no way at all.
Worth trying to remain objective in this, though I still want them out.
Really? They have taken a gamble on the the financial remuneration outweighing the risks. But reputation is about what goes on in people's heads. It only needs one person to think worse of them and that is their reputation damaged in some small way. Of course the vast majority of Charlton fans would not be going out to hire a PR or Crisis Management firm, so from that perspective they may be on safe ground, but it only takes one person somewhere to be in a position of power over an account for that to cost them. Just one person making a comment to a friend that these people thought they could salvage a dying football club by introducing of a new website could result in them losing a job bigger than the one they have now. It's all about marginal risks versus marginal gains.
In a sense Super Eddie, I think you probably have a reasonable point, because Charlton is not a big enough concern in the eyes of the nation for them to worry too much about any associated disrepute. However, imagine it was a bigger company, say Man Utd, Marks and Spencer or BT that had been run into the ground by sheer managerial incompetence. Now imagine the reputational damage to them of fiddling about with websites whilst the whole of that business was crashing around their ears. Do you not think that people in the PR industry, and even wider, would not start to question what on earth they were doing? I for one, am absolutely sure that they would.
I worked on a few club websites (Man Utd, Juventus, Rangers to namedrop a few) as a third party and the one way to guarantee they will be unappealing to fans is to let the club control every aspect of them. The bosses very quickly see them as the main way to pump out the official line which almost straight away turns that very audience off. The last people to realise this approach doesn't work are those in charge.
I was part of a presentation to Man Utd which we thought went well - the feedback was good - until a very senior and well-known director, who had been silent, just said: "I don;t care about any of that. How can we make the most money out of fans online?" That sum it up. A new website will be little more than a vehicle to try to get cash out of a dwindling fan base.
Curbs is just one person they have interviewed for the website, he's not launching it or fronting it. We've long needed a new website and now the old deal has run out we'd would have to have one anyway.
No idea what input Meire would have, very little is my guess.
Of all the comments made at the meetings this seems the last to get worked up about.
Most clubs are continuing with a central provider, I think. Charlton were one of the last clubs to join that FL scheme and we were very reluctant to do so, so I am not about to criticise leaving it, but there are considerable risks attached to it.
A number of people came out of the meeting and told me how bemused they were by the heavy emphasis put on it as the way to rebuild attendances. I'd have to share that scepticism.
I remember the debate well. The club were aware of the disadvantages such as the lack of control, the poor look etc but financially it was better and the higher income won the argument and rightly so imho.
Do i have faith in Meire making a considered rational and long term decision beyond "it's pretty"? No, of course not but neither is the website the cause off our problems.
I expect a comms manager to focus on his area of work. I expect a CEO to have a more strategic view. She can't do that and that is the real issue.
The new website sounds good. The business questions are:
How will it generate income above the FLI site?
How will it contribute to our (unknown) strategic goals?
Seth, I'm just wondering if you actually thought that Tom, or anyone else from the club, would answer your question on here?
No I didn't. I am not going after Tom really, if you read my OP it is about how the culture in the leadership have no credible solution to the collapse in the fanbase and offer trinkets instead. If you leave aside the major reasons people stay away, basically because we are a crap football club right now, then it is so much easier to delve into the sofa/house music/curry night solutions then the hard slog solution of re building a decent fan base is avoided. My OP was intended to expose the stupidity of the thinking within the leadership culture of the club, and Tom chairing all these meetings is right in the heart of it. Henry suggests above there are bigger things to get worked up about, and ordinarily I might agree with him except the website is the only idea put forward by the regime has to get people back. I also deliberately challenge this notion from the perspective of supporters who are off grid as it were. I wonder if prioritising the new website came about from extensive fan consultation... like the sofa!
I thought the stuff they said about the website sounded quite good, judging it on a completely standalone basis.
The problem, and the main indication that they really haven't learned from their mistakes, is that they really don't seem to understand that websites, family fun days, improving the matchday programme, selling better food and drink in the kiosks, whatever, none of it matters if your core product - the football team - is rubbish. We don't support a website or a burger bar, but they still seem to be stuck on this ridiculous theory that what happens in the pitch is no more important than the two hours before and after the match when you're supposedly logging onto the website or watching your kids on a bouncy castle in the car park. They don't understand what motivates people to support a football team. They don't understand that, when Charlton were getting crowds of 60,000 and 70,000, there were no websites or family fun days, we just had a great team.
Let us just pray that they are on their way out. Otherwise we're going to be the equivalent of a restaurant that serves appalling food but has really nice tablecloths.
Curbs is just one person they have interviewed for the website, he's not launching it or fronting it. We've long needed a new website and now the old deal has run out we'd would have to have one anyway.
No idea what input Meire would have, very little is my guess.
Of all the comments made at the meetings this seems the last to get worked up about.
Most clubs are continuing with a central provider, I think. Charlton were one of the last clubs to join that FL scheme and we were very reluctant to do so, so I am not about to criticise leaving it, but there are considerable risks attached to it.
A number of people came out of the meeting and told me how bemused they were by the heavy emphasis put on it as the way to rebuild attendances. I'd have to share that scepticism.
I remember the debate well. The club were aware of the disadvantages such as the lack of control, the poor look etc but financially it was better and the higher income won the argument and rightly so imho.
Do i have faith in Meire making a considered rational and long term decision beyond "it's pretty"? No, of course not but neither is the website the cause off our problems.
I expect a comms manager to focus on his area of work. I expect a CEO to have a more strategic view. She can't do that and that is the real issue.
The new website sounds good. The business questions are:
How will it generate income above the FLI site?
How will it contribute to our (unknown) strategic goals?
It wasn't just financially better. The Football League had constructed the payments for internet rights in such a way that clubs which stayed outside their scheme were very heavily punished financially for opting out - we could cope with that in the Championship and in the first season in League One, because it was discovered that the League owed us some money it hadn't paid in previous years. By 2010/11 (pre-Jimenez takeover) the penalty of staying out was crippling.
Call me old fashioned, but I am far more likely to visit the club website if we are having some success on the pitch. To have a 'belts and whistles' site would mean nothing to me if the team is languishing in the low tiers of English football. The thinking behind an improved website, from afar, seems to be - to paraphrase 'Field of Dreams' - 'If we build it, they will come.' Building a new website will not improve things on the pitch, nor will it persuade me to log on to it any more than I do these days, which is once in a blue moon.
Under any regular ownership the old clips being easily available online would be a great idea but under the current owner it is laughable when they have openly admitted to not caring about the history & culture of our club.
How do they think giving us all an easy reminder of our happy memories from the time our club existed with the ultimate goal of winning football matches instead of a shop window for saleable young players that they have turned us in to is going to help win fans back to the club they have destroyed.
" the participants can behave like mini Thomas Driesens"
I'm interested in this but ? Are the club going to provide some sort of formal way to submit scouting ideas.
So will I be able to go on there and suggest we look at the oppositions corners a week or two before we play them? I know it's a novel idea, but someone might just pick it up and put it into a training session.
Win football matches. Get promoted. Be successful football wise- or at least seriously attempt to achieve this. That is the way to obtain consistently high attendances.
You could have Bill Gates and Google tailor design a personalised website for the club but so long as the footballing success is not a priority or achieved then there will not be a significant rise consistently higher attendances.
Get the football part right and the crowds will flock.
This is not complicated and how it cannot be grasped after 3+ years is ridiculous.
You're forgetting that Roland is a visionary. He sees rugby union as our sporting template. We need more polite middle class, less committed fans, who enjoy the whole match day experience, which includes a nice post match meal and a bit of a jig to some Euro house music. Haven't you been paying attention? Who really cares about results if you're having fun?
Seth, I'm just wondering if you actually thought that Tom, or anyone else from the club, would answer your question on here?
No I didn't. I am not going after Tom really, if you read my OP it is about how the culture in the leadership have no credible solution to the collapse in the fanbase and offer trinkets instead. If you leave aside the major reasons people stay away, basically because we are a crap football club right now, then it is so much easier to delve into the sofa/house music/curry night solutions then the hard slog solution of re building a decent fan base is avoided. My OP was intended to expose the stupidity of the thinking within the leadership culture of the club, and Tom chairing all these meetings is right in the heart of it. Henry suggests above there are bigger things to get worked up about, and ordinarily I might agree with him except the website is the only idea put forward by the regime has to get people back. I also deliberately challenge this notion from the perspective of supporters who are off grid as it were. I wonder if prioritising the new website came about from extensive fan consultation... like the sofa!
I understand.
One point I would make though is that just because the football is rubbish (and it is!) that is no reason to give up on anything else.
If the new web site is good it won't help the results on the pitch but that is not a good enough reason to keep a rubbish one.
As a bit of an aside, on Friday at 14:31 I got an email from the club, informing me that they were now streaming live on YouTube the U23 match against QPR. I thought well that's funny, didn't know the U23s were playing today. I'll check though. Turns out the link took me to a match which happened last November. So, what was that all about? Did my email account deliver me something 5 months late? That's worse than Royal Mail.....
As a bit of an aside, on Friday at 14:31 I got an email from the club, informing me that they were now streaming live on YouTube the U23 match against QPR. I thought well that's funny, didn't know the U23s were playing today. I'll check though. Turns out the link took me to a match which happened last November. So, what was that all about? Did my email account deliver me something 5 montgs late? That's worse than Royal Mail.....
Comments
Also, there is no way this is damaging his parent company's reputation, no way at all.
Worth trying to remain objective in this, though I still want them out.
Would it be better for the club to go independent again? Quite possibly. There are risks and there are costs, but the benefits to fans and club alike may well outweigh these. I'd like to see it happen.
Is the current poor website the cause of the missing thousands? No. The poor navigation and dysfunctional ticket sales areas may result in a few tens of missing fans, but at the end of the day the vast majority of fans who are interested know when the matches are and how to get tickets. Ultimately though we know that any such claims are utter nonsense, because the other clubs all use the same web provider and they are not experiencing crowd shrinkage on anything like the same scale as Charlton.
Will a new website create a turnaround in club fortunes? Absolutely not. The club is in a shocking mess because of the total and utter incompetence of Duchatelet and Meire. Fans are staying away out of frustration with, and protest against, their regime. The regime are incapable of delivering competitive football, they have broken all bonds between club administration and club fans. Nothing with invigorate this club until these jokers depart.
Is Meire really keen on online feedback? Oh yes, so keen in fact that she instructed to PR guys to get it all removed from Google search lists, so that all that it could be buried and ignored.
Is the rubbershowtoms website really 'the most exciting thing coming out of Charlton'? Unfortunately, I think it probably is.
Rub_up_the_wrong_way ?
You could have Bill Gates and Google tailor design a personalised website for the club but so long as the footballing success is not a priority or achieved then there will not be a significant rise consistently higher attendances.
Get the football part right and the crowds will flock.
This is not complicated and how it cannot be grasped after 3+ years is ridiculous.
Fingers crossed!
In a sense Super Eddie, I think you probably have a reasonable point, because Charlton is not a big enough concern in the eyes of the nation for them to worry too much about any associated disrepute. However, imagine it was a bigger company, say Man Utd, Marks and Spencer or BT that had been run into the ground by sheer managerial incompetence. Now imagine the reputational damage to them of fiddling about with websites whilst the whole of that business was crashing around their ears. Do you not think that people in the PR industry, and even wider, would not start to question what on earth they were doing? I for one, am absolutely sure that they would.
I was part of a presentation to Man Utd which we thought went well - the feedback was good - until a very senior and well-known director, who had been silent, just said: "I don;t care about any of that. How can we make the most money out of fans online?" That sum it up. A new website will be little more than a vehicle to try to get cash out of a dwindling fan base.
Do i have faith in Meire making a considered rational and long term decision beyond "it's pretty"? No, of course not but neither is the website the cause off our problems.
I expect a comms manager to focus on his area of work. I expect a CEO to have a more strategic view. She can't do that and that is the real issue.
The new website sounds good. The business questions are:
How will it generate income above the FLI site?
How will it contribute to our (unknown) strategic goals?
If you leave aside the major reasons people stay away, basically because we are a crap football club right now, then it is so much easier to delve into the sofa/house music/curry night solutions then the hard slog solution of re building a decent fan base is avoided.
My OP was intended to expose the stupidity of the thinking within the leadership culture of the club, and Tom chairing all these meetings is right in the heart of it.
Henry suggests above there are bigger things to get worked up about, and ordinarily I might agree with him except the website is the only idea put forward by the regime has to get people back. I also deliberately challenge this notion from the perspective of supporters who are off grid as it were.
I wonder if prioritising the new website came about from extensive fan consultation... like the sofa!
The problem, and the main indication that they really haven't learned from their mistakes, is that they really don't seem to understand that websites, family fun days, improving the matchday programme, selling better food and drink in the kiosks, whatever, none of it matters if your core product - the football team - is rubbish. We don't support a website or a burger bar, but they still seem to be stuck on this ridiculous theory that what happens in the pitch is no more important than the two hours before and after the match when you're supposedly logging onto the website or watching your kids on a bouncy castle in the car park. They don't understand what motivates people to support a football team. They don't understand that, when Charlton were getting crowds of 60,000 and 70,000, there were no websites or family fun days, we just had a great team.
Let us just pray that they are on their way out. Otherwise we're going to be the equivalent of a restaurant that serves appalling food but has really nice tablecloths.
How do they think giving us all an easy reminder of our happy memories from the time our club existed with the ultimate goal of winning football matches instead of a shop window for saleable young players that they have turned us in to is going to help win fans back to the club they have destroyed.
We need more polite middle class, less committed fans, who enjoy the whole match day experience, which includes a nice post match meal and a bit of a jig to some Euro house music.
Haven't you been paying attention?
Who really cares about results if you're having fun?
One point I would make though is that just because the football is rubbish (and it is!) that is no reason to give up on anything else.
If the new web site is good it won't help the results on the pitch but that is not a good enough reason to keep a rubbish one.
So, what was that all about? Did my email account deliver me something 5 months late? That's worse than Royal Mail.....