Photo: Muhammad Ghafari / Flickr

As reported recently by NPR, a crucial World Cup qualifying match between Ghana and Egypt took place at the military-owned Air Defense Stadium in Cairo, Egypt. The first international game since the 2011 uprising met great concern from the visiting team, with Ghana repeatedly requesting a location change.

FIFA determined that additional security measures were sufficient, and aside from a few flares lobbed onto the pitch, no significant incidents were reported. Even the protests in Tahrir Square quieted during the game, as hundreds of citizens shifted their attention to a large display screen broadcasting the match.

From an AP report:
“Tuesday’s game at the military Air Defense Stadium was the first international in the troubled Egyptian capital since 2011 and one of the first games to have such a big crowd since the Port Said disaster last year. More than 70 people were killed in a football riot in the Suez Canal city, a disaster that changed the face of Egyptian football and forced games to be taken away from Cairo.”

You may have noticed that I’m one of the newest members of the IAVM staff here in Texas. As I’ve been telling my friends and former co-workers about my new job, I keep getting asked what it is exactly that IAVM does or who makes up the association. I usually share with them a textbook definition, but that rarely hits on an emotional level.

Now, though, there’s something we can all share with people who want to know more about IAVM. It’s our membership video, and we just released it into the wild. It’s right there above all this text, and you can watch it, too. Please feel free to share it with current members and future members. And let us know in the comments your thoughts about it.

Thank you for being a member, and thank you for having me on board.

One of our members, Michael Marion, passed along some information from Ticketmaster. It’s about scalping and a way to help stop it. It’s good info, so we thought we’d share it with you, too.

“There are a number of ways resellers trick fans into thinking they’ve found your website,” Ticketmaster wrote. “Many buy URLs that feature your trademarks, using them in Paid Search to give the perception of being directly affiliated with you. Others use your trademarks in ad copy, even going so far as to say it’s the ‘official’ place to buy your tickets. Often times fans don’t realize they’ve bought secondary tickets; or worse, they show up at the gate and discover the tickets are fraudulent. The results are bad for the fan, bad for you and bad for the industry.”

Ticketmaster is working with Google to fix this problem. Using Google Whitelist, you can “better protect both your intellectual property and your fans by limiting the user of your trademarks by other parties in their paid search ad copy.”

Here’s how you can participate:

1. Compile a complete list of words/text that you have trademarked into this pre-formatted Google Whitelist spreadsheet.
2. Complete the Letter of Authorization, which lets Google know you’re authorizing Ticketmaster to submit the request on your behalf.
3. Send this information to your Ticketmaster representative, who will submit it on your behalf.

“Please also encourage your live event ticketing peers to participate in Google Whitelist,” Tickemaster wrote. “As adoption grows, Google can monitor patterns of abuse and develop algorithms that prevent the abuse of your trademarks. While it’s in Google’s best interest to reduce trademark abuse and fraud on their platform, it’s in yours to protect your fans—and get them coming directly to you again for tickets.”

(photo credit: Newhaircut via photopin cc)

Many of us have a distinct memory of something that may not be the most monumental event in our lives, but somehow it stands out beyond all of the other daily experiences we accumulate. It might be a summer camp memory, sitting around a fire determining the maximum amount of marshmallows one can stuff into one’s mouth. Or perhaps it’s the memory of a first week away at college, playing volleyball on the dorm lawn. There is actually a term for this kind of memory—it’s called a Context-Dependent Memory, and all it takes is the taste of a marshmallow or the smell of cut grass to trigger the memory’s reappearance.

So why are we talking about marshmallows and context-dependent memory to a bunch of venue managers?
Here’s why. Continue Reading →

There’s a maxim written in stone at Delphi that has guided humans for hundreds of years, and it’s “Know Thyself.” This maxim is key for leaders looking to implement change in an organization.

According to Dr. Johan Coetsee—a senior lecturer in organization and human resource management at Northumbria University, Newcastle—leaders are only successful if they have a deep understanding of themselves and their impact on others.

Coetsee interviewed 27 CEOs of multinational companies and public sector organizations in the U.K. and Ireland to determine how they managed change successfully. He discovered that authenticity and attitude—more so than a change management model—factored predominately in winning over employees in transitioning an organization.

“Many managers are very good in terms of the technical aspects of change. They are able to identify the change to structure or implementation but they forget the softer side of change management—the employees,” he said. “If a leader wants to create alignment between their vision and their people, they need to ask themselves how they feel about change on a personal level. Successful CEOs place a high emphasis on being authentic, being themselves. People need to be able to trust you. If you’re not a charismatic leader, there is no point faking it as you will lack authenticity, instead you need to understand who you are and what your values are. Your attitude to change will influence how the change occurs and whether it will be successful.”

Of course, change is constant.

“Managing change initiatives successfully can be the difference between organisations and teams that thrive and those that come apart at the seams,” he said. “Winning hearts and minds is key, as being good at managing a project isn’t the same as being a good manager of change. You need to create a sense of readiness for change.”

Gives you something to thing about, eh?

(photo credit: QuotesEverlasting via photopin cc)