Following on from the success of Manchester City’s Google+ Hangout with Patrick Viera<\/a> two weeks ago, Chelsea FC are the latest club to use the ailing social network as a way to engage with their supporters. Chelsea’s star goalkeeper, Petr Cech<\/a>, hosted a live Google+ Hangout to engage with over 500 fans and talk about fitness, player language barriers, training, the Champions League final and how his head injury affected him.<\/p>\n

The session was due to start at 1pm but it took longer than anticipated to get Cech from the training ground to Chelsea’s media centre. This caused some confusion and deflated the start of the campaign which started some 35 minutes late, but is to be expected considering the club had never done something like this before. Cech answered a number of questions from 5 fans around the world (e.g. Ghana, United States, England, Sweden & Austria) that had been selected in advance.<\/p>\n

It’s fair to say that football clubs have struggled to find a use for Google’s own social network (as have many other brands!), but this is a great development by Chelsea and Manchester City – showing they are not scared to at least be the first to try something new. Chelsea currently are the 5th largest club on Twitter<\/a> worldwide with 1.4 million followers and also have a hefty 12.3 million on Facebook<\/a>. Chelsea’s own Google+ presence<\/a> is quite impressive with over 2 million +1s.<\/p>\n