As the world’s biggest sport event is coming in the next three days, its heat is spreading further and hotter than ever before. The world is going to stop for a month to watch out the game.
Sport connects people. And so do social media. With more than 40 million active Facebook users, 50 million daily tweets and millions of views on Youtube everyday, social media have been becoming more popular since the previous game in 2006. So this will be the first World Cup experiencing the explosive growth of social marketing. There’s buzz about the role the social media will play in the action off the field. The only question: What have you seen, here and there?
FIFA developed its own service
FIFA has plans to get in on the action with its own social networking service called TheClub on its official website. There are more than 1.6 million members attended so far, who connect to other fans around the world.
Social networking sites are ready
The marketing strategies of World Cup 2010 include the use of Facebook sites to connect fans on global and regional levels and Twitter accounts to provide updates on the preliminary news and action. It’s expected to drive a record amount of social media traffic as users descend on Twitter and Facebook to critique refereeing decisions, celebrate goals or simply taunt the opposition.
- Facebook has an app that ranks soccer passion based on number of “Likes” fans hit for their team, divided by the number of Internet users in that country. Moreover, football fans have already participated in Facebok fanpages and groups and got daily updates about this global "social" event in advance of the 32 team competition.
- Twitter has already commented that they expect this year’s World Cup to drive more online traffic than the U.S. presidential election and the Super Bowl. Very much like the Winter Olympics look for Twitter to be a tremendous source for 2010 World Cup breaking in the moment news, insight and reactions.
Brands are getting more social
FIFA sponsors and partners have also evolved their strategies for building and sustaining online buzz around the tournament. Brands have multiple planned online touch points for the World Cup. They are also directly or indirectly participating in World Cup social media marketing related endeavors.
- Coca-Cola has launched an online contest called the ‘Longest Celebration’ competition , inspired by Roger Milla’s post-goal dance at Italia ’90, which allegedly inspired a new generation of dance moves. The contest simply encourages users around the world to upload their own creative goal celebrations to YouTube.
- Budweiser takes creativity to the next level with the “Bud House”- an online reality show featuring one fan from each of the 32 qualifying countries living in a house in Cape Town with contestants eliminated when their team is knocked out
- McDonalds launched its online World Cup Predictor, in the form of an online fanstasy tournament, asking fans to use their knowledge to predict which teams will win which games, round-by-round
- Sony Ericsson has launched the Twittercup which appears to be an online competition at its very simplest – the more tweets your nation receives, the further they go in the cup. Launched in December 2009, the Twittercup has already amassed 43,000 tweets
- Castrol is launching the ‘Castrol Index’ and Castrol Predictor apps this month – the first a system for rating players (measuring passes, tackles and moves) housed on www.fifa.com to find the team of the tournament, the second using past team and player performance data to calculate which nations have the best chance of success at South Africa 2010
The real question is what kind of impact are these campaigns going to have on helping brands get the online traction their multi-million dollar investment demands?
