As I watch my Facebook mini-feed update the latest public opinions and news, I see my screen filled with World Cup commentary. The World Cup Fever has spread from country to country and from one social media platform to another. This enormous amount of wired talk has even broken records, for instance it has set the new tweet record on twitter.
Thursday June 24th during the Japan vs. Denmark match, 3,282 Tweets flew across the stream every second, beating the previous record by almost 200.
Many companies are noticing the passion and excitement in the social media medium during the games and are becoming a part of it. During the earlier round of the World Cup, Coca Cola used twitter to promote trends. Coca Cola’s Global Interactive Marketing Vice President Carol Kruse shared his excitement:
“The amount of impressions in such a short period of time around our whole World Cup campaign, to me it was a phenomenal time. It made this emotional connection at the time, it was great!”
Brian Solis, points out in his blog that in the first 24 hours, Coca-Cola’s Promoted Trend earned 86 million impressions and an engagement rate of 6% compared to approximately 0.02% of people who click on regular online advertisements.
Budweiser and the New York Times also took advantage of the public’s World Cup buzz.
As the official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup, Budweiser took their approach to the next level. The company has utilized all emerging media mediums available, interacting with fans on a daily basis. They have created the website BudUnited.com which uses YouTube to air an original reality series. The channel already has already earned over 3.5 million views with an average engagement time of 11 minutes. And, it’s only going to continue to grow as the World Cup intensifies.
It is nothing new for brands to follow their audience to new mediums and adapt to their targets interest as they change over time. To maintain relevance in the consumer’s eyes, brands must become a part of the likes and dislike of their audience. Using the World Cup as a platform has shown positive results in relation to consumer response and interaction continuing to build brand/ consumer relationships.
Interesting post on the fever surrounding the World Cup. For as much as soccer is bashed or viewed as a sport that doesn’t have that many fans, it is surprising to read the effects the World Cup is having on sites such as Twitter. My guess is that the fever can be attributed to either one of two reasons:
A) Bandwagon fans. Scrolling down my Facebook News Feed during the World Cup brought some unexpected status updates from friends I wouldn’t consider to be soccer fans. Maybe they caught the World Cup fever, but my guess is that there might have been a few cases where people didn’t want to be left out.
B) It only takes a dedicated following to make a difference. Someone with 20,000 Twitter followers may not have nearly as many tweets or rethreads as someone with only 2,000 followers. If a company or account has a loyal following, they will interact with the brand. Although it may be a smaller following, soccer fans are known to be very passionate. Therefore, it makes sense that they would transfer their passion to Facebook and Twitter.
Good post!