The World Cup in the "Newer" Age

With social media usage on the rise, this year’s World Cup will be unlike any other.
In 2006, when the last World Cup took place in Germany, only the networked elite really used social media. Since then, Twitter and StumbleUpon have become household words.

Here’s the math: Twitter has 105 million registered users, Facebook has more than 400 million users and soccer is the world’s most popular sport. The likely result? An incredible surge of social media usage by fans who want to share feedback, frustrations and celebrations in real time.

FIFA clearly realizes the power social media will have on the World Cup. In fact, a social networking group on FIFA.com has 1.6 million members, but the organization is planning on incorporating the website into Facebook Connect. There will also be an official World Cup Twitter account launched before the tournament.

So why the hype?

Social media sites created a buzz around the Oscars, Super Bowl and shuttle launch, but this will be one of the first truly global events that entire populations around the world will be tuned in to and interested in discussing.



In addition to the interaction of fans, there will likely be an increase of players who will be tweeting and updating their statuses from the sidelines–or as close to the sidelines as possible. Like the NBA, FIFA has issued guidelines that restrict players tweets inside the World Cup stadiums; individual nations will be responsible for imposing further restrictions. England’s coach Fabio Capello wasted no time in banning his players from posting to Twitter or Facebook during the World Cup, and other nations are likely to follow.

The folks at Twitter know the company has the potential to become even more popular during the World Cup, and they’ve even gone so far as to create deals with cell phone companies in select countries so that subscribers can send and receive tweets for free.

Though I think the ability to talk about the World Cup in real time with other people around the world is fascinating, I hope that this global interaction will open dialogue on other important issues beyond the soccer stadium. Perhaps people will use this opportunity to learn more about politics in South Africa or other African nations, or even to discuss the social impact of large-scale events like the World Cup. Either way, the interaction of social media with the World Cup will be something worth tweeting about.

Community Connection:
If you’d like to follow along with the World Cup in real time, check out the already-created hashtag #WC2010 and keep an eye on Twitter’s trending topics.



matadorsports.com

Soccer fans have never been shy about expressing their opinions, but this year's World Cup in South Africa which will be the first of the "social media age" according to many may see record levels of global interactivity. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were in their infancy in 2006, when the last World Cup took place in Germany, but have since exploded in popularity.

Social media now connects millions around the world 50 million tweets are sent daily while Facebook boasts more than 400 million active users a development that will allow fans separated by distance to celebrate goals or critique referee decisions together online.

"Football is the world's biggest sport, so the world will practically stop for the month of the World Cup," Matt Stone, head of new media for world soccer's governing body FIFA, told CNN. FIFA has its own social-networking service on FIFA.com -- called "The Club" -- which has 1.6 million members, but the organization is about to make a bigger push into social media. Stone said that Facebook Connect, which allows Web sites to be shared on Facebook, will be incorporated into FIFA.com and that FIFA plans to launch official Twitter accounts for the World Cup too. Stone would not give specifics but he said the accounts may include tweets from people in the "top echelons" of FIFA. Could that mean tweets from FIFA president Sepp Blatter himself? Stone wouldn't say, but he promised some "exciting announcements in May."



Regardless of who does the tweeting for FIFA, expect to see a lot of tweets flying back and forth between fans when the action starts on June 11. The match between the United States and England on the tournament's second day should be particularly fun to monitor on Twitter.

"Our notion is that [the World Cup] will eclipse everything we have seen so far [on Twitter] including the U.S. election, the Oscars or the Super Bowl, simply because it is so international," Robin Sloan, a Twitter employee that works on media partnerships, told CNN. Sloan suspects that during the month-long tournament, terms related to the World Cup will rank highly among the service's "Trending Topics," a measure of the most popular discussions on Twitter. [The World Cup] will eclipse everything we have seen so far including the U.S. elections and the Super Bowl - Robin Sloan, Twitter

Although Twitter is based in the U.S., where soccer is not as popular in other parts of the world, the service is seeing its fastest growth outside of America, Sloan said. The service is now available in six languages, there are plans to add more, and a recent report found that only half of all tweets are in English. Twitter is also striking deals with mobile providers in other countries so that it is free for subscribers to send and receive tweets on their phones.

Sloan said this is particularly important in countries such as South Africa, where access to computers and smart phones is limited. And it won't be just fans tweeting about the World Cup.



Several top players including Brazil star Kaka and Landon Donovan of the U.S. are active on Twitter. Stone said FIFA has issued guidelines that players should not tweet from inside the World Cup stadiums, and it is up to individual nations to impose further restrictions.
Already, England coach Fabio Capello has reportedly banned his players from posting to Twitter or Facebook during the World Cup. When there is a great goal, or a controversial penalty, fans will likely turn to video sharing site YouTube to watch the watch plays, create parody or "mashup" videos and record their own reactions.

"Things like the World Cup really excite us because we see a level of engagement and interaction beyond what we normally see," YouTube's sports manager Andrew Bangs told CNN."Within minutes of the World Cup starting, we will certainly see thousands and thousands of uploads about the World Cup."



In 2006, after French player Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi of Italy, hundreds of videos parodying the play were posted on YouTube. Some videos placed Zidane in a video game while others showed him in well-known movie scenes. YouTube's popularity has surged since 2006 thanks in part to the advent of inexpensive video cameras and cell phones that can record and instantly upload video to the Web.

Bangs predicts there will be more mashups and parodies during the World Cup as well as videos examining the political implications of an African nation hosting the tournament for the first time.

He also says there will be lots of videos where fans put the camera on top of their television and record themselves reacting to a goal or red card decision, a relatively new phenomenon. "We will see no limit to the uses and creativity that emerge around the World Cup," Bangs said.

cnn.com

No one can deny the growing popularity of the iphone. These smartphones are taking over the cellular world one user at a time. Apple has continued its pursuit of global smartphone domination and for the most part succeeded. Roughly 60,000 iPhones were sold in South Korea on the first day they were available. While that hardly comes close to the 1 million iPhone3G S models sold in the United States upon its arrival, only 400,000 smartphones have been sold in South Korea, which has one of the largest mobile subscriber bases in Asia.



The end of an iPhone exclusivity agreement in Europe has also boosted sales. An impressive 600,000 iPhone handsets were sold during the third quarter in France alone, according to Tech Radar.

The advantages of networks like Facebook makes communication extremely simple between mass amounts of people. This convenience is responsible for many people having tons of friends on Facebook and not really knowing half of them. This also creates the problem of having "fake" people pose on Facebook which is creepy.

Another issue that is brought up with Facebook is the massive amount of people that use the networking to try and drag you into their pyramid scams. I'm sure about everyone gets these messages from a guys who knows a guy who knows you. The messages usually consists of some friendly greeting followed by "I know we really don't know each other" and then a job proposition in which you can work your own hours with great pay and all that jazz. This gets annoying fast because of its constant recurrence.

I believe that Facebook is a great tool and has many advantages but these problems I have recently experienced bring the minor drawbacks to light.

As the social media trend continues to pull everyone into it more and more companies are beginning to rely on socail media as a buisness tool. This trend of marking does not exclude the sports world. With big-time pro sporting events coming up in Charlotte, sports leaders are relying more heavily than ever on social media to ramp up buzz and sell tickets.



From basketball to NASCAR to hockey, local sports organizations in recent weeks have used ticket incentives and other giveaways to rack up thousands of new online fans and followers. But the soaring totals raise the same questions many observers ask when it comes to businesses using Facebook and Twitter as marketing tools. How exactly do you calculate the return on investment? And are these really devoted fans who will spend money over the long haul, or will they fade away like the Twitter ticket specials and Facebook giveaways that brought them? "It's still a new area," said Eric Boggs, founder and CEO of Argyle Social, a social media consulting firm in Durham. "The social Web has been around a long time, but businesses are just now beginning to use it" for marketing.

The Charlotte Bobcats, who played their first home playoff game this weekend, got an indication of the power of social media when they let their Facebook fans and Twitter followers buy tickets to tonight's game before the general public.




Within a week, the team added about 3,000 Facebook fans and about 1,000 Twitter followers. Team officials couldn't immediately calculate how many of those new followers bought tickets, but Bobcats President Fred Whitfield said he feels certain the social media exposure helped accelerate sales.

The team sold 13,000 advance tickets for today's playoff game against the Orlando Magic - nearly 4,000 more than ticket totals for the last home playoff game the Charlotte Hornets played in 2002, long before Facebook and Twitter became popular. Whitfield plans to repeat the advance ticket offer on social media for the Bobcats' second home playoff game.

"We see social media becoming a really effective marketing tool," he said. "The whole social media platform gives us the opportunity to really connect with the consumers who are most interested in us."

newsobserver.com

It can't be explained as "a universal log-in," but Facebook's huge amount of announcements on Wednesday at the company's F8 developers conference reveal some of the social network's biggest moves yet.



Facebook has now built deeper, stronger pipes that will pull in more information from partner sites and push more social-media capabilities out to them in turn--Open Graph, which integrates third-party data into Facebook in a far more complex way than its Facebook Connect predecessor; Social Plugins, which add a smattering of social features to those publishers; and the revamped Graph API, which overhauls Facebook's platform code to make it simpler and more flexible.

One of the promotional materials for an additional F8 debut, the nascent RFID-based project called Facebook Presence, quoted the "Back to the Future" line "where we're going, we don't need roads." That's sort of ironic, because the truth is that Facebook knows the social Web is in need of roads, so as to speak, and it has anointed itself as the builder and operator of that infrastructure.



This will affect everyone from the developers who filled the San Francisco Design Center Concourse's halls for CEO Mark Zuckerberg's keynote address, to digital publishers and other social-media sites, to each of Facebook's 400 million-plus members. It's also likely going to mean some changes in direction at the other companies that have built or are building tools that also want to lay the groundwork for a lasting social Web--and by this, I mean Twitter and Google.

Indeed, many of the concepts that Facebook executives unveiled aren't totally new ideas. They borrow, at least in theory, from everything from Google Friend Connect to Meebo's chat bar to Digg's thumbs-up buttons. But Facebook, once again, is using its melange of marketing, engineering, and design expertise, which draws the occasional comparison to Apple's, to pitch a subtle message to the developers and publishers of the Web: they can do it, but we can do it better. And people are buying it.

cnet.com

Technology is getting insanely realistic