USA Bid Committee having a ball keeping its fans engaged

The World Cup ended nearly a month ago. And FIFA won’t award the 2018 and 2022 World Cup host cities until December.

So if you’re the USA Bid Committee, hoping for one of those two coveted selections, how do you keep the casual and hard-core soccer fan excited and engaged in the interim?

Keeping fans involved is a big issue for a lot of sports that have gaps between big events or rallying points. Most Olympic sports fall in this category. The key is creating compelling content and a reason for people to engage on an ongoing basis. GoUSAbid.com has faced this challenge since the site was launched, and it has more than met the challenge every step of the way.

An opportunity to win an autographed soccer ball, signed by the U.S. men’s national team, is the latest lure. That’s what the folks at GoUSAbid.com are offering for the low, low price of inviting five friends to sign up and support the bid. Its goal is to get a million fans to back the effort. The autographed ball is the perfect short-term vehicle to help reach its goal, add to its database and extend the scope of its viral campaign.

It’s another smart effort by the committee, which is working on the behalf of the U.S. Soccer Federation in its effort to bring the World Cup back to the U.S. With more than 917,000 people having already signed the petition, breaking the million mark is a sure bet.

Social media campaigns help hand Nike the World Cup crown

The World Cup won’t end for another 17 days. But we don’t need to wait that long to know the winner of the brand wars. It’s Nike, hands down.

Rival adidas is one of the official sponsors of the World Cup, but with Nike dominating TV, online and print media, adidas may as well be brand X.

When award-winning Wieden + Kennedy partners with Oscar-nominated director Alejandro G. Inarritu (21 Grams, Amores Perros and Babel leap to mind), it’s no surprise that the campaign they create would be memorable.

And Nike’s “Write The Future” commercial delivers on that promise. It’s a stirring three-minute paean to the sport and its stars, including Didier Drogba, Fabio Cannavaro, Franck Ribery, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo (not to mention cameos by Roger Federer, Kobe Bryant and Homer Simpson).

But what truly elevates Nike’s brand is the use of social media surrounding the campaign. It has done a great job of engaging users in creative ways by incorporating Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, among other platforms.

GoUSABid lays foundation for U.S. Soccer and World Cup

While the eyes of the world will turn to South Africa this week for the start of the World Cup, the USA Bid Committee has been working hard to ensure the eyes of the world will be on the U.S. come 2018 or 2022.

For a study on a website and an initiative done well, simply take a look at GoUSAbid.com, created by the USA Bid Committee. It is a separate entity from the U.S. Soccer Federation but it is working on behalf of the USSF.

The goal of the committee is to get FIFA to award the World Cup to the U.S. in either 2018 or 2022 (FIFA will award both in one round of bidding, an unusually efficient approach). The goal of the site is get people actively involved, grow their fan base, increase their database of names and capitalize on the surge in interest that comes with a World Cup.

GoUSAbid.com is a well-designed, well-planned, well-executed effort. It has already prompted more than 450,000 people to sign a petition to bring the tournament back to the U.S. (which hosted the tournament in 1994), a decision FIFA will make in December.

Chicago Tribune's gaffe on Pronger compounded in digital time

In this digital age of instant everything -- with live news and video at our fingertips -- newspapers still have the luxury of time, time to get things right.

That isn’t always the case, though, and the Chicago Tribune’s special pullout poster Tuesday is living proof of that.

With the Stanley Cup finals being played between Chicago and Philadelphia, the Tribune printed a poster of Philadelphia’s Chris Pronger. In a dress. With a headline that says Pronger “looks like Tarzan, skates like Jane.” Seriously.

The poster is demeaning to women. There is no gray area here. This wasn’t a case of poorly chosen words tumbling from the mouth of a corporate executive -- like BP’s CEO and his now infamous “I'd like my life back” quote -- or a bad headline that lived briefly on the Internet.

New technology coming to social media near you

Two recent stories in Advertising Age underscore the power of Facebook, and how companies need to stay vigilant about adapting and exploiting emerging technologies via social media platforms.

The first story focused on how Facebook was nearing a launch date for its location-based functionality. The second reported how magazines would be able to sell subscriptions within Facebook’s news feed.


Location-based services (LBS) are a hot topic this year in social media, much as 3D is for the television industry. So when a behemoth like Facebook -- with its more than 450 million users -- announces adoption of LBS, companies need to take note. The same is true for the system Facebook will try to introduce offering users the ability to purchase subscriptions without leaving their site. The key phrase there being “without leaving their site.”

How companies can best leverage either technology is obviously dependent on what business they’re in, but it is important to be aware of emerging technologies and start thinking about what they could mean for your organization. Not long ago, LBS was one in a sea of new ideas, but it has grown quickly into something Facebook wants to leverage. There are others on the horizon, like QR codes and augmented reality, which could work their way toward mainstream use as well.

Magazines to sell subscriptions within Facebook’s news feed {Advertising Age}
Mags look to Facebook to hawk print subscriptions {Paid Content}
What will Facebook’s upcoming location-based service look like? {Mobile Beat}
Facebook poised to take geo-networking mainstream {Advertising Age}
How Facebook's geo-netoworking plans will change everything {Advertising Age}

Revamped MSN homepage embraces changing digital environment

MSN rolled out a new homepage Wednesday. Or more precisely, it’s in the process of rolling it out to the site’s 100 million users.  MSN’s initial redesign began last November when it was road-tested for a small segment of its users to solicit feedback.

In addition to revamping its design - its first serious makeover in a decade - Microsoft added a number of new features. Prominent among those features is a large push for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. With Bing showing steady growth in the share of search queries, this comes as no surprise.

The redesign also incorporates a new module for local news, another fast-growing segment of MSN’s site traffic. Additionally, MSN has aggregated its social networking, with popular trend watches, Hotmail, Twitter and Facebook tabs.

All of this isn’t to say the new MSN homepage is a success or failure. Change isn’t easy for a lot of users, and the loss of the MSN’s trademark blue background alone will be enough to cause some initial anxiety.

Twitter: The little platform that could -- and did

Twitter, which surpassed its 10 billionth tweet on Thursday, is in a lot of ways the perfect example of how important having a social media strategy -- and a social media strategist -- is in the current digital climate.

Less than two years ago, Twitter was a roundly dismissed microblog that conjured images of people tweeting what they were planning to have for lunch. But it quickly became the little platform that could. Its simplicity became its beauty. The masses flocked to it, celebrities enhanced it, and businesses finally embraced it.

Now, it's an essential part of any content strategy. It's simply expected. Users demand social media today. The Web community puts a high premium on participation and Twitter has become the digital equivalent of the front porch. And that's a bigger leap than even the numbers -- from one billion tweets in 2008 to 10 billion tweets in just about a year -- indicate.