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.

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.