FIFA World Cup 2010 – Without a Social Media Strategy

The FIFA World Cup 2010, the largest sports tournaments in the world, has not implemented a social strategy yet.

Only some more weeks to go till the next World Cup kickoff in South Africa. I decided to take a look on how the FIFA World Cup 2010 was implementing their social media strategy. The FIFA World Cup 2010 is one of the largest sports events worldwide and the 2006 final game was watched by 715.1 million people. The FIFA is one of the most prominent sports organizations and has several millions of active members. In 2006 the non-profit organization documented a profit of 303 million Swiss francs. The main office in Zurich employees 125 people.

While surfing through the official FIFA website, I wanted to check how many followers their Twitter account, Facebook Fanpage and YouTube channel had. Surprisingly I couldn’t find a link to any kind of social media channel. Only a RSS Feed for the news section was on the front page.

So I decided to find their channels manually via search box. This wasn’t as easy as I had anticipated. The Facebook search gave me over 500 results for the term “FIFA World Cup” and sure enough, I found 30 pages with over 1000 fans tagged as “FIFA World Cup 2010″. So sniffing trough the different pages I noticed that none of the Fanpages officially belonged to the FIFA itself, but were all run independently. The sum of these 30 Facebook fanpages accounted for 155’000 “fans” (which of course didn’t include the “long tail”).

Same thing happened with Twitter. The account with the most followers (35’400) was the “unofficial FIFA Soccer tweet” and the following Twitter accounts didn’t look like they were coming from an official side either.

Since the FIFA is giving away a lot of money for advertising, it would be beneficial to have a YouTube channel. So I searched for for one, but was disappointed as well. The only thing I found were fans creating their own FIFA trailers, with comments such as: “IMPORTANT PLEASE READ!!!! If you cannot watch this video because of copyright restrictions , here is the link to the video on Dailymotion” (So the FIFA is not using the viral effect but trying to stop it).

Obviously the FIFA has not implemented a social media strategy yet. Fans out there are screaming for attention and want to participate and engage with the FIFA, as all the “unofficial” pages and accounts could show. By using social media channels, the FIFA could easily gain a fellowship of 200’000 people, since there at least so many already following some unofficial social media channel. I’m sure the FIFA will have something up their sleeve for the World CUp, but since the largest groups are usually the ones people tend to follow, even if the FIFA decides to open official channels, there will be a lot of confusion on which account to follow.

Also the FIFA is facing some threat from social media. Many organizations are forming an alliance against the FIFA, criticizing the expected 2 billion $ profit from the “World Cup” but on the other side having Africans working for less than 1 $ per day. Other companies (e.g. Nestlé) had to realize, that social media can have tremendous power if not handled in the right way and can hurt a companies reputation strongly.

So, it’s about time that the FIFA implements a social media strategy as fast as possible. First to harness the immense marketing power and second to react to criticism coming from social media.