Building on 32 years of futbol history as an official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup (although a formal relationship began in 1974), the Coca-Cola Company recently launched a global ad campaign centered around its current theme of “Open Happiness” and backed by an aggressive digital strategy.

This campaign comes off the heels of the soon-to-conclude FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour which to date has seen the famed 18-carat gold trophy travel 93,958 miles (151,217 km) in over 225 days, crossing five continents and touching the lives of more than 500,000 futbol fans. The tour, which began on September 19, 2009 will do one final circuit in South Africa.

In the last couple of years, the world’s marque sports shoe and apparel company has faced increased competition from a reinvented brand in adidas and the innovative newcomer Under Armour.  Between the two competitors, adidas has a particularly strong social media presence. Their adidas Originals Facebook Page boasts nearly 3 million people that “Like” the brand while the Official Under Armour Facebook Page has over 220,000 “Likes”.

Nike elects to take a slightly different approach by leveraging fan created Pages on Facebook in addition to their official Pages like Nike Football and Nike Sportswear, but beyond Facebook and Twitter, one of the most critical keys to the Beaverton, Oregon-based company’s success is their viral video marketing strategy.  Nike protects its house by consistently reaching millions of global fans on YouTube.

In the second installment of our “Facebook Fan Page Tips” series, we showed you the basic steps for setting up your new Facebook Page such as uploading the most effective profile picture, adding information, and hooking your page up to Faceobok Mobile for the ability to update on the move.

One of the most attractive benefits of the Facebook Platform for building your digital brand equity is the massive global audience and the potential to reach new fans/consumers.  For this reason, it makes a lot of sense for you (whether a personal brand or corporate brand) to syndicate your blog to your Facebook Page where people have opted-in to join your niche conversation.  This way, every time you post new information that your fans/consumers may be interested in reading, the conversation is brought directly to them.

This week’s Saturday Night Live episode hosted by former Golden Girls star, 88 year-old Betty White, claimed the highest ratings and largest audience since November 1, 2008 when John McCain and Sarah Palin appeared. And who do they have to thank? A fan and his Facebook Page.

After White starred in a viral Super Bowl Snickers commercial, a 29-year old superfan named David Matthews took to the 450+ million user platform in an attempt to garner 5,000 fans before writing a letter to SNL producer Lorne Michaels.

After being picked up by USA Today and Perez Hilton, Matthews says the Page jumped from 8,300 fans to over 22,000. According to AllFacebook, the Page went from 30,000 to 230,000 fans last week. The “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!” Facebook Page now claims over half a million “likes” or “fans”, which is simply astonishing.

In case you didn’t already know by now, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his Director of Products, Brett Taylor (former Co-Founder and CEO of Friendfeed) introduced the next iteration of the Facebook Platform called the Open Graph to the web developer community, and it was generally well received by the public at large—at least on the content provider side.

Despite this announcement coming a mere two weeks ago on April 21, 2010 at the company’s third annual f8 conference, the Facebook Like Button was already implemented on over 50,000 websites and was seen tens of billions of times globally. In fact, the Like Button instantly exceeded 1 billion impressions in less than 24 hours with only 75 major websites using it at launch.

But what exactly does this mean for the sports marketing world, and what about you Joe fan?

Let’s get one thing straight upfront—social media is not as easy as “if you build it, they will come” for any athlete, team, league, or sponsor looking to establish or enhance brand equity.  Social media marketing is no different than traditional off-line marketing in that it requires a well thought out strategy, devoted resources, and a budget targeted at a reaching a measurable goal for the individual or organization.

With that said, social media’s major advantages—the cost-to-creativity ratio and the ability to expand reach via an engaged audience (key word here is “engaged” but I’ll explain more)—make this form of marketing so powerful that most athletes looking to enhance their salaries with fat endorsement checks should be asking their agency, management team, or friends and family why social media isn’t a part of their overall marketing strategy.