Which brands are activating the best social media campaigns during the 2010 FIFA World Cup? Does being an official World Cup sponsor or FIFA partner like Adidas give the brand an edge over an unaffiliated competitor like Nike?

Even more interestingly, does focusing budgets on ambush marketing actually present a greater value proposition for brands such as Pepsi whose main competitor Coca-Cola is spending millions of dollars to be officially affiliated with the most popular sporting event in the world? Read our white paper to find out more!

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.

Facebook recently introduced an opt-in list of “Suggested Pages” as another step in the new user registration process. In stride with the recent decision to replace the “Become a Fan” button with “Like”, this appears to be an attempt by Facebook to encourage new users to express their interests and become active.

The phrase, “Connect with your favorite celebrities, businesses and brands to hear the latest news from them”, is displayed above the list.

Yesterday’s 2010 NFL Draft was one of the most anticipated and hotly debated in recent history, both off- and online. Rightfully so, the NFL has made a concerted effort to facilitate and capture fan conversations that are taking place across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and blogging networks.

The key to the NFL’s online social media draft strategy was recognizing that “conversations are happening in a lot of different places,” NFL.com’s General Manager Laura Goldberg said. “We want to make sure we’re aggregating comments no matter where they are.”

In the first installment of our “Facebook Fan Page Tips” series, we showed you how to create a new Page. Now I will walk you through steps to help set up your Page before publishing it to the world.

In this post, I will be focusing on the basic settings, but keep in mind that these seemingly simple instructions are absolutely critical to the success of your Page. Remember you have to crawl before you can walk, and we’ll have you sprinting like Usain Bolt in no time. Click for more to read a step-by-step breakdown of the process.

A few weeks ago, I contributed to an e-book put together by fellow sports and social media enthusiast Jason Peck. The focus of my post was industry predictions for 2010 and given the nature of our work at Activ8Social, I decide to focus on individual athletes. I came up with three primary growth areas to keep an eye on: Promotions, Live Video, and Mobile.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a few examples and decided to point them out to better demonstrate my predictions. Here’s my original post, coupled with a recent example of each primary growth area. Drop me a line and let me know how you see sports and social media growing in 2010 (hopefully by leaps and bounds).

As promised in the initial post last month, all of us here at Activ8Social will be sharing our knowledge on the basics of setting-up, navigating, and managing Facebook Pages—one of the most effective tools capable of developing your brand online.

In this installment of the series, I will show those of you who are unfamiliar with Facebook Pages how to create a new Page from scratch and how to move around the main control panels. Here’s a breakdown of the step-by-step process.

Well-known sports and social media blogger, Jason Peck, released an ebook today that aggregates the opinions and predictions of 16 thought leaders in the sports and social media space.

We are excited that Activ8Social Partner Steve Cobb was included in the first annual release of the compilation. You can find his predictions on pages 21-22.
Sports Social Media Predictions 2010

One of the services that we specialize in at Activ8Social is the creation and management of high volume Facebook pages for professional athletes, brands and other sports entertainment clients. Through our experiences, we’ve become intimately familiar with the Facebook platform and accumulated a long list of best practices that have led to increased fan engagement and ROI for client pages.

The simple definition of a Facebook Page is “a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users”. When you sign up for a regular Facebook user account, you’re given a “Profile” which is private by default. The “Page” feature was created to enable brands (e.g. a product, organization, business, public figure, athlete, band, celebrity, etc.) to connect with fans and consumers in a structured environment within Facebook (see Roger Federer’s page below). It’s an extremely powerful feature with tons of little known secrets and strategies that can go a long way for building brands in a truly authentic and cost-effective manner.