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!

Odds are if you’re responsible for the digital marketing or social media strategy of an athlete, celebrity, team, league, or company, you will be considering how best to leverage Facebook’s relatively new Social Plugins on an official website or blog.

If you meet this profile, you may find yourself asking “what features does Facebook now provide for my website, how easy is it to implement, and what does all mean”?  For an in depth look into the last question, check out our blog post from last month on the f8 conference.  For part one and part two, we’ve gone ahead and compiled a quick overview that should shed a little light on the basics.

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.

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.”

Who’s the top athlete on Facebook? Is it an international phenom like Cristiano Ronaldo or Roger Federer with millions of fans? Or maybe an engaging personality like Shaun White or Steve Nash with creative, authentic content?

That’s a question Activ8Social set out to answer early in the new year and in the process, we decided to rank the Top 30 professional athlete Facebook Pages as of February 2010. Top caliber athletes from all over the world and from a variety of sports made the grade. Read our full blog entry for more details.

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.