Social Media Campaign Review : KRDS Launches #SecondWorldCup To Monitor FIFA World Cup & Position its Social Media Capabilities

If I know one thing about Football, it’s that everyone takes it seriously. In India we believe that cricket is a religion, then football is probably the entire universe. With the kick-off of the FIFA World Cup about a week ago, all your timelines are probably flooded (which is an understatement) with crazy football chatter. Everybody is talking Football. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody is an expert.

Whether you’ve been a long standing football fan or just a bystander who is curious to know about the happenings, I’m sure right about now it’s gotten nearly impossible to figure out the sentiments with regard to different teams and players.

This year during the first world cup match between the host Brazil which defeated Croatia in 3-1 match has already witnessed 12.2 million tweets during the match. Twitter saw users from more than 150 countries joining in to share their views and emotions.

Visualizations, infographics and bigger imagery are a trend across all digital platforms. Combining Football with visualizations would be a killer combination. If you agree with that, please join me in welcoming “The Second World Cup”

Objective

Create a more visually appealing way to represent the public sentiments about their favorite game while engaging with them and creating a digital world cup. The Second World Cup is monitoring the social media conversations regarding the FIFA world cup while targeting the variousteams, players and their supporter using hashtags and mentions.

Execution

The Second World Cup is a very well thought out site with an immersive experience, available for both desktop and mobile. The site captures the emotions of the public through a simple yet effect visualization on “The Field”, which is the home screen. The Field is a canvas of floating bubbles representing different teams and players. The idea is simple, the more the talk about a team or player, the bigger the bubble. Allowing users to discover what players and teams are the most talked about on Twitter during the event.

With the capability to view only teams, only players or a combination of both, the site shows the most important information on the top in a clean, sophisticated and beautiful manner.

Once clicked on, the bubble shows the total number of tweets(in real time) mentioning the team or player along with the rank of the team and the player.Click on “The Locker” and the site pulls up specific covnersations from various social networks reagrding the team.

The site also tracks the social impact of each team and player and gives you a chance to read a few facts about them as well.

The next and one of the most important sections is the Supporters section. The various supporters of various teams are given the spotlight, displaying their twitter display images and linking back to their twitter profiles, awarding supporters for their loyalty which would help increase their reach and followers.

Another brilliant feature of the site is the Battles sections which contains a calendar of each of the games and allows users to take part to tweet matches happening between two teams in real time. It shows the real time war of tweets between the fans of different teams, along with the tweet counter. The center wheel also shows which side is dominating the other.

At the end of each match, the virtual winner of the battle is announced; the team which gets most mentions across the social networks wins.

Using the SecondWorldCup handle, they announce the latest updates and engage with different followers.

Using other official handles like KRDS and KRDSParis to retweet and create a buzz among their larger set of followers:

Positives

Beautifully laid out User Experience with high Visual Appeal

The whole site is pure beauty. It is designed in keeping with the ongoing website design trends. With a high visual impact, the website is minimal and hits the nail on the head when it comes to achieving its objective. Designed for all form factors such as Desktop, Tablet and Mobile the website is a great place to stop by while on the run to get an overview about the general public emotion regarding the upcoming games. The site provides great insights into the teams and the star players in a manner which is easy on the eyes and helps experts and rookies alike, in gauging the importance of players and matches.

Leveraging the capabilities of a single platform

Twitter tends to become the hot-bed for all activities around sporting events. The brand has been able to clearly use this insight and it is the whole basis on which the campaign is sustaining. Being able to capitalize on the strengths of a single platform while using the others to support your central platform is a growing trend we seen in various new campaigns.

Brand Positioning

Through this activity, KRDS, a B2B company is trying to position itself as a market leader by creating a quality website and gathering data which indirectly spells out company's services among brands. It also showcases how evolved the agency is in terms of integrating technology and social media.

Scope for Improvement

Although the site in itself is brilliant, the campaign lacks luster in terms of a marketing push for the site. The SecondWorldCup twitter handle is not nearly as active as any of the actual supporters. With a meagre following of 28 followers on Twitter, the handle is definitely not doing as much as it should to engage with the audiences. There is tremendous scope in interacting, mentioning and tweeting to various fans and egging them on to tweet more and more. And in turn increasing its own followers and reaching out to higher number of audiences.

Although the site is excellent in capturing public sentiment, it doesn’t show the actual score of each match. By simply displaying the score of the ongoing match in real time, the site should be able to attract many more visitors.

Closing Thoughts

The site is a must try for all the fans of the game and has the potential to go completely viral and be the one stop shop to all FIFA fans. The site displays exactly the kind of fan-madness which is present on Twitter and other social networks regarding football. Such topical content creation leads to better branding for the company.