NBIF portfolio company Radian6 tells Wall Street Journal who’s winning the World Cup online – Nike

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries – Wall Street Journal | link to original article

The real games at the World Cup might be on the soccer field—or “pitch,” if you’re being proper—but there’s also a World Cup competition of sorts on the Web, especially where advertisers are concerned.

Among brands that are advertising around the World Cup, Nike is running away (horrible pun intended) with the online attention, according to several Internet and social-media trackers. A Nielsen study released Friday found that Nike had about 30% of the World Cup “buzz” among brands on blogs, message boards and social-networking sites—a coup for a company that isn’t a partner or official sponsor of the World Cup or of FIFA, soccer’s governing body.

FIFA has been trying to limit the visibility of companies that haven’t paid the hefty price for official sponsorships, the Journal reported this week. But although the organization can restrict advertising around venues, there’s little it can do online. Poor FIFA partner Adidas had about 14% of the online mentions, followed by Coca-Cola and Sony at about 12% each.

Media mentions of Nike peaked soon after it launched its “Write the Future” campaign featuring a glossy Web video and such stars as Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo. The shoe maker also saw a bump around the beginning of the tournament, according to online social-media monitoring firm Radian6. The firm also found that by far the biggest boost to Nike came on Twitter, where it saw more than 3,800 posts on May 21, a few days after it began its campaign. Official sponsors like Coke and Budweiser saw “respectable volume in blogs, on Facebook and mainstream news, but Nike blows them out of the water when it comes to tweets,” wrote a Radian 6 spokesman in an email to Digits.

It’s a question, though, whether a mention on Twitter has the same power as a mention on a more widely trafficked site. On one hand, Twitter messages are easily and frequently repeated; on the other, they’re more fleeting.

As for the online popularity of players—the numbers aren’t as much of a surprise, but they’re interesting nonetheless.

Even people who don’t follow soccer know that Cristiano Ronaldo is the most popular player in the world right now. In the U.S., he received about one-fifth of the searches for all World Cup players in the week before the first game, according to data firm Experian Hitwise. Brazil’s Ronaldinho was well behind the game at about 6%, with Landon Donovan of the U.S. at about 4%.

Mr. Ronaldo also wins in Radian6’s survey of media mentions, ahead of Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Brazil’s Kaka. Since the games began, though, Mr. Messi has received far more attention—primarily because of Tweets and blog posts on the day of Argentina’s Game against Nigeria.