Paul Vallois of Partners Andrews: the other World Cup is the battle to maximise social media

Sitting here in the bowels of the Barbican (London conference centre) on what’s reputed to be the hottest day of the year the irony’s not lost of me. It’s here that the Internet Advertising Bureau is hosting a social conference and wifi is limited – again no irony lost.

There’s been a lot of talk this morning about social consumption and the need for brands to be always on, not just pushing out social content but thinking about and investing more in social distribution and the science of sharing. Yep, that cute cat doesn’t guarantee you will ‘go viral’. Saying that, if Tim Howard saves it, you’re probably onto a winner.

Which brings us nicely onto the World Cup. It’s ubiquitous at the moment and even more so when it comes to social presentations. iab research claims that over a third of us couldn’t contemplate the World Cup without social.

It also appears that the World Cup has been a catalyst in some of the big social developments both for brands and platforms themselves.

While Google’s been developing its single sign in and more closely integrating G+ and Youtube for a while the World Cup has led to innovation in its ‘of the moment content’ and realtime trending searches. It’s also led to increased integration with Twitter both at a planning and product level.

Some of the work with Adidas best typifies this. In addition to the build up surrounding the draw and the Brazuca (World Cup football) launch the brand established a team on the ground in Rio. Consisting of clients, agencies, Google and Twitter the team access realtime analytics and trending data to ensure maximum engagement and sharability of their content.

Twitter claim that the world cup has dwarfed London 2012 already. The latter generated 150m tweets whereas the world cup delivered 300m in the group stages alone.

Unicef took on a similar, albeit smaller scale approach to maximize the effectiveness of their Socceraid collaboration with ITV and Robbie Williams. Responding to the most influential of the 11.7k tweets/minute helped deliver £5.3m in funds in a single evening.

With all the talk of football it was interesting that the mandatory chapter on wearables never came. This from Ripcurl (below) was the only example. But as several commented, avoid the ‘shiny’ until the basics are in place. The retail sector is one that could certainly learn from this pearl with 19 per cent of the top 50 retailers failing to support commerce on their mobile sites and 52 per cent of them have apps where we can’t even make a purchase – a schoolboy error if ever I saw one.

However, the football analogies and world cup with all its social innovation pales into insignificance though when campaigns like this show the real power of social.

Paul Vallois is managing partner of Partners Andrews Aldridge