The Holy Final - #GREGARG

Tweets, Christ, popes and an idol - the final match of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil offered creative excitement and divine suspense - but the decision was made on the ground of football facts: the round was in the square and Germany were world champions. The final and other great games in four stories about numbers, tweets and strategies - to cheer about, pray about and think about.

#ITALURU - Bite in the sunset. At the beginning, the World Cup in Brazil offered meagre football fare and hardly any material for stories. That came to an end on the evening of June 24. Luis Suárez brought the culinary turnaround in the Italy-Uruguay game. One bite, one shout and the World Cup was also launched on the social web. Snickers and McDonald's responded immediately, earning 68,000 and over 100,000 retweets and favorites respectively with their event-related tweets. Social media is responsive media. What counts is the favor of the hour, minute, second. Yesterday's news is tomorrow's reaction.

#BRAGER - Night of Records. 9 goals, 35.6 million tweets, an infinite number of tears and a social web community that came up with creative ideas every second: everything was posted in record numbers after Germany swept Brazil off the pitch.

The tournament as such also broke user records by the meter. The total of 670 million views achieved by the 97 campaign videos of the 45 largest World Cup advertisers is significant. Never before has there been so many for an event. It is significant because the high figure proves that commercials are now making the leap from the big TV screen to the small mobile screen on social media platforms and are spreading rapidly from there. The Nike commercials Risk Everything and The Last Game delivered the best performance with 80 and 65 million views respectively on YouTube alone. Nike is the video world champion with a total of 240.6 million views across 8 commercials. It is followed by Samsung with 124.4, Adidas with 90.3, Kia with 27.8 and Beats by Der with 24.5 million views.

#NEDARG - The Matrix Game. Holland's tactics are difficult for any opponent to play.

General Van Gaal's system demands everything from the players: discipline, anticipation, intelligence and stamina.

It wasn't quite enough for the final. But the system provides approaches for increasingly complex social media work. There has already been brief talk of cross-device and cross-media user paths. FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter: "This was the first World Cup to take place fully on mobile devices and in social networks. " The resulting content, which was spontaneously created and distributed by fans (users) and brands in real time, was an enormous enrichment for the World Cup. But the real-time boom is now facing trouble. Twitter is planning to add a complicating additional function for commenting on retweets, the most important and simplest viral amplifier of all. In addition, the reach of non-paid Facebook posts from company sites (organic reach) has fallen from 16 % to 6.5 % since 2012. At the same time, the cost of Facebook ads is rising. Both of these factors mean that the organic distribution of content via social media platforms is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to predict.

Social media hub: For this reason, World Cup sponsors with a strong marketing commitment in particular have set up their own social media hubs. FIFA itself provides the blueprint model for the social hub. The starting point is the FIFA Global Stadium as the central point of contact from which FIFA's official social networks obtain their content. Over 1 billion users have visited the Global Stadium to date. In addition, there is the actual social hub as a platform for "global conversations". It contains rankings - probably intended more for business partners - as well as content aggregated from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. There is FIFA's own content as well as content from users. Aggregation takes place via various # hashtags. Users can add their own hashtags to the content directly from the HUB and share it in their networks. The HUB is available in a browser version and as a mobile app. With the concept of its own hub, FIFA has more influence on its own social media activities. The performance of the hub: 451 million Facebook users were provided with official FIFA content. FIFA now has more than 16 million followers on Twitter. During the opening match, there were 10 new users per second. The number of subscribers to the World Cup Instagram app grew from 42,000 to 800,000 within 31 days! Sony (One Stadium), Nike, Adidas and Coca-Cola have similar concepts. The idea of the hub is still in its infancy, but somehow seems to point the way forward because it can counteract the dependence on Facebook, Facebook & Co. The FIFA President again: "All of our social offerings have experienced enormous growth rates. The billion-strong audience at the Global Stadium created the sense of global togetherness that only the World Cup can create and gave fans the opportunity to share the excitement on this digital platform." The concept of the big FIFA can also be adopted for the scale of an SME. Bet that ...?

#GERARG - The holy finale at the end. "Why the hell are they always showing this statue of Jesus?" they asked in a visibly annoyed Facebook post on Spiegel Online. The answer is this: Nothing has a stronger impact and spreads faster and more frequently on the social web than images with a high symbolic content. During the final, I followed various Twitter #Hashtags via Tweetdeck, a monitoring tool. The picture of Christ in front of the setting sun found its way onto social networks within seconds. At the end, the organizers set off a magnificent firework display in the evening sky above the Maracanã. Before and after, however, it was the fans with spontaneous creations, the brands with staged brand messages and the footballers with selfies from the catacombs that ensured the fireworks were visible worldwide on the social web. More fireworks in our social media feeds, please - even after the World Cup. I would be delighted...

Beat Hürlimann

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