The kind of racism I’m talking about is the kind where otherwise normal people issue some of the most pathetically vile posts one can imagine; and they seem to do it when they can hide behind the cloak of Xbox Live or, in this case, Facebook. It’s akin to a hit and run, with most of the simple-minded people who issue these kinds of posts choosing to hide behind their wall of perceived anonymity. I mean, at least the KKK and the girl from the UCLA video — we haven’t forgotten about you, Alexandra — are brave enough to face the pubic.

The same is doubtfully true for those who willingly hide behind what ever barrier of perceived invisibility and post things like the stuff found on Facebook, which was collected and then submitted to Reddit. What we have is a collection of the ignorant Facebook posts that appeared shortly after Japan beat the United States in the World Cup final, and it shows that when you mix an idiot with a keyboard and a touch of bravery due to a “they can’t see me” attitude, you get things like the following.

Click for a bigger image:

Perhaps they would go for the “my account was hacked” excuse, but that only works for professional athletes. No, what we have is a bunch of sore-loser kids who think they are invincible because of whatever privacy settings they have on their Facebook account, and so, they feel like they can say anything without repercussion. I just hope these fake tough guys are stupid enough to not delete that crap, just in case a future employer ever searches for one of the featured Facebook pages.

If we’re lucky, one of these witty individuals might have a person of Japanese decent as a future boss. I long to see the amount of backtracking if that ever happens.

Now that the Round of 16 is over and we are down to the final 8 teams that will be playing in the Quarterfinals of the World Cup – most of the marketing that has accompanied the games has been played out and it’s a good time to try and look for some lessons from the International phenomenon that is the World Cup. To help, here is my round up of 10 of the most interesting marketing campaigns from this World Cup as well as some marketing lessons that they offer:

#10 – ESPN3 Live Streaming

Offering live streaming for sporting events is certainly not new, but the way that ESPN has integrated their streaming with cable providers has been excellent. For many soccer fans, watching the World Cup Live might have been their first experience at a "pay for streaming" service online. Hulu is paid for by ads, and YouTube is omnipresent – but ESPN3 took the riskier step of integrating with cable providers. By doing so, they not only managed to prove their value to their cable provider partners/subscribers – they also managed to create a great user experience because they didn’t force consumers to pay again for something they were already paying for through their home cable subscription. Big win for ESPN.

#9 – Coca-Cola History Of Celebration
Coke is an official sponsor of the World Cup and has the stadiums plastered with their logo as you would expect. Continuing with their theme of happiness that was so nicely brought to life through viral videos such as "The Happiness Machine,", their World Cup spot focuses on the story of Roger Milla and his dance of celebration during the 1990 World Cup that sparked a revolution in goal celebrations (as the ad claims). The video is set to the official theme song of the FIFA World Cup 2010 and the voice over is from an announcer with a South African accent (nice touch). The last shot of Roger Milla in the stands enjoying a Coke while the voiceover talks about how he "showed the world how to live" is pure World Cup melodramatic magic.

#8 – KIA Motors South Africa
As the official automobile sponsor for the World Cup, KIA had fertile ground to do a lot of great things around the World Cup. Unfortunately, their actual effort seemed uncoordinated and confusing – with KIA Motors South Africa running a promotion all about offering an exclusive experience to people who engaged with the South African page or Twitter account, while the global marketing team seemed to focus on the new Soul car with a 1 minute video (embedded below) asking "what’s your soul app?" and randomly talking about anti-gravity apps. The US KIA Twitter page doesn’t even mention anything about the World Cup, the global Facebook page offers disconnected polls and the pieces of this campaign just seem out of sync in the unique way that can easily happen when global teams work in their silos and never collaborate. One commenter on their YouTube video summed it up best in their response to KIA’s question … "My soul app is the one that blocks these kind of ads." Ouch.

#7 – Cisco Around The World
Continuing their Human Network campaign* Cisco uses an engaging ad showing a soccer juggling trick they call the "around the world" that spreads from country to country through young soccer fans watching a video and trying to recreate that moment. As a kid, I remember watching Jürgen Klinsmann in 1994 score an amazing goal against South Koreans and spending months practicing and trying to perfect the same move. Cisco managed to tap that moment that many soccer players and fans could relate to, and demonstrate how their global network makes sharing moments like that possible in a faster and more real way than ever before. (*Full Disclosure – Cisco is an Ogilvy client, but I did not work on this campaign).

#6 – CristianoRonaldo.com

Voted the FIFA World Player Of The Year in 2008, Cristiano Ronaldo (and his often photographed abs) may also be the best looking player in this year’s World Cup … or so I’m told. To capitalize on the attention, he relaunched his website during the World Cup and last week I got a launch announcement from a PR team announcing his new site as a place where they would be "pulling dialogue between Cristiano and his 5 million fans on Facebook and Twitter." After Portugal lost a close Round of 16 match against their neighboring rival Spain, Ronaldo was featured heavily in the news for his comments about feeling like a "broken man." Unfortunately, he isn’t sharing this despair in any sort of dialogue with his fans and his Twitter feed has been silent since before the Spain match. The lesson it brings to light is the central pitfall in creating this "revolutionary" new model for dialogue between a celebrity superstar and his fans: the whole thing falls apart if the superstar just doesn’t feel like talking.

#5 – CNN + FourSquare World Cup Promotion
CNN jumped into the geolocation bandwagon around the World Cup and launched a promotion with Foursquare where they are offering special badges to people who check in at locations within South Africa as well as at viewing parties at various locations around the world. Though they are not broadcasting the games, this is an interesting chance at experimentation for the brand and if it works I imagine we will begin to see this used by other Turner Network channels like TNT around college basketball, as well as potentially around large newsmaking events that draw a crowd at viewing parties as well, such as national elections.

#4 – Bud United House Party
You have to give Budweiser credit for not giving up on the BudTV idea even though their idea of a 24 hour online network fell flat. Around the FIFA World Cup, they leveraged their sponsorship to create the Bud United house where they invite one person from every one of the 32 finalist teams to live in a house together during the World Cup. The only rules were that when your team was eliminated from the World Cup, you were too. The result is an engaging online reality show that has a great premise, interesting content and a unique sponsorship activation. The only problem to see with this campaign is that they focused all their TV budget on running the same ad over and over where the fans try to distract the soccer player with an mosaic image of beer in the stands. If they used some of that budget to drive TV audiences to check out Bud United, they would have likely increased their engagement dramatically.

#3 – Pepsi "Oh Africa"

Pepsi was one of the sponsors that some felt "ambushed" the games to take away attention from the official soft drink sponsor (Coke) and got great buzz for their TV spot and viral video featuring people making a soccer pitch for several soccer superstars to play against kids in a soccer challenge. The not so subtle message is that Africa can achieve great things (like defeat international soccer stars) if her people can work together.

#2 – Nike Write The Future
Nike’s online long form ad with the tagline of "Write The Future" can only be described as epic in how it manages to take all the top tier talent they sponsor and roll out a story that not only talks of their impact on the game and culture, but how what happens on the World Cup stage often does write the future for all of us. The World Cup is special in its significance to the world and watching this ad helps you understand and live that. If there is one ad most closely associated with this World Cup, it has to be the Write the Future campaign. Adidas still had a strong global showing  and for "real soccer players," Adidas remains the brand most focused on soccer and stands to realize big revenue gains from merchandising as a result of the games. They made the uniforms and the often debated . But for Nike to grab just a bit of the spotlight through great creative and storytelling isn’t bad for a brand that was not the official sponsor.

#1 – Brand South Africa
After the games finish and the world turns its attention to the next big sporting event, the biggest winner from these games may very well be Brand South Africa. The country has had an ambitious nation branding and marketing effort in place since 2002 – and one that in part led to their selection as the host nation for Africa’s first FIFA World Cup. The games have gone off perfectly and the biggest controversies to date have been the Jabulani ball and the inconsistent officiating – both having little to do with the host country. Using music and dance as a way into their culture, coverage of the games online and on television were filled with African rhythms and clearly stood out from anything else. Though the South African’s didn’t progress in the tournament as far as they liked, the country invited the world to their doorstep, brought out the vuvuzelas, did a disika dance and showed the world what Africa was truly capable of.

Amongst a World Cup filled with good and bad marketing lessons, South Africa deserves to stand at the top of the list with pride. Good marketing helped them get selected to host the games, and great marketing will help them inspire people to visit and invest in their country long after the final match is played and a champion is crowned.

Comments

Today, Twitter announced the new record of 3,283 tweets per second, this time coming as a result of Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark in the World Cup. These tweets came in as the final whistle was blown in the game.

"The second week of the World Cup continued to see consistent spikes in TPS after goals that are remarkable increases over our average of 750 TPS," says Twitter’s Kevin Weil. "However, we caution to call any goals a record this week both because many of the games were played simultaneously with another one and total numbers were fairly similar to the first week when only one game was being played at a time."

They felt confident enough to call this one a record though, because the other game being played ended six minutes earlier.

I’ve still been seeing a lot of Fail Whales this week, but it has obviously not stopped people from using Twitter too much. Rather the amount of people using Twitter is the cause. Meanwhile, Twitter is expected to keep growing strongly at the international level.

Brazil appears to be in the lead when it comes to focus of targeted attacks. Targeted malware emails are being aimed at Brazilian companies, including those in the chemical, manufacturing and finance sectors. Attacks use dual attack modes – a PDF attachment and a malicious link to bypass traditional security measures.

Symantec says spam for a pharmaceutical site with the World Cup as a headline used obfuscated JavaScript within the attachment which contains code to redirect the recipient’s browser to a different and disguised location.

Some other highlights from the report include:

- Spam – 89.3% in June (a decrease of 0.9 percentage points since May)

- 12.5% of all web-based malware blocked was new in June (an increase of 0.1 percentage points since May)

For more details on the targeted attacks and other findings, take a look at the report.

For comparison, Twitter sees an average of about 750 tweets per second in a given day, and 65 million total tweets in a day. One has to wonder how much the Fail Whale has held these numbers back though.

Speaking of Fail Whales, Twitter has changed the message on the Fail Whale page slightly to link to the Twitter Status blog. The company apparently got the idea from a blog comment on TechCrunch. If you’ve been questioning the importance of blog comments, that’s something to think about.

Twitter also highlighted these goals from the World Cup as the most tweeted goals of the past week:

1) Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in their 1-0 victory (2,940 TPS)

2) Brazil scores their first goal against North Korea in their 2-1 June 14 victory (2,928 TPS)

3) Mexico ties South Africa in their June 11 game (2,704 TPS)

As for the Lakers, Twitterers weren’t the only ones excited about the outcome of that game.

Google now has a new post up detailing some other discoveries it has since made. "It turns out that people who search for one player frequently follow that immediately with a query for another player, Google says.

Google shares the following diagram:

"A thick line connects Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi because a lot of people followed a search for one of them with a search for the other," explains Google software engineer Jeffrey D. Oldham. "A thin line connects Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona because fewer people searched for them together."

Check out the post for an explanation of the other interesting discoveries Google has made around World Cup search activity.

"The 2010 Football World Cup may be the first to be held in Africa, but it is also considered by many to be the first time that millions of fans will be able to make significant use of social networks to boost their experience," a representative for Symantec tells WebProNews. "Social networks like Twitter and Facebook will play a major role in World Cup 2010 as football fans display videos and photographs, share anecdotes and, perhaps most importantly, showcase their football expertise in heated debate."

"Users are cautioned to resist the temptation to simply click on just anything, no matter how alluring it may appear," the company says. "Symantec research has shown that the majority of cybercrime attacks happen through legitimate websites that have been compromised by attackers the victims are unaware that while they are on a normal looking website, they are, in fact, exposed to malicious content."

"Users should also beware of accepting new friends claiming to be likeminded football fans and be especially wary of new sites set up around teams or specific players," urges Symantec. "Traveling fans should not reveal details of their current whereabouts on the social networks. Criminals are known to monitor the sites and use this information to plan robberies."

The firm actually has a site dedicated to information about World Cup-based security threats, which you may find helpful. The page comes with links to become a fan on Facebook and follow them on Twitter, which may also help keep you in the loop with any new related findings.

Social networks have already been making a point of encouraging fans to engage around the World Cup. For example, we looked at a couple offerings from Facebook and MySpace. Google showed us what the search activity has been like.

The Leaderboard displays a running competition to see which country has the most passionate fans, and allows them to support their favorite teams and encourage their friends to support them. You can sort it by passion rank, popularity, intensity, region, or group.

"With the help of Facebook’s global World Cup broadcast partners like Univision and ESPN, fans can share status updates and comments with their friends while watching the events live via Facebook’s Live Stream social plugin," the rep says.

"Fans can also build their own dream team with the EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars game on Facebook," she adds. "And for the giving fan, you can sign up to support 1GOAL, the World Cup charity that aims to ensure education for all, and stay connected with them on Facebook."

On a related note, we also received an email touting Watercooler’s Epic Goal as the "best soccer game on Facebook." I can’t personally vouch for this, but in the spirit of things, it seemed worth passing on. This review looks at some different ones.

The World Cup’s 30 days of soccer began on Friday, and there will no doubt be plenty more related searching in the coming weeks. Google Consumer Operations Strategist Jaime Forman-Lau says:

It’s often said that football is a global sport, and that’s certainly true in search. Searches for [world cup 2010], [copa mundial] and [?? ?] are all spiking, although overall World Cup buzz seems to be off to a slower start in 2010 than in the months leading up to the 2006 tournament, based on global trends for queries like [world cup] and [fifa world cup]. India is the #1 country searching for [fifa world cup schedule], [fifa 2010 schedule] and similar queries. And as the match-up between anglophone rivals England and USA approaches, searches for [england world cup] continue to far surpass interest in [usa world cup].

Most of us will be watching the matches on TV in pubs and living rooms, but a few lucky spectators will get to watch in person in South Africa. Searches for [world cup tickets] peaked in mid-April, and have since declined. But whether home or abroad, we’re all searching for the best way to show support for our team. Searches for [world cup decoration] have risen, and a glimpse at the Dutch shows queries for [oranje versiering] (“orange decoration”; orange is the Netherland’s national color) and [orange] have risen sharply for the last three months, as they have in 2006 and 2008 for the World Cup and European Cup.

Insights for Search shows a great level of interest in Cristiano Ronaldo and some other stars of the sport:

These are the players provided in Google’s own Insights for Search presentation. As I am not a soccer guy (I’m more of a fan of the other football), I can’t get too specific, but if you want to check out search activity on any other players, you can do so using the tool yourself. I’m sure there will be plenty of them showing up on Google Trends as well (not to mention Twitter).

"We’ve built this community for our users to act as an aggregate of the flurry of World Cup activity not only across MySpace but across the entire web including videos, live status updates and tweets via Kosmix, World Cup content from Fox Sports and Univision and much more," MySpace Manager of Corporate Communications Jessica Bass tells WebProNews.

The MySpace World Cup Profile includes: 

- Real time tweetbeat via Kosmix

- Teams specific badges for users to support their favorites and automatically appears in the user’s stream

- Live matches and world cup news via Univision

- Opportunity to sign the petition to bring the World Cup to the US

- World Cup videos, photos, fan forums and soccer related social games

MySpace is shifting its focus to content more these days, and this World Cup profile is certainly an example of that. Though on the site, MySpace still touts itself as "a place for friends" to new users, its announcements are generally geared more toward content lately, and News Corp. COO Chase Carey was recently quoted as saying flat out, "MySpace is a content site."

That’s not to say friends aren’t still a big part of the equation. When you choose your badge to "show your team spirit", it updates your status for your friends to see.