I’ve never understood why NBA or NFL players call themselves world champions. To be world champions, don’t you have to compete against the rest of the world? No matter – that’s why we have the 2006 FIFA World Cup. It is a sport that resonates across all cultures, classes, religions and countries. The Internet also resonates across all the aforementioned. Put the two of them together and you have one powerful combination.
Yes, television is required to watch the games in their entirety (for now) but if you want to listen to games or check live updates, you can do so online. The Official Site of the “2006 FIFA World Cup hosted by Yahoo”:http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com allows you view game highlights online as well.
This is critical for football fans (I refuse to use the word ‘soccer’) in North America. We are in the middle of the working day while matches are being played live a few time zones ahead in Europe. Unfortunately, calling in sick during the World Cup is not as socially acceptable here as it is in other parts of the world.
The numbers of people checking out the World Cup on the Internet is staggering. According to “eMarketer”:http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004004 5.7 Million unique visitors visited the offical 2006 FIFA World Cup site in April and 4.2 Million unique visitors in March. This is before the tournament started!
Category: Sulemaan Ahmed
Having recently attended a few conferences such as the Visa E-Commerce summit and “Mesh”:http://www.meshconference.com, I’ve realized the speakers I liked were ones who discussed how they dealt with disaster. So here is my turn in the confession booth – Let’s hope no one from “work”:http://www.searstravel.ca is reading.
Last year we sent an email for a St. Patrick’s Day promotion. ‘Leave the New World for the Old World’ with great travel deals to Ireland. All our i’s were dotted and t’s were crossed. We clicked send and the message went off into cyberspace.
Later the same evening I got a panicky call. *Every one of the over 50k subscribers on the list got the email 8 times.* One of those ‘oh crap’ moments in my career.
After heart palpitations and fear of black-listing by ISPs, it was damage-control time. First we stopped sending email. We then met first thing in the morning to figure out what went wrong. Prior to the meeting, my inbox already had messages from my boss and SVP asking what had happened.
At the meeting the IT guys were expecting a public execution. There was a bug in the email system that caused the problem. They apologized for the screw-up. Rather than finger-pointing we looked at fixing the situation. (Yes, I did have to restrain myself at first.)
Firstly, hats off to the “organizers”:http://www.meshconference.com for setting up the Mesh Conference in just 9 weeks. They also *sold out* without any traditional marketing; it was strictly via word of mouth and blogs. Talk about ROI.
The conference attendees presented a nice mix of techies, marketers, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, students and PR folks. It was a great opportunity to network with others.
The sessions on day one were very productive, especially Blogging 101 by “Tris Hussey”:http://blog.larixconsulting.com/blog. He didn’t lose us rookies in the room and facilitated interaction amongst the audience. There was some debate about whether blogs generate revenue, but one attendee pointed out his client had many sales leads and referrals for other businesses not to mention job offers because of his blog. Looking strictly at ad revenue from Google Ad Sense is a myopic view.