As the World Cup got underway, Nielsen published an interesting blog post last week that shows what people are talking about online related to the sporting event in seven different countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, Spain, Germany, and Italy. You can take a look at the United States and United Kingdom charts below, and follow the link to read the full article (complete with all the charts) at the NielsenWire blog).
In the United States, two things stand out as particularly interesting from the Nielsen chart. First, the U.S. team was not the most talked about team in the U.S., and second, the power of David Beckham continues in the U.S. Even though he’s out of the World Cup due to an injury, people are still talking about him — a lot.
Otherwise, most conversations within each country are about the teams and players from those countries, which is not surprising. However, it’s not the conversation topics that I found most interesting in this post from Nielsen, but rather, it was the way the charts clearly show segmented conversations based on geography. That’s some cool data that businesses should be gathering and applying to their own brands.
Let’s face it — marketers always have to show visuals and hard numbers justifying the various initiatives they need to secure budget dollars for each year. Wouldn’t a chart like these help executives who still don’t fully appreciate the value of online conversations about brands get a better perspective? It’s just another tool you can put in your marketing toolbox to help build the case for social media marketing investment.
Charts like these prove that people are talking. As marketers, our job is to find ways to leverage those conversations and keep them going.
Susan Gunelius is the author of 10 marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and technology books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, an award-wining blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more.
She has over 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include large and small companies around the world and household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more. Susan is frequently interviewed about marketing and branding by television, radio, print, and online media organizations, and she speaks about these topics at events around the world. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.
