Euro 2008: predictions on social media

I guess most people have realized by now that it is again football time…2 years after Italy won its 3rd 4th World Cup (thanks anon!), we are back in the game with the European UEFA Championship that is being hosted by Switzerland and Austria…I said “most people” since England ignores (or tries to ignore this event) since they did not qualify for it…:) at least Becky and Posh Spicy did not have to fly across to the old continent and leave their new home in LA.

Today, I was watching the Poland-Germany game while working on one of my clients at the same time (betting site, www.better.it, owned by Lottomatica) when I decided to check whether some innovative player was already taking advantage of social media to market his services profiting from the euphoria triggered by events such as the European Championship.

First, I checked on YouTube and was expecting to find any really exciting activity…apart from Shaggy’s video of Like a Superstar.

Then, I moved to Facebook and searched for “Euro 2008″ within the Applications:

This time my expectations were definitely met…over 100 applications were developed regarding the Euro 2008, so I decided to pick the first one (guessing by the rank, which is probably the total number of people that have installed it).

In this particular case, the application has been developed by TV NetWork Eurosport in partnership with Yahoo!. This application allows players to compete by predicting the tournament results and if successful, the best player wins a 42-inch Plasma TV…so whoever thought about this initiative to drive traffic to the Yahoo!-Eurosport joint portal, is also using it as a “teaser” so users install the applications. And looking at the results achieved so far, I’d say, its not bad at all. My rank (I am the last one since I just joined in) is 38.648 out of 60.651 members…that makes me think that about half the people that have installed the application are also actively playing…well I’ll follow this application across the championship and my guess is there will be over 100K members by the end of it…shall we bet ? :)

Meanwhile “Forza Italia” and volume up on our favorite music!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.