CorpComms Magazine

Social media was still in its infancy during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Now, with 50 million tweets being chirped into the ether every day and Facebook registering more than 400 million active users, the potential for fans to share their South Africa highs and lows is astronomical.

The international sporting event is expected to 'eclipse everything' seen so far on Twitter. YouTube's sports manager, Andrew Bangs, is all geared up for 'a level of engagement and interaction beyond what we normally see,' predicting 'thousands and thousands' of uploads 'within minutes' of kick-off.

Matt Stone, head of new media for world soccer at FIFA, clearly has every reason to be excited, telling CNN: 'Football is the world's biggest sport, so the world will practically stop for the month of the World Cup. There will be so much more media consumed, used and published in 2010 than in 2006.'

Stone added: 'Social media can bring fans closer together and give fans more opportunity to communicate with each other.' So we can expect unprecedented numbers of goal celebrations, penalty commiserations and vociferous attacks on referees' decision-making abilities to flood the Internet from 11 June.

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