Sony Ericsson's Twitter World Cup Mashup

Many companies are stumbling into Twitter and trying to find a way to make it work with existing activation plans in order to cross off the 'social media checkbox.' Mobile companies, by their very nature, are held to a higher standard for social media activation. What is a World Cup Official Mobile Phone Handset to do? Sony Ericsson is leveraging soccer's global appeal and passionate country allegiances to juice the competitive spirit of Tweeters throughout the world.

Launched in December, the Sony Ericsson Twitter Cup is a social networking mashup that features all 32 national teams in the real World Cup and in the same tournament format uses fan tweets to advance each team to the next round of the Twitter Cup virtual tournament. Following the same format as the World Cup, there are group and knockout stages, including quarter finals, semi finals and the final. The more tweets a country gets, the more fans they have and the better chance they have of progressing to the subsequent rounds

The Sony Ericsson earned FIFA's designation as Official Mobile Phone Handset of the World Cup via a pass-through from Sony Corporation, which is the Official Digital Life Partner of FIFA. Sony Ericsson agreed to sub-license the category from Sony Corporation and the agreement includes all FIFA events until 2010 including the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. The Digital Life category includes mobile handsets as well as consumer electronics, professional and broadcast AV and other equipment, personal computers, movies, music and gaming.

"Sony Ericsson is dedicated to providing soccer fans with the best experience of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, giving them more ways to support their team and get involved with all aspects of the game," said Karen Morris, vice president of Marketing for Sony Ericsson North America.