An experiment to discover how fans of nations and football teams constructed identity and attached external brands or icons to their avatars.

We also wanted to know how to promote, track and run a campaign on the Twibbon platform.

Process

We created the World Cup Twibbons campaign during the 2010 World Cup Finals with a ‘twibbon’ avatar overlay for each of the 32 national teams that people could add to their Twitter and Facebook avatars.

We promoted the twibbons to friends and through our own usage and watched to see what would happen. It was a quick and simple experiment that yielded good results and excellent lessons.

Here is the full list of country avatars overlays — World Cup 2010 twibbons.

Results

Over the month of the World Cup Finals we had 4,182 people add our twibbons to their avatars.

The top teams of the tournament in popularity and in success were also the top teams for twibbons — Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Australia, Italy and Brazil — and represented the majority of all twibbons in a long-tail distribution curve.

Almost all usage of our twibbons was on Twitter, not Facebook, and almost all new users discovered the twibbons through friends and the pre-created tweet new users were invited to post when once they had added their twibbon.

Expertise

We tracked very closely how people added twibbons to their avatars to understand viral propagation patterns, sources for conversions and levers for activation. In all cases our top source for twibbon activity was peers – people seeing and following what their friends were doing.

Participants’ ability to activate their peers was influenced by a number of factors including their number of followers, their regularity of tweeting and the strength of the following / follower ties.

We also create a full World Cup Twibbons case study.