Web 2.0 effects of the World Cup Twenty20!

Whoever said that social media and user generated content wasn’t booming in India? The world cup twenty20 series one of the most watched cricket series from an Indian fan point of view came to its rightful and fruitful end yesterday with the Indians lifting the worldcup after 24 long years (though the last one was a one day international cup).

Now how did the online world take to this new format of twenty20? One might think everyone must have been glued to the TV not to have bothered about going online right?? WRONG!

Here are some numbers crunching on the web 2.0 sphere to know the impact of twenty20 online.

Lets start with mentions in Blogs..

Google blog search throws up the following results :

47,320* blog posts for ‘twenty20′ (In the last one month)

Blogpulse which is the metric by Nielsen threw up the following results :

2720* blog posts for ‘twenty20′

Technorati which is a blog discovery tool shows the following results:

11,782* blog posts for ‘twenty20′

Lets look at social networks now..  chose the two most popular ones in India Orkut and Facebook..

Orkut throws up the following results:

359 users for twenty20

103 groups created by users for twenty20

1000+ Forum topics/messages on message boards for twenty20

Facebook which has recently become more and more popular shows an equally high number..

152 Groups created by users for twenty20

70 Events created by users for twenty20

3 Applications created by users for twenty20

Now lets consider Video i.e. Youtube for the internet..

1,250 videos on twenty20 and the one with the highest views is the 6 Sixes by Yuvraj Singh which has got 848,592 views 1165 comments and 2019 favourites in the last 5 days!

Here is that video:

Just proof (if needed) that web 2.0 does take the discussion and conversations far beyond the actual mass media and the creators and distributors of media in web 2.0 are consumers themselves. The only thing marketers need to figure out is how to tap these conversations and leverage them for brand building opportunties for their clients. I guess its about time clients and brand managers start thinking about a web 2.0 strategy.