There is no event that can match the World Cup for capturing the globe’s attention and stimulating national passions. This year’s tournament is also providing a valuable lesson in how the Internet, when well deployed, plays an essential role in the media mix.

Personally, I’m experiencing the tournament’s ability to bring people together from all over the world through the pool in which my old soccer teammates are participating. Many years after our last provincial championship, we’re living across Canada as well as in the U.S., Australia, Spain and  Ireland. E-mail remains one of the key Internet applications, and the organization of our pool—as well as the sharing of video clips of diving Italian strikers and photos of our children—would be impossible without it.

The World Cup also energizes the city in which I live, because Toronto has a wonderfully diverse population. Flags adorn vehicles driving through the streets, and entire neighbourhoods shut down after key wins cause impromptu celebrations. Traditional media simply can’t reflect the depth of the passion on the streets, but Consumer Generated Media (CGM) is more than up to the task. One blogger brings a commitment to watch games with national supporters in their favourite hang outs and a digicam to capture the experience of how the tournament is enjoyed in this multi-cultural city.  

Of course, the tournament would be inconceivable without television. A Global Market Insite (GMI) survey, reported by e-Marketer Daily, showed that over 95% of all global fans will follow the cup on their televisions, with the vast majority (93%) choosing to watch at home. But the Web is becoming an important complement to television.

According to figures from comScore, in April there were 5.7 million unique visitors to the official 2006 FIFA World Cup site hosted by Yahoo! and 4.2 million visited in March. Not surprisingly, the bulk of these visitors are in Europe. E-Marketer reports that Europe contributed the greatest proportion of visitors in April with 51%, or almost 3 million people. The next highest region was Asia Pacific, with 17% of the total, nearly 1 million people. Traffic from Latin America represented 12% of the total, and only 10% of the visitors came from North America, highlighting the still limited popularity of soccer in the US.

The many North Americans who are not visiting the FIFA World Cup site are not only missing out on the passion and excitement of the tournament, they are not seeing a superb example of how to present information online and engage visitors.

·        The site itself has a remarkable depth of content, including multi-media elements like video highlights. It is also very interactive, with a live match cast that provides comprehensive minute-by-minute up-dates of the games and live fan chat.

·        In addition, if you don’t have access to computer (for example, if your daughter’s gymnastics class coincides with the England-Ecuador match), the site is optimized for viewing on a mobile device. It loads quickly and presents just the information you need to see on a small screen.

While following the World Cup offers many Internet-related learning opportunities, I’ve been focused on the lessons provided by the competition and who is involved, such as:

• Don’t let your heart prevail over your head when making crucial decisions, like predicting that Ivory Coast will survive the “group of death” at the expense of Argentina.
• Expect mocking e-mails when bad decisions become known to a global audience, such as predicting that Ivory Coast will survive the “group of death” at the expense of Argentina.
• Don’t drive to Little Italy for pancetta with 15 minutes left to play in an Italian match.

Most business people understand that they can never stop learning and seeking new ideas for their business. And the most successful ones grasp the need to seek those learning opportunities from expected sources—such as conferences and business journals—as well as from unexpected ones, such as other industries. They also know that in today’s economy, the Internet will play a vital role in that learning process.

I was reminded of this lesson while preparing my presentation for last weeks’ International Prepress Association’s Technical Conference in Chicago. In a session called “Leveraging Technology to Grow Your Business,” I’d been asked to provide business owners and senior technical managers with ideas on how to do exactly what the title suggested. That could sound like a challenge, if one’s understanding of the growth opportunities for output service providers stops at the headline: “Print is Dead! Long Live the Internet!”

To help prepare for the session, I dusted off the March, 2005 copy of Harvard Business Review, which contained an article called “MarketBusting: Strategies for Exceptional Growth.” The article featured a small case study on a printer called Madden Communications. That company had pursued one of the article’s suggested strategies—changing its unit of business from selling a product to selling a product-service mix—and had achieved great success.

The magazine described how Madden used a combination of customer insight, strategic planning and operational execution to make the transition and achieve impressive business results: “Madden’s revenues grew from $10 million in 1990 to $133 million in 2004, in an industry thought by many to be hopelessly mature.”

The last line, of course, is an elegant way of saying “Print is dead.” But HBR was able to look past that simple statement and see a company that had a lesson to offer for any businessperson willing to learn.

And anyone who wants to learn more about Madden can check out their website, which offers a strong example in how to connect a company’s online presence to their business strategy, notably the core competencies page which states: “Madden has transformed what were transactionally siloed steps into an integrated retail solution that we manage better than anybody else. This integrated solution process is our service.”