It was early doors, but all the signs were there: World Cup fans have already gone Twitter mad.

The micro-blog buckled under the weight of tweets in the build-up to the first match on 11 June.  The site had already experienced a few outages and had to post an explanation on the technical difficulties which led to its poor performance.  (Twitter.com 11/6)

The Twitter team went on to warn: “As more people turn to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world (or in the World Cup), you may still see the whale when there are unprecedented spikes in traffic“.  (Twitter.com 11/6)

During the opening game between hosts South Africa and Mexico, CNN.com’s Twitter buzz counted around 300,000 tweets.  (NewTeeVee 11/6)

We’re monitoring the impact of social media on the World Cup, so had a quick look at the buzz driving the surge on Twitter on 11 June.  By drilling down by channel, we were able to generate the top 75 lead topics on the micro-blog. This enabled us to analyse the noise-to-signal ratio of tweets and filter conversations which kicked off debates which would linger longer than many hangovers.

Figure 1: Twitter topic cloud – 11/6

For example, a quick click on mentions of The Guardian in the topic cloud led us to a discussion about football fans and brewers joining forces to fight a hike in beer tax during the tournament.

In terms of sentiment on Twitter (11/6):

There were 2015 positive mentions, 3561 neutral mentions and 331 negative mentions.

Most of the positive chatter was driven by sheer exuberance that the World Cup was starting.

The arrest of the head of Rwanda’s Football Federation, Brig-Gen Jean Bosco Kazura, for attempting to leave the country without permission was one of the key negative mentions.  The soldier was heading to the World Cup.

So, what’s on the horizon?

In the weeks leading up to the first match, the Vuvuzela topped Mashable’s Twitter Trends chart (12/6).  The plastic stadium horn sounds like a drone of bees – music to some ears – worse than tinnitus to others – musical Marmite.

As the teams got down to business, France captain Patrice Evra complained that he couldn’t sleep because of the Vuvuzela racket.   The Serb team complained that the din impacted their concentration and they gave away a ’stupid’ penalty during the Ghana game, (Yahoo.com 13/6).  FIFA had already considered banning the horns.  It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out.

If first-day traffic numbers for Twitter are an indication of what’s to come, then it seems there will at least be a micro-blog pitch invasion at this year’s World Cup.

p.s. There was another link last week to an old report on BBC News’ popular stories. This time it was a report on a sponsorship settlement between FIFA and Mastercard – from 2007!  (BBC News 21/6/07)

Wonder if this issue will be resuscitated by social media, just like the Mars story? (See post on 10 June – Why was Mars back in the conversation?)