Part 2 of a 4 part series

The Holland / Belgium bid

For part 2 of our 4 part series we turn our attention to the digital efforts behind the Holland / Belgium bid. Our Northern European neighbours have the legendary Ruud Gullit, European Championship winner in 1988, as President of their bid. The former Chelsea and AC Milan star has been highly active in supporting the bid and earlier this week he even took to cycling the streets of Paris to do so.

The Holland Belgium bid utilises more social media than the Iberian bid we examined last week and has more followers. The official website is full of informative content and, with features on great goals, a fanzone, a bidbook and a bid monthly magazine, there is more than enough to keep the casual reader or avid fan interested.

The site encourages participation. One unique and interesting way it does this is through the ‘Join the Wave’ campaign. Fans of the two national teams are encouraged to ‘create a virtual wave with the most colourful supporters in international football by uploading their videos to the site.’ At the time of writing, there are 41,776 ‘hands in the air’. This idea is particularly attractive to fans as it focuses on fun and sharing and enables them to share their own personal wave across multiple social media platforms – facebook, Hyves, twitter, Netlog and email.

Put your hands in the air for the Holland Belgium bid

The website also explains how this bid is aiming to be environmentally friendly with its goals of sustainable stadiums and a green World Cup.

Like the Iberian bid website, there is also a comprehensive multimedia zone where photographs are shared on flickr and bid on tour videos can be uploaded onto an official Holland Belgium bid YouTube channel (with over 30,000 upload views) .

As you would expect there is an official facebook page and the bid has its own twitter page, which posts regular news updates on press conferences and presentations (with 635 followers).

The website has links to both Hyves, which is the most popular social network in the Netherlands, and Netlog, which is a Belgian social network site. This is definitely a case of the bid knowing its audience and going where its fans and eyeballs are. This is consistent with some of the ideas we have been advocating here the theuksportsnetwork for some time. On Hyves there are over 1,000 members sharing photos, videos and generating general buzz behind the bid. Netlog is somewhat smaller but still plays an important role with over 100 members again sharing content such as blogs, videos and photos.Neither nation has lifted the FIFA World Cup, but both have had their moments. Holland has reached the final three times – mostrecently earlier this year in South Africa. We will have to wait until December 2^nd to know whether the bid will be successful.

For the next post in the series out next Monday we head East to take a look at the Russian bid’s use of digital media.