Adidas may be an official sponsor of the World Cup - providing the ball, dressing the referees and plastering its branding across the 10 stadiums in the competition - but it still has been trumped by a Nike ad called "Write the Future."

Featuring England player Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, of Portugal, the Nike ad received twice as many mentions on English-speaking blogs, forums and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook than Adidas, its main rival, according to a Nielsen study.  Adidas has run its own ad along with its other branding expenditures - however these, which feature David Beckham and Noel Gallagher, from the band Oasis - have not been as well-received.

Following Nike, the "ambush" brands most associated with the tournament were Carlsberg, Pepsi and Panasonic, Nielsen said. It also found that:

• FIFA partner Coca-Cola had five times the level of association with the World Cup than Pepsi – despite the latter's 'Oh Africa' ad featuring World Cup stars such as Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry and Kaká which has generated over a million views online.

• Triggered by Twitter retweets in early June to its FIFA YouTube page and its campaign to create the longest 'goal' shout, Visa had 15 times the World Cup association than MasterCard.

• FIFA partner Sony is timing the launch of its 3D TV sets with the opening day of the tournament, helping to drive association levels seven times higher than Panasonic and ten times higher than Philips.

While identifying what works and what doesn’t on social media has become just as much art as science, one clear driver in this instance is the huge popularity of the games around the world - on television of course, but also online.

For instance:

Global traffic to FIFA.com during May has doubled from 0.11% to 0.21%. It is sure to jump substantially higher as the official event gets underway, says comScore.

ESPN3.com has delivered more than one million hours of video and ESPN.com served up another 729,000 video views, according to PaidContent.org. ESPN3.com viewers averaged 51 minutes per match on ESPN3.com. ESPN.com (including ESPNSoccernet.com and ESPNDeportes.com) drew 9.5 million visits and 34.5 million page views.

On Friday, June 11, measurements from Akamai showed that traffic to news sites globally started a steady climb about 6 a.m. Eastern time and peaked six hours later at noon, reaching nearly 12.1 million visitors per minute. (via CNET). That exceeded the previous record of 8.5 million visitors per minute - set when Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election in 2008.

Whither FIFA?

Given the social media focus by sponsors and other companies, it is surprising that FIFA itself hasn’t been more robust in its social media efforts, writes HubSpot. While it has developed The Club - FIFA's own social network which has 1.6 million users - the organization hasn't created an official Facebook application.