There are many new trends popping up here and there regarding where health communication and care is going thanks to digital technology. That’s NOT what this week’s Health Digital Check-Up is going to cover. Instead, let’s take a look at the opposite side: the places where digital still hasn’t taken hold.

That’s right, the Digital Check-Up is going analog for a week. Shocked? Well here’s five ideas and stories to consider for when it comes to the case for traditional tools in health care. Are these destined to change too?

Word Of Mouth

Online resources may act as a second medical opinion for Internet users, but to find a specialist in the first place, word of mouth may still be number one. Tony Brayer included this point within a guest post at KevinMD: selecting a physician is still very much rooted in referral and less-digital guidance. As he noted, “The primary care physician is still the leading source for patients seeing specialist physicians and the opinions of referring physicians remain the leading factor for an individual patient choosing a hospital.”

Patient-Physician Communication

One of the hot topics of the digital age is how patients and physicians can communicate when they aren’t face-to-face through social networks, e-mail, etc. While the topic is still being discussed, it means that there is an important role of direct communication between physicians and patients. As Stephen Wilkins at Mind the Gap discussed, there are immediate gains from direct, strong communication between a patient and their doctor.

Bookshelves

There always has been a little bit of perceived pride that comes from a hefty bookshelf office, and in the medical industry, perhaps a hearty case of texts and guides will never be replicated by things like e-books and tablets. Think about this quote from Malcolm Jones that appeared in a Newsweek piece on the cultural downside of e-books:

I come from a generation for whom the books and records on the shelf signaled, in some way, who you were (starting with the fact that you were a person who owned books or records or CDs). If you visited a friend, you took the first chance you had to surreptitiously scan that friend’s shelves to get a handle on the person. I suppose I could sneak a peek at a friend’s Kindle, but is that the same? And try that kind of snooping on a bus or in a coffee shop and you’ll probably get arrested. 

Rural Practice

For all of the Wi-Fi coffee shops and wired hot spots that fill our major cities, it’s really easy to forget that there are plenty of places around the world that aren’t completely connected. Among other things, practicing medicine and supplying healthcare to these regions relies on traditional, traveling physicians and small practices. Among other challenges to recruiting to this field is a newer one: the impact of the digital age. The attraction for young doctors to join the ranks, as this Washington Post article explained, is fading fast as many new physicians have been trained in a tech-heavy era that may not be as applicable in rural areas.

Nostalgia

Culturally, there may be one thing that never fades: our sense of nostalgia for how things used to be. Perhaps this mindset is one of the greatest challenges of moving forward in the digital space among many healthcare organizations. We have come a long way in the last few decades thanks to technology, but as Paul Waldman wrote last month in The American Prospect, we are in an era of immense innovation, and discussed how nostalgia can actually play into the fears of technological change.

Earlier this summer, we took a look at a few different ways that hospitals have been using social media – or even what new networks could mean for future patient outreach. There are some hospitals and health centers that are ahead the pack, and the best example may be the Mayo Clinic.

The Mayo Clinic raised the bar in the past month, not only further committing resources to digital and social media efforts, but also by creating a first-of-the-field Center for Social Media. As Valeria Maltoni reported at Conversation Agent, the effort is designed to “accelerate effective application of social media tools throughout Mayo Clinic and to spur broader and deeper engagement in social media by hospitals, medical professionals and patients to improve health globally.”

As a case study on textbook engagement in the healthcare space, here are a few different ways the Mayo is using online channels – and what it could mean for the future of patient communication.

The Mayo Blog Network

At the tip of the iceberg is solid, original content, and Mayo lays its social media center on that foundation. There are few places that are as well respected when it comes to healthcare leadership as the Mayo Clinic, and by creating a blog network with these experts on topics like nutrition, pregnancy and dealing with depression, Mayo can ensure it always has quality information to share.

Cases in Social

As we have learned, the lessons from general consumer PR do not always apply to health communication, especially online. For a healthcare facility like the Mayo Clinic, there aren’t many examples to look toward while determining a new program. To help fill that gap, one section of the Center focuses on case studies of what organizations have successfully done in the space.

Centralizing Existing Networks

Across the big three social networks, few healthcare facilities are even in the neighborhood of the Mayo Clinic’s audience: 67,000 strong on Twitter, another 23,000 Facebook fans and more than 2.4 million total views of 800-plus YouTube videos uploaded. Not too shabby. But by building a central home, it brings all of these networks and conversations into one – making both monitoring and engagement less of a challenge.

Sharing Mayo Clinic

Up to this point, everything discussed has generally been content created by the organization (or at least conversations moderated by it). One additional component of the center, though, is Sharing Mayo Clinic, a blog dedicated to the stories of patients and families, as well as Mayo Clinic staff. With the number of people who touch Mayo, it’s easy to gather these stories, and promoting them online helps to get those interactions out to people looking for someone going through what they are. It’s further worth noting how simple this was to create: a free Wordpress blog, a small annual fee to move it to the mayoclinic.org domain and minimal design. Complexity doesn’t make things interesting; this is excellent proof that compelling content matters much more.

But Why?

Katherine Hobson of WSJ Health Blog got a chance to interview Lee Aase, one of the managers of Mayo’s center. Hobson asked Aase what the goals of the new effort were, and Aase’s straight forward response is worth ending on, “[What’s the goal?] To help patients. Sometimes that means providing information directly to them, and sometimes it means disseminating information more rapidly to the medical community.”

It seemed helpful the first time the Check-Up doubled as a book club, so to continue the link sharing, here are another five resources to check out when you are looking for news in the digital health space.

Newsmap

There is never enough time in the day to keep up with trends and news. However, sometimes tracking down the big story is worth your time, and luckily there’s a really cool tool called Newsmap to help by visualizing news stories like a word cloud. You can even drill down the topics into certain verticals, like health, to get a category specific view of the news of the day.

5 Ways Social Media Helps Promote Good Health (Mashable)

Mashable is a go-to news source for just about everyone online because they often break many stories related to social media, technology and online culture. In addition to those short pieces, Mashable retains a bunch of contributors who offer longer guides to different corners of the Internet. For a can’t miss one on how digital media can help improve your health, Alexander Howard’s piece from early July is a great resource.

Former FDA Official to Pharma Marketers: Don’t Expect Much Regulatory Guidance on Social Media (eMarketer)

Health communicators in the U.S. have been tracking the future of FDA regulations for the digital space very intently since last November’s hearings. In an interview with eMarketer, Peter Pitts, a former FDA official familiar with the existing DTC guidelines, gives some disheartening news: any guidance from the administration is likely to only address “long-hanging-fruit issues,” and not move forward into some of the bigger questions.

‘Twitter Doctors’ Lists Medical Kings of Social Media (Social Times)

There are many ways to gauge influence on Twitter (like the awesome Edelman creation, TweetLevel), but you can never go wrong by checking many different sources. Twitter Doctors breaks down just those medical professionals who use the microblogging service, and is easy to sort based on followers, retweets or influence. Read more at Social Times for some more information on who the highest rated medical Twitterers are.

Ask Wolfram|Alpha about Medical Drug Treatments (WolframAlpha Blog)

Wolfram Alpha is not a traditional search engine, per se – It bills itself as a knowledge engine, and the data it gives back are not links to other sites, but detailed results that help to answer the query right there. On its own blog, the WA team recommends a new thing to look for on the network: medical and drug treatment data. Check out the results for what happens when you search for “drug treatments diabetes” to give it a whirl.

Seen any other good articles or resources? Be sure to keep the sharing going by leaving it for others.

There are many reasons we end up creating a deck for ourselves or a client. Sometimes it is for an important stakeholder meeting, other times, it’s to introduce a new plan or strategy. Either way, once those events are over, that presentation may find itself buried on a server somewhere, never to be seen again, far from the social Web.

Why horde information, though? Did you know that there actually is a place where you can share your decks with a wider audience? SlideShare is basically a YouTube for visual presentations, and not only is it a place for you to share, it’s also a place to find other people’s ideas on all sorts of topics – including the future of health communications.

Edelman Digital has recently gotten more involved on SlideShare in the last few weeks, and in honor of that, we went digging to find some of the most interesting presentations out there relevant to the health and digital spaces.

Healthcare Napkins

There are some amazingly creative presentations on SlideShare, designed to simplify complex ideas into easy to digest ideas. One of the most interesting may be this visual “back-of-the-napkin” breakdown by Dan Roam explaining the Healthcare Reform debate of the last year.

GP and Specialists Study

Although the research is several months old, this study on pharma and physician participation in online health information and social media in the United Kingdom still provides several insights into the universal concerns of healthcare communication online. There are several interesting charts in here on the different levels of participation among the specialists and general practitioners who were surveyed.

Happiness as Your Business Model

Tara Hunt’s clever and engaging discussion of looking at economics through the eyes of psychology is not only is fascinating, it also shows off a few other cool things about how visual information doesn’t have to be boring. A presentation doesn’t have to be all bullets and lengthy slides to get a point across – sometimes, simple is better, and Hunt does a great job at proving that.

How Facebook and Twitter Are Changing Healthcare

In both a forward and retrospective look, Kevin Clauson, a professor of pharmacology at NOVA Southeastern University, breaks down the landscape of healthcare and digital media. Looking at the change of culture, business and delivery of information, Clauson’s presentation shares several examples that may serve as good case studies.

Six Digital Trends to Watch

Edelman’s Steve Rubel and Dave Armano took some time out of their hectic calendars to get together and create an incredibly valuable presentation on what’s next in the digital realm. These two thoughtleaders within Edelman have some great ideas and foresight into what we’ll have to plan for in the future.

One of my long-standing rants about digital communication and technologies is that sometimes it gets wrapped up unfairly into an umbrella term of “social media.” In fact, there are many forms of digital that are inherently not social, and those are worth exploring as well.

One item that fits well into that category in the health space is the notion of electronic medical records (EMRs). The active online Health IT community often discusses the concern that we’ll be behind in efficient patient care as long as we continue to avoid digitized health records.

To give you a different topic to think about this Tuesday, here are a few interesting things to consider when it comes to the role EMRs could play in improving patient care. If you have something to add, feel free to comment so we can keep building this list of resources.

The “20 Year Lag”

The article I always seem to keep coming back to in the EMR debate is a Wikinomics piece from March 2009. Jeff Perron very plainly states a fascinating juxtaposition of using paper-filing systems to organize vital information: “Am I to believe that our libraries did, almost 20 years ago, what our health care system is starting to do now?”

The Benefit

It’s easy to try and guess the benefits of an electronic records system, but it’s better to check out this case study from Dr. Owen O’Neill of a Minneapolis orthopedic surgical practice. The initial return appears just to be in staffing and management of the facility, but as you read on, you’ll note how O’Neill pointed to the improved quality of patient care, reduced risk of transcription errors, and better access to information after-hours. Even better, his partner noted how the physician quality of life also improved.

The Privacy Concern

Privacy has been the buzz word of the last year, and personal health is among the most sensitive of topics. While it’s easy to question why health systems are far behind other public sectors, the strongest reason to be cautious with implementing electronic records is that patients have to trust the security of their digitized records. They have to believe that a secure system in “the cloud” or in health system servers will keep their personal information safe.

New Technologies to Help

The tablet computer revolution has moved many to start looking for practical applications of the devices in the medical space. One such suggestion is leveraging those technologies to streamline the EMR process. There would be a few kinks to work out; as one author noted, if they can’t type on a tablet faster than they would normally write, the dictation apps better learn medical jargon. There is at least a notion that these devices could replace the physician’s clipboard.

Will They Solve Every Care Issue?

Late last year, a study showed that EMR adoption rates were still quite low in the United States, and there had yet to be more than modest differences in the quality of care between hospitals. Most notably, one concern is that some of the systems that may be able to use EMRs most effectively are those who see many poor patients. Yet those same hospitals rely on federal funds more than others, and EMRs may be lower on their implementation list. A digitized health system has clear benefits, but they certainly won’t solve everything.

Image credit: John Norris

Community can be a very powerful force in health. It is the central notion behind the idea of public health and wellness, but it is also a little bit of a juxtaposition. Many people view their personal health as a private matter, but as the online movement drives right into the world of patient communities, this line is increasingly becoming blurred. It’s partially the same reason: community support can help make health public, and as such, more manageable.

Last week, as a part of Digital Capital Week here in Washington, several thoughtleaders in the digital health space got together to discuss how open information and public channels change the role of patient’s in their own health. Led by Dr. Val Jones of Better Health, Susannah Fox from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Maya Linson from National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, and Erin Enke from TogoRun led some great conversations on the role of digital in the public health revolution.

A few interesting discussion points came up, so here are five different things to think about regarding the landscape of digital health.

The Chronic Disease Question

There isn’t some statistic from recent research that demonstrates that a majority of people with chronic health conditions are active online, but, as Susannah Fox commented, the evidence suggests that those who do participate are very active. That means that digital doesn’t necessarily help get to the wide audience related to some disease or health condition, but the people online who you could reach are likely heavily engaged.

The Sharing Factor

It may be surprising to find out where the results of a health query end up going after someone turns to the public channel to find health information. As Fox noted, 2/3 of people who search for health information online (a universe which we understand to be nearly more than 4/5 of Internet users) share what they find. The question is with whom – and it appears to be friends and family, not medical professionals.

Credential-Free Doesn’t Mean Trust-Free

Erin Enke made a point that seemed to resonate well through the live and Twitter audiences (you can go back and check #DigitalHealth for the latter): when patients participate in health communities, they don’t have medical credentials, yet still earn the trust of their peers. That may also mean, though, that when approached by a PR or marketer, they could be surprised by the role they’ve earned through the trust of the community.

Overcoming The Credential Concern

A great question was posed to the panel towards the end of the session: is self-policing within patient communities enough to overcome the vetting concern? If anything, primary sourcing information is not really that prevalent on any health site (only three percent of health sites clearly source information with date), user-generated or professional. Communities rely on trust because the Internet changes the value of primary sources, the group must rely on authority to determine validity.

When Patients Talk, But Staff Can’t Respond

In a HDCU a few weeks ago, we touched on the different ways hospitals leverage social networks and digital media. Maya Linson brought up a really interesting point: many facilities block access to social networks like Facebook and Twitter on employee terminals. Patients, though, may not realize this as they air their concerns of questions on the channels, and then further get frustrated by a lack of response. It’s not enough that we live our health in public, but now that we’re more open with it, a response is expected.

Image credit: badjonni

A post last month on Twitter’s Media blog began, “Okay, so it’s uncontroversial to say the World Cup is a big deal.” The global event has gripped almost every inhabitable corner of the world, with more than 100 million people worldwide tuning in to each game since the competition began last week. The 2010 World Cup is offering something different than previous years: the unprecedented amount of digital and global media available at our fingertips puts us in a position to immediately share experiences across the world.

One of the great parts about working for a global company like Edelman is that you can bet that there has been a bit of chatter on various channels across our network about the tournament (although, I have noticed that our British colleagues have been a little quiet since last Saturday’s U.S.-England match…). In that spirit, we took a few contributions from Edelman footie fans to provide a global look at the way digital communication has changed the way all of us are watching this year’s World Cup.

140 Character Fans

From Ivo van den Brand (@ivovdB), Edelman, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

If you intend on fanatically following the World Cup 2010 through Twitter, you’ll have a hard time receiving a good combination of up-to-date news Tweets (scorers, injuries, substitutes and highlights) and witty pre- and post-match analyses. @WorldCupBlog effectively sources local know-how from national fan bases, using selected football bloggers from participating countries as their board of ‘Tweditors’. Doing so, @WorldCupBlog continuously provides its followers with sharp, up-to-date news feeds, as well as local insights and invaluable quotes from local pundits (e.g. citing former head coach Jurgen Klinsmann during the Germany match) without having to cope with unwanted spam messages (that are already taking over Twitter.com/worldcup). As a bonus, most of the bloggers engage with their followers, adding a touch of the pub dialogue most of us like best while watching the ‘footy’.

Nothing But Net

From Jessi Langsen (@tokissthecook), Edelman Digital, Chicago, IL

It should come as no surprise that there’s a web destination for every kind of soccer-related curiosity. For those with a heart for numbers, Footbalistic has the stats to satisfy even the most detail-oriented fan. If you’re more interested in the big picture, Infosthetics has each game (and the conversation surrounding it) visualized with a number of compelling graphics. If holistic coverage is the name of the game, Fanhouse’s World Cup coverage is a place to check out. Even Vanity Fair is covering the World Cup from their soccer blog, Fair Play. Fair Play talks about football on and off the pitch, aggregates World Cup news from various sports and news sites and provides cool posts on the history of the World Cup.

Match-ups via Mobile

From Jenni Lopez (@jlo734), Edelman, Silicon Valley, CA

The whole game from the palm of your hand, without a foul in sight. Bon Cherry has a comprehensive list of World Cup app recommendations but a few favorites are listed below:

ESPN FIFA World Cup – Includes news, brackets, updates and for $8 you can upgrade to listen to audio of the games on your iPhone (with ESPN Mobile app, you can watch the games live). I love that I can select my favorite team (Spain) and read only the latest on those players, games and news.

Univision Futbol (BlackBerry is an Edelman client) – For Spanish speaking folks, this application is similar to ESPN’s but in Spanish and a tremendous complement to Univision’s main soccer page.

A Corporate Kick

From Nivene Judeh (@nivjustsmiles), Edelman Digital, Chicago, IL

Due to the international popularity and scope of the event, many recognizable brands have gotten into the game. Any commercial break will give you a preview but many of the most interesting integrations are online. CNN has teamed up with Foursquare to provide two different badges based on World Cup-related check-ins: one for fans at the games in South Africa and one for those watching from closer to home. Other companies have gotten into the viral video game, producing World Cup-themed ads that view more like short films. Nike and Adidas are two to check out. Budweiser has launched BudUnited.com, a YouTube page centered around a World Cup reality show about fans living in a house in South Africa. Consumers can vote for their favorite fan, penalize another fan or check out the Facebook page to paint their profile picture with their country’s team colors.

Watch Anywhere, Anytime

From Dave Levy (@levydr), Edelman Digital Public Affairs, Washington, D.C.

Viewership for the World Cup has traditionally been measured in terms of the global audience tuning in to their nation’s local broadcasting outlet. It’s never been a perfect measurement: soccer is best as a shared experience, and one of the most popular ways to watch is in massive groups at pubs or friends’ homes. That said, the time differences worldwide don’t always make watching from traditional settings possible and for those of us in that position, there are a handful of online outlets offering live feeds of every game. To find one that may work, check this list from Lifehacker. With these added avenues, it may be more challenging to figure out how many more people have turned in to keep up with the tournament, but it’s a great list if you need to keep up on games when you may not otherwise be able to get to a TV.

How are you watching the World Cup?

Image credit: Clive Rose and Axel Bührmann

One of the best reasons to be actively following Twitter and connecting with other smart people around professional and social networks is that you often will come across lots of great links to the newest studies or fascinating blog posts.

Thanks to a great Edelman Digital team (most hat-tip worthy: a great Community Manager who loves to share), I find myself with stacks of of articles about new developments in online health and communication. So many of them are fascinating, but they may not be enough for a full, focused Check-Up. But, as a midday reading list, this collection is quite useful.

In the nature of sharing, here are five links related to Digital Health from the last few weeks worth a bit of your time today. What links, stories, blog posts or new networks have you seen recently?

The Health Tweeder

As we keep learning about the way people discuss diseases in social networks, an interesting tool to check out is The Health Tweeder. It is a nifty visualization of the content on Twitter that discusses different disease states.

The 1st Canadian Pharma Ad on Facebook?

A great catch by the folks over at Marketing 4 Health: an ad for a Canadian pharmaceutical company (King Pharmaceuticals) was spotted in the sidebar for some Facebook users. Of course, every country faces different regulations for direct-to-consumer marketing, but the author is right to give credit to the organization for innovating within its governments guidelines.

Future of Health: Heart Powered Tech

Could your heartbeat be used to provide power to run other electronic devices in your body? For the answer, check out this great story shared by PSFK.

The (Questionable) Link Between Health and Wealth

I’m a sucker for a good infographic, and I’ll be darned if this isn’t a great one shared by GOOD. The question at hand: is there really a link between the wealth of a country and its population’s health? The math says there is, but that’s only when looked at via life expectancies; the author of this post goes beyond the generalized to share a few more insights to consider.

Hello Health

In the past, we’ve mentioned the divide that exists between patients and physicians online. Hello Health is trying to change that, making a shared network where the two groups can co-exist and connect. The group also presented at the recent Health 2.0 conference in DC – a perfect fit for the patient-empowerment movement.

Twitter has certainly been my point of discovery around many topics, so I was really grateful last week when Bryan Vartabedian shared a great resource from Ed Bennett that I had never seen before. Bennett, who works in the University of Maryland Medical Center, has taken the time to compile a fantastic database of US hospitals and the different digital media that each uses.

Bennett has cataloged 730 different hospitals in this list, and the information sheds a good amount of light on the different reasons health centers are venturing into social media. Based on his data, here are five points to consider about hospitals and how they use these channels.

The Embrace of Twitter

Most of the growth surrounding Twitter happened in the middle of 2009 (likely thanks to that Ashton Kutcher/CNN battle), so it isn’t too surprising to see that Hospitals really started to embrace the status-based medium in the middle of last year. Up to that point, it seemed that many hospitals had been steadily joining YouTube before the prominent rise of Tweeting.

Self-Promoting Content

When it comes to the type of content that these health centers are sharing, it isn’t surprising to see that much of it is promotional about the facility. The content for an entire Twitter feed or YouTube channel may involve advertising spots or stories of health recovery from within their walls. In no way is this exclusive to how hospitals use digital media, but it is certainly a simple way to make sure that positive content around each organization is available.

Children’s Hospitals Posting Often

Bennett broke down his research into geographic categories, but he also split the data in a few extra verticals. Most notably, he has dedicated a full section to children’s hospitals from around the country and the different channels you can find them. The nature of content involving children may tend to pull at the heartstrings, and since young people are involved, the plethora of channels from these institutions are likely due to the fact that there is better audience fit online than general centers or intensive care.

A Lack of Blogs

Even though a major hospital blogger is often on the top of my “must read health blog” lists (Running a Hospital from Boston Beth Israel’s Paul Levy), it doesn’t seem to be the norm. According to Bennett’s research, only 94 of the 730 “digital” hospitals run full-fledged blogs. The balance between producing content, building an audience and maintaining a consistent publishing schedule are the likely barriers that push health centers towards a lower time-investment channel like Twitter.

How Could Foursquare Be Involved?

Bennett didn’t include it in his research, but there may be one more place worth checking out when it comes to health centers in the digital space: Foursquare. Hospitals, just like offices, airports and restaurants, offer a little bit of diversity of places to check-in to the location based-game. Unlike the other channels, health center venues on Foursquare probably weren’t created by the institution themselves, but that hasn’t stopped them from showing up for patients or employees to fight to become the mayor. Should Hospitals start paying attention to these channels, too?

Image credit: taberandrew and Paul Keleher

Originally posted on Sports Grid.

In 1993, Tom Weir penned a column for USA Today stating his thoughts on this country and fútbol: “Hating soccer is more American than apple pie, driving a pickup, or spending Saturday afternoons channel surfing with the remote control.”

Things have changed in the last 17 years. For one thing, North America hosted a World Cup. In another, as with most things, soccer has become less maligned around the States because the home team has actually gotten competitive. The 2002 World Cup featured the best performance by the Americans ever; last year, the US squad almost pulled off the win of a lifetime before falling to Brazil in the finals of the confederation cup . Dave Eggers once tongue-in-cheekly noted that, “When children in the United States are very young, they believe that soccer is the most popular sport in the world.” For maybe the first time since the Cup has been in the U.S., though, there is a reason for everyone around here to get excited beyond the youngest among us.

I’m a soccer fan living in America, born in America (aside: even if I have cheered for England in World Cup’s past and potentially even have St. George’s Cross hanging in my workspace, I will be rooting for the right team come the opening game for Uncle Sam’s Army on June 12th). But even stateside, faithful fanatics like me have nothing on the global tenor surrounding the beautiful game. The good news, though, is that the global network of social, digital media may bring us all together in just three weeks time.

I kind of believed that we’d catch on to this game this year, but in the last few days, the excitement really feels like it’s catching on. For example, there’s this outstanding Nike commercial that’s gained nearly a million views in just a few days’ time.

From the minute I saw the first post of the video over on Yahoo!’s Dirty Tackle, I passed it to every soccer fan within my social networks I could. I promise that this entire column is more than an excuse to post the clip, though. I did some digging of how quickly the video reached the various parts of the Internet. As of 9:30 this morning (May 21), the Bit.ly stats have it at more than 15,000 clicks and 16,000 shares on Facebook (updated: 49,000 clicks and 263,000 shares on Facebook as of May 27) – not shabby for one day at all. Here’s to American innovation and Nike!

But wait, of those 15,000 clicks? Our country of 300 million? We account for about 2,000. Our former colonial oppressors? Actually, a little bit more than that, and Brazil has as many, too. An American company’s three minute commercial spread throughout the world massively quickly – and relatively none of us noticed.

Twitter and Facebook are going to play an amazing role in this year’s Cup – even if only has a fractional impact in America. The universality of Twitter is absolutely something new to this lap through the World Cup, and there’s an interesting viewpoint about its reach shared on Twitter’s Media blog:

Okay, so it’s uncontroversial to say the World Cup is a big deal.

It is, in fact, the biggest deal: the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world. In 2006, 700 million people watched the final match.

So it’s not surprising to suggest that the World Cup will be big on Twitter. Let’s take the Super Bowl as a data point. At peak moments, nearly half of all tweets created were about the game. And think about it: where the Super Bowl is U.S.-centric, the World Cup is global, and increasingly, so is Twitter. Then, mix in mobile use: people are going to be tweeting from bars, from movie theaters, and from stadiums in South Africa. Lots of people are going to be tweeting from their desks at work—but lots are also going to be tweeting from places in the world where phones, not PCs, are the primary internet connection. (Twitter sends about a billion tweets via SMS every month.)

I plan on watching every minute of this year’s matches that I humanly can – but I’ll also have one eye peeled to the billions of other voices chiming in about the World Cup. The global game is truly about to be that, and it is something we will luckily be able to share together wherever we may be. Regardless of what Tom Weir once said, I don’t have to hide my love of soccer anymore to be an American. In fact, I can broadcast it to every corner of the world in just 140 characters time and participate in the events more than any U.S. fútbol fan could before.