Welcome to World Cup 2014 on The Online Rule

The World Cup 2014 promises to be the most socially enabled competition yet, with social media use at a peak and most of the world’s biggest players actively updating their own Twitter accounts.

It’s also an exciting time for clubs and broadcasters, who appear to finally be embracing the engagement opportunities presented to them by social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Vine.

This means there’s more chance than ever before that we’ll see some genuinely innovative uses of the platforms that are out there. It also means that, inevitably, some players or countries will get things catastrophically wrong and be forced to apologise (see: Tottenham’s recent faux pas).

At The Online Rule we love looking at the intersection of social media and sport, particularly football, and over the next few weeks we aim to cover as much of 2014’s World Cup as we possibly can. From countries doing their best to engage with fans, to broadcasters using user-generated content in their shows, we’ll be there to cast an analytical eye over it all.

Of course, we can’t do this alone. So if you’d like to join us by submitting an article or two or just point us in the direction of something you think we should know about, please get in touch. The more eyes we have the better.

You’ll be able to keep track of everything we post on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as seeing all of our dedicated World Cup 2014 content in its own specially created section of the site. We’ll be tagging our posts with the #digiworldcup hashtag across all platforms, so keep an eye out for those and join the debate online. We’d love your comments too, so feel free to pitch in below the line and let us know what you think.

One thing’s for sure: it won’t be a quiet summer.