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Vancouver - Gold Medal for Social Media?
The fact that I married into a family of hockey fanatics was very apparent on my Facebook page when the Canada vs. USA hockey game was feverishly playing out last Sunday. Twitter reported 172,000 tweets on the topic of "Canada vs. USA Hockey Game." Coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games via social media sites helped coin a new phrase, "social games," and changed the way that viewers watched the competitions.NBCOlympics.com streamed over 400 hours of live event coverage during the games and offered over 1,000 hours of replays of full-events in all 15 sports. To view this live streaming video you needed to subscribe to a multichannel provider who signed a deal with the network. Unfortunately, our family doesn't subscribe to any multichannel provider (rabbit ears in this house), so we were relegated to what NBC chose to show us on primetime - figure skating, alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, speed skating, snowboarding and short track. Luckily, NBC interrupted a previously taped event to bring us live coverage of the first Canada vs. USA hockey game.
The website at NBCOlympics.com is quite interactive and allows you to do a search on each individual sport, read what the athletes were tweeting, view medal standings and many videos, including the Top 10 Wipeouts. NBC also sported a Facebook page which only garnered 125,539 fans. The "agony of defeat" was evident in all the negative comments fans posted, and have continued to post even after the games. NBC, however, now has the opportunity and ability to use this information to improve its content and programming for the 2012 Summer Olympics. NBC paid $2.201 billion for the USA rights to the 2010 and the 2012 Olympics. With an investment this great, the broadcasting company needs to harness the power of its audience to help enhance its image. In contrast to NBC, the Facebook page for The Olympic Games enjoyed a huge fan base of 1,517,906. The page, created by the International Olympics Committee, was generally well received and featured photo contests and mini games to make it more interactive for the fans. Like the saying goes in the social media world, you can't control the conversation, but you can join it.
Even the Norwegian curling team gained popularity through social media. As USA curling team member Chris Plys tweeted, "Norway has the crazy pants." A Facebook fan page entitled The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team's Pants, which currently has 596,694 fans, was created with posts on the latest results of curling and, what else, the pants! Going viral, of course, can have its downside as well. The U.S. Ski and Snowboarding Association asked Scotty Lago to leave the Olympic Village early after a bawdy picture of a woman kneeling to kiss his Bronze medal flashed across the social media exchange, and spread much faster than snowboarder wanted.
The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team
So, overall, was the Olympics experience a Gold medal for social media? I would say... probably Silver. There is always room for improvement, especially with an event this massive. It will be interesting to see what the 2012 Summer Olympics in London will bring to the social media spectrum. Athletes will likely start building their fan bases sooner, if they haven't already, through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And, the International Olympics Committee will probably tweak the Blogging Guidelines for the athletes, many of whom were confused by the rules.
In the meantime, the name Crosby will forever be a swear word in our house and will warrant getting your mouth washed out with soap. Better luck in 2014, USA!
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion or position of Concepts & Strategies, Inc.
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