The Social Games: How social media took gold at the Olympics
It’s been labeled the first social games and earned the nickname of ‘London Tweety12’ but how did the 2012 Olympics and social media become a match made in PR heaven?
When it comes to businesses and organizations using social media, they seem to fall one of two ways, fully embracing social media and all its technical wizardry or a complete lockdown. Fortunately in the case of the International Olympic Committee it was the former. From a hat-tip to the digital age in the opening ceremony to a tweeting extravaganza at the closing ceremony, social media was with the games every step of the way.
The official line…
The IOC was quick off the starting blocks by creating the Olympic Athlete’s Hub. The idea behind the Hub was to create a social network especially for athletes. Throughout the games Olympic competitors were encouraged to share statuses, photos and videos to their Facebook and Twitter sites. These posts were then automatically streamed to their Hub profiles so fans could find all their favourite athlete’s information in the same place. Sports fans were also encouraged to get involved through the Hub Communities and get rewards for participation.
Away from the Hub the IOC had a strong presence on Facebook with the Olympic Portal. The Portal acted as a Facebook page directory linking together the official pages for athletes, sports, teams and official partners. Facebook users could easily jump from Jess Ennis’ page to Tom Daley’s to get regular updates and gain access to behind-the-scenes photos of the athletes’ time at the games.
The winners…
While the marketing tactics of the IOC played an influential role in making London 2012 the first ‘social games’, it was the public’s participation on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that really had an impact on how the Olympics were shared and experienced around the world. Statistics gathered by Salesforce Radian6 showed that at peak times nearly 3,000,000 tweets were sent about the games. The opening ceremony saw a mighty 2,989,784 tweets sent. On Saturday 4th August a combination of Mo Farah taking gold in men’s 10,000m and Jess Ennis’ victory in the Heptathlon saw 558,943 tweets sent. Finally the closing ceremony clocked up a 2,288,901 tweets as London celebrated the past 17 days of sporting excellence. Usain Bolt came away with gold in the social games with 962,756 tweets sent about the fastest man in history. American swimmer Michael Phelps took silver with 828,081 mentions on Twitter, and Team GB’s Tom Daley who won the bronze in the men’s 10m Platform Diving also took bronze in the social games with 487,835 twitter mentions.
The Google Doodle Olympics…
Never one to be left out of the running, Google celebrated the Olympics with a series of sports themed doodles on their search engine homepage. Between 27th July and 12th August the search giant posted a variety of designs featuring different events from the games including interactive doodles where visitors to the site could compete in sports such as the hurdles, football and canoeing using the space bar and arrow keys on their keyboard. The interactive doodles were a big hit across the web with blogs and companies creating their own social Olympics out of the games. At Digital Polish we challenged our Facebook friends to beat our score and claim to the top spot, and it didn’t take long for us to be knocked off the podium.
Let the games continue…
With the Paralympic games just over a week away we’ll be interested to see what role social media plays in the second round of London 2012.
Photo credit: Duncan Rawlinson via photo pin cc
