The first social olympic games

They say that this year will be the year of the first social Olympic Games and there are a multitude of official London 2012, Olympics and official sponsor social media platforms and campaigns.

But what does being the first social Olympics really mean and what sort of impact will it have on the experience of the games in London and around the world?

Social media has grown in the past 8 years and as the last Olympics being in China causing a nervousness about social media due to their strict internet policies, the London Olympics poses the first opportunity to really take advantage of social media.

What is officially going on in the realms of social media?

• Official London 2012 Facebook page, Foursquare and Twitter streams have been set up and are pushing out interesting Olympics based facts, competitions and useful information. There will also be live streaming of the events on the Olympics official YouTube channel.
• Sponsors are making the most of integrated campaigns heavily featuring social - McDonald’s launched their ‘We all make the games’ campaign and Proctor & Gambles ‘Thank you mom’ campaign.
• Official useful information is also being pushed by Transport for London with the ‘Getting ahead of the games’ twitter feed being a great way of announcing up to the minute travel issues and information.

There is a degree of fear about the use of social media for the International Olympics Committee and London 2012 social media teams though to do with managing the brand. There are huge Regulations about associating your business or yourself with the Olympic games ‘marks’ and set expressions. The regulations are there to protect the best interests of the sponsors and uphold the integrity of the Olympics brand, but some could technically be violated by people simply sharing through social media what they are seeing.

How well will all of this social media be managed?

We’ll have to wait and see! Social media is meant to be a bottom up approach to communicating, making it the choice of the people what they want to talk about, discover and discuss together. Social media is facilitating a world wide discussion and sharing of interest around the London Olympics, so the brand related regulations can’t be too strict or this process won’t occur.

What will also be particularly interesting to see is how feedback and negative comment is managed. The ability to manage what could be huge amounts of complaints about anything from travel to tickets will be telling to see how good the customer experience really is when under that much pressure with the time constraints that exist with a short term event.

Has anyone seen anything else great linked to London 2012 and social media out there? How do you think they’ll do with managing the level of feedback on their streams? Leave a comment below!