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Why the Olympics should be the perfect social media event

9th August 2008, 02:51 pm
Official logo of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games

I watched about an hour of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics live yesterday. It was perfectly timed to coincide with lunch in London and so I sat at my desk and watched live streaming thanks to the BBC. At the same time I was following what other people around the world thought about it on Twitter. And later in the afternoon I looked at photos on Flickr and saw what my friends thought on Facebook.

I suspect my experience was not alone - whereas in previous years my main source of Olympic news and events was the television and the thoughts and opinions of reporters and commentators. This year I suspect I will follow it more through other people and through social media.

This isn’t just because of the time difference - most of the action will be in the morning and early-afternoon UK time so I’ll be at work, in front of a computer but not a TV. This is because if there were ever a perfect candidate for coverage in social networks, online communities and social media, then the Olympics surely must be it.

From my experience with clients, the aspects that are common in successful online communities typically include:

  1. A shared or common interest or goal
  2. The subject may be broad but allows interest groups to form
  3. A subject people are or can be passionate about
  4. Enthusiasts and leaders who will help to shape the community
  5. An experience that is or can be inherently social, that people want to share with others
  6. A subject that can create strong opinions and passionate views
  7. Regularly changing and updated content
  8. Media and varying content types so different people can interact in different ways
  9. You can be more interested in the issues as you are in the people you are discussing them with
  10. An ability for the online experience to be supplemented with offline experience

The Olympics is one of those subjects that meets all of these criteria. People unite behind it and are enthusiastic on a number of levels - the Games as a whole, individual sports and individual countries. I like the event as a whole and what it stands for, but I also have my favourite sports (the cycling, rowing and track events probably my favourite in that order), I also obviously want to see a good performance from Team GB.

Many people will have strong and impassioned views on any or all of these levels. Some people are extremely passionate and would want to be leaders or enthusiasts online. But the experience is inherently social - you want to talk about it with others (as I saw yesterday on Twitter) and anything that allows you to do this would be seized upon.

The events themselves lend themselves to regularly updated content. With constant updates on results and real-time feeds on events as they happen. It’s also a very media rich event, with photo, video, audio and text coming together to describe and enhance your experience. Creating ways that you can share and experience these will increase reach and attract people.

The nature of the Games themselves suits online communities. In these people tend to unite round issues and themes rather than, necessarily, round individuals and their friends. You might want to discuss the performance in the Team Pursuit heats and share opinions with a variety of people who you don’t know but who are also passionate about that sport.

So, if I was evaluating the Olympics as a candidate for online communities or successful use of social media, I’d say the chances of success were high. Of course, I’ve written elsewhere about how even the most ideal candidate for an online community can fail if it is executed or managed badly. But the positive signs are there.

That’s why over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be watching and following the discussions on Twitter, the photos on Flickr, the videos on YouTube and the discussions in forums and communities across the Internet. It strikes me that Beijing 2008 is the first time that we will see mass use of social media to cover the games, and I’d expect that this brings out a higher quality and broader range of debate, information and coverage than ever before.

Some places you can follow the 2008 Beijing Olympic
Some more reading

Category: Matt Rhodes, Online communities, Social Media, Social networks  |  Comment (RSS)  |  Trackback

3 Comments

  1. Matt:

    The Olympics came at the perfect time, didn’t they? I think this ’social event’ lets people use the tools, a thing many of them are running out of reasons to find. You talked of Twitter as a good place to talk about the Olympics. I agree because it’s hard to think about what to talk about. The Olympics offer the promise of easy content. Don’t get me wrong, some people don’t need the Olympics to be worth following: but many do. As the new tool smell wears off some of these tools, we’ll need social events like this to keep talking. In my opinion.

    11 August 2008, 7:01 pm

  2. FreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » Social media and the Olympics - what brands are doing:

    [...] the 2008 Beijing Olympics should be the perfect area for social media coverage of the event itself (see post here). Social media is also being used by many big brands to capitalise upon the [...]

    11 August 2008, 8:50 pm

  3. Matt Rhodes:

    Matt,

    Thanks for the comment and I do think you’re right, although I might look at it from a different way. Something like Twitter only works where you have a genuine interest in the things people might be saying or are using it to find out what others think or are doing. You create your own community around you about whatever you decide. You might just follow your friends (and so your community is your friendship group), you might follow people in the same industry as you (and so your community is whatever area you work in), or you might create a community about a shared event or experience (such as the Olympics).

    I have no doubt that many people are following each other only because they want to find out what they think about the Olympics (or indeed reactions to events in Georgia as I’ve been watching over the last few days). I also have no doubt that many of these people will prove less interesting to follow when you don’t have this shared interest…

    Maybe I should resolve not to mention the Olympics in my Twitter updates so I don’t pick up an transient followers… ;-)

    Matt

    11 August 2008, 9:00 pm

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