Olympians & Social Media

We've all heard of Facebook.  Many of us have heard of Twitter.  We know what blogs are and we know how to nagivate Web sites.  These forms of social media have been around for a long time now, especially basic Internet sites.  But these past Winter Olympics were the first time in history that the International Olympic Committee really, fully utilized social media to advertise, inform, update and connect athletes to fans and spectators all over the world.

The past games were the first in which an overwhelming number of American athletes "tweeted" to their fans about the Olympic experience - it put fans in the moment, in the place, in the mindset of the celebrity athletes they'd been rooting for since before the games began.  American downhill skier Lindsey Vonn is a tweet machine with 71,478 followers and multiple posts a day during her time in Vancouver.  Though the games are long over, she has continued to update her fans/followers about her post-Olympic training and plans.  Shaun White isn't nearly as consistent with his tweets.  Nonetheless, 169,371 people still follow him!  Apolo Ohno is almost annoying with the amount of tweets he's produced - but his 162,873 followers love it.  The Olympics as a whole also maintained a Twitter account for up-to-the-minute updates about the games.

The games also had a commanding presence on Facebook, where various Olympic organizations had fan or group pages, athletes had profiles, fan and group pages, and even individual sports had fan or group pages.  Athletes kept their fans abreast of Olympic news via status updates and built their fan base through virtual friend requests.  The International Olympic Committee's Facebook page has over 1.5 million fans and inspired almost 200 million similar pages since last January, as reported on olympic.org.  The page also hosted a photo contest in which over 4,000 photos were submitted.

The IOC also made use of YouTube and Flickr, where officials, athletes and fans alike could post videos and photos for other Olympic fans to view.  NBC, the major network broadcasting the games, provided live video streams of events for fans to watch from any computer with an Internet connection.  The Web site also provided in-depth interviews and biographies of the athletes, schedules of events, slideshows of all things Olympic, interactive maps and games and other supplementary video.

For the first time in Olympic history, fans and spectators could access the games at any time.  They could watch events wherever they wanted.  They could personally connect with their favorite athletes via Twitter or Facebook.  They could practically stalk the Olympics and athletes through countless social media tools.  For the first time in Olympic history, fans, no matter where their location, could be fully involved in every aspect of the Olympic games - it became an entirely new level of interactivity.

It's kinda cool that something as monumentous as the Olympics could be made so accessible to so many people.  Social media put personalities and stories with the athletes.  It made the sheer magnitude of the organization of the games conceivable, and it broke down walls that traditionally exist when celebrities are televised. 

I'm excited to see how the International Olympic Committee utilizes social media for the Summer Games two years from now.