"Australian Olympians to embrace social media for London 2012".

"Twitter will be London 2012's lead news platform".

"London 2012: Team GB badminton hopefuls apologise for Twitter feud".

All headlines in the last few weeks serving to back-up the recent assertions made during Social Media Week that London 2012 will be the first "truly social media Olympics".

The explosion in the number of registered users on social media platforms and their increased access to them via smart phones means that we will doubtless see more tweets/posts per second about the Olympics at key moments this summer than any sporting event so far - the 2012 Super Bowl had 12,000 Tweets per second at peak moments according to statistics quoted at the Socialympics Social Media Week panel co-hosted by sponsorship consultancy Synergy and social media agency Jam - but I wonder if we are in danger of getting caught up in talk of the medium at the expense of the message.


In the run-up to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, the talk was again all about this being "the Social Olympics" and we at insidethegames saw the way in which athletes and spectators alike turned to Twitter and Facebook at key moments, be it to express sadness at the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, excitement at the visit of Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured) to the Athletes' Village, or awe at Sean White's unleashing of the Tomahawk to take the halfpipe gold. 

But while we saw athletes and the public taking to social media and expressing themselves, what we didn't see too much of in 2010 were any brands successfully getting in on the social media act. Other than a virtual snowball fight organised by Coca-Cola, and some P&G activity in the US around their "Thank You Mom" campaign, any social brand activity was largely lost in the overall social noise.

The BBC held a panel during 2012 Social Media Week to share their plans for including social media into the broadcast mix, which will also include 24 HD live streams and broadcasts of both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies in 3D.  So with the host broadcaster acknowledging how the audience intends to spend time on social media to enhance their Olympics experience, what opportunities are there for brands, sponsors and non-sponsors alike, to do the same?

Just being present on Twitter and Facebook isn't enough, consumers will smell a "sell" a mile off in this new sophisticated social media world.  It needs imagination and commitment to make this social media work for you, to engage meaningfully with consumers in this new space.

A complete Olympics exclusion zone in social media world is impractical, so although there are clear guidelines over what can and cannot be said by non-sponsors it is still possible to hijack the Olympics for your brand with a creative approach.  With five months to go until London 2012 how many brands are already getting their social media messages right?


Jam's research, released during Social Media Week, suggested that only 0.5 per cent of Olympic social media chatter is around the official sponsors. The research also highlighted the way in which non-sponsor Nike has successfully stolen the thunder from sponsor adidas in their social media presence, with Nike's #makeitcount athlete-centric campaign and hashtag receiving some 70,000 mentions on Twitter so far, meaning they are currently 14 times more likely to be discussed in Olympic conversations than adidas.

Olympic sponsors McDonalds are yet to unleash any real Olympic messages at all. They are known to have been tentative with their social media strategy until recently, and their experience in January with the Twitter hashtag #McDstories backfiring may make them tread carefully with any planned Olympic social media campaigns.

Even offering something that consumers actually want isn't always enough to ensure a strong brand presence in social media. Gordon Lott of Lloyds TSB has expressed surprise with the high level of social media engagement seen from the recent Lloyds TSB Torchbearer Campaign. Around 50,000 people attended the Torchbearer Roadshows up and down the UK, 20,000 photos were taken of those people with the Olympic Torch and 60 per cent of those photos were downloaded, which Lott states was a great demonstration of the way in which social media can interact with experiential campaigns.

Interestingly however, despite his pleasure with those figures, the Lloyds TSB London 2012 Facebook page currently only has 3,706 likes, suggesting that longer-term engagement in social media is hard to come by.


Engagement is the buzzword for all social media strategies around London 2012, and is in danger of becoming as over-used in Olympic circles as the L-word, legacy. Hugh Chambers (pictured), chief commercial officer of the British Olympic Association was heard to talk during Social Media Week about how Team GB are positioning themselves as a team of 900 athletes, 60 million strong, by engaging with the British public and how important social media is seen to enable this. I did wonder how much Hugh really took this engagement message to heart when I realised that he has his own Twitter profile protected, thus choosing not to engage very much at all.

What can we predict with any certainty? There may well be controversies caused by an athlete's inappropriate comments at some point. There is likely to be strong frustration vented when the public realise the level of the IOC's ability to take down any audio and video footage from inside Olympic venues being shared on social media in order to protect their broadcasting rights. But we can't really guess what the messages of London 2012 will be, which stories and trending topics will capture the social media imagination. 

After all, who would have predicted that #vuvuzela would have been a worldwide trending topic for every single day of the 2010 World Cup?

What we can say is that there will be unprecedented use of social media to capture the flavour of London 2012, and that the way the Games are recorded and experienced will be enhanced by it.  The race to the gold medal for best brand on social media is still wide open, with the creative and prepared likely to stand a better chance than the complacent and bemused, but a late entry could well steal it at the finishing line.

It's all still a very open field.

Louisa Gummer is the social networking manager of insidethegames