Updates over Media, Marketing en Publishing
It was the frown seen around the world. When U.S. Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney grimaced on the medal stand in London when she was being awarded a silver medal, she looked like she was sucking on a lemon. Then a shot of her making that face became an Internet meme. But now Maroney is turning […]
Lees meer“I wonder what happened at the Olympics.” “I guess you’ll have to wait until you get home to find out.” ### “What do you think she’s like? I wonder what kind of music she’s into, books she’s read, where she’s from…” “Assuming asking her is off the table, see what you can find out from […]
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It’s a brave new world my friends.
There were more tweets sent in a single day during the Olympics last week than there were during the entire 17-day competition in Beijing in 2008. In 2010, during the Vancouver Winter Olympics, there were around 307,000 mentions of the term Olympics during the opening weekend of the event, as opposed to 3.5 million this time around. And we may not even be prepared for just how social the 2012 games have been — spectators during a cycling event were asked to halt all tweets unless they were “urgent” as the data hungry onlookers were interfering with GPS equipment.
It’s a truly social Olympics, the first of its kind, so where else would we turn but to the same the real-time social network that toppled a dictatorship, powered a massive American protest, and brought down the likes of Anthony Weiner. It’s Twitter’s time to shine. The communication floodgates are open, and when the entire world congregates around one city, one competition, and (in the U.S.) one broadcast network, there is to be an expected amount of sewage pouring through our social channels.
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There’s no such thing as bad publicity. A source tells TechCrunch that mainstream news coverage of the temporary suspension of an NBC Olympics coverage tweeter / hater gave Twitter’s signup rate a boost. The same source revealed that the debacle led to internal communication within Twitter, describing the scandal as having a silver lining: “A good thing”.
Why? Well, Twitter needs user growth to power its ad model and lay a nest egg.
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If you’ve grown sick of these NBC/Olympics stories, too bad! We have nearly two weeks of Olympics and their respective tape delays left. I don’t even want to count how many hours of delayed Ryan Seacrest that is.
Here is a wild, EXCLUSIVE, Olympic story that could only be found by top-notch journalists with Internet connections and Twitter accounts (where could we find people with those qualifications? Not in New Orleans).
Anyway, buried lede: A Twitter account, @NBCDelayed has been mocking NBC’s ill-thought, tape-delayed coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games.
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We’ve been pretty outspoken about NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. From what looked like a good start full of social media promise, the broadcaster has failed to deliver the most crucial element of all: a large, unfettered river of live sports content from the event itself, available to anyone, not just cable subscribers (coverage here, here, and here). It’s been getting a lot of grief on platforms like Twitter, but one subset of annoyed U.S. consumers have taken a more industrious route: getting VPN services.
“We have seen a very large spike in UK VPN sales in the last week,” says Phil Blancett, president of StrongVPN.com, a VPN service provider that gives customers the option of a U.S. or UK IP address. With a UK address, users can effectively visit BBC’s site, as if they were in the UK, meaning they would have full access to the Beeb’s online Olympics video offerings: live plus catch-up streams for every single event, tagged in small chunks based on individual athletes for easy navigation. A regular U.S. user would normally be geo-blocked from accessing this — it is available, theoretically, only to UK TV license fee holders.
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Voula Papachristou, Greece’s triple-jump champion, was barred from competing in the London Olympic Games by the Hellenic Olympic Committee after an offensive tweet on Monday.
She tweeted, “with so many Africans in Greece, at least the West Nile mosquitos will be eating food from their own home.”
Lees meerVoula Papachristou, Greece’s triple-jump champion, was barred from competing in the London Olympic Games by the Hellenic Olympic Committee after an offensive tweet on Monday.
She tweeted, “with so many Africans in Greece, at least the West Nile mosquitos will be eating food from their own home.”
Lees meerThe International Olympic Committee is launching a host of programs with the goal of making the 2012 London Games the “most social and tech-savvy Olympics ever,” but restrictive social media guidelines reveal the organization’s inability to move beyond its old and broken command-and-control communications model. In its Social Media, Blogging and Internet Guidelines the IOC states that it “actively […]
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On the heels of a deal with Facebook to promote Olympic conversations on NBC’s Facebook page, the broadcast network today is taking one more step to improve its social standing during the big sports event. It is linking up with Storify, the social-media “story creator”, to put streams of real-time Olympic content, curated by NBC journalists, across Today.com as well as NBC’s 10 owned TV station websites. An NBC spokesperson tells me that this is one of the “bigger things” that NBC has attempted to do using social media.
NBC journalists — hundreds, a spokesperson tells me, that will be in London and elsewhere — will be mining content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites, and putting into the Storify platform to create running narratives. It will be the first time that journalists affiliated with the local sites will work in collaboration with the NBC News team on an effort like this.
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