Social Media and the Olympics

The Olympic Games start in just a few weeks. Ad Age has reported that NBC is likely to lose money on the Olympics for the first time ever. To me the Olympics should be a slam dunk, even in a down economy, and the ability to sell advertising space ought to be proportional to the amount of buzz and excitement about the Games. So as I started working on this post, my intent was to talk about the blown opportunity to use social media to get people excited in advance. After all, every Olympics people complain about the coverage–too much of the back story, not enough of the competition. Yet, it’s obvious that network executives believe the back story is what sucks us in and keeps us watching. How better to tell those stories than in advance, using social media to connect with viewers?

However, I was surprised to learn when I visited their Olympics site that NBC actually has a great deal of social media integration. In fact, they are doing a lot of things right. What’s good and what’s bad? In the screen cap below, check out the neat “Olympic Pulse” box, featuring revolving recent tweets from various Olympic athletes and commentators.

Clicking through on Olympic Pulse takes you to a dedicated Twitter page with pulldown lists of athletes and journalists that tweet, sorted by name or by sport. You can see those individuals’ twitter streams embedded on the page. Clicking on an athlete’s name takes you to their profile page, with not only their tweets, but a brief bio and tabs linking to even more content. It was not immediately obvious to me how to follow that person on Twitter, but they do have a small follow button to the right of the profile. Ideally, that button should be much more prominent beneath the athlete’s name to expand the user’s experience beyond their singular visit to this page.

In addition, on the right side of these pages (though you have to dig pretty deep to find them on the actual home page), there are buttons for the general @NBCOlympics Twitter account, a Facebook application, mobile alerts, RSS, and widgets. They do not link to a Facebook fan page, which is a surprising choice, and the application has no activity (so far). I suspect they’ll use it to publish updates during the Games, but a fan page would afford them more versatility and greater reach.

The general Twitter account features a diverse stream of useful information about athletes, Vancouver, US qualifying rounds, etc. They also smartly use the Twitter Lists feature to make it easy to find other Olympic-relevant Twitter accounts. What’s missing is the interaction. Some of the tweets invite participation via comments on the NBC Olympics blog, but NBC could take better advantage of the social nature of Twitter (and Facebook) by keeping these discussions there, thereby capturing the attention of other users. Then, the ultimate move to engage with viewers would be to ask which athletes people would like to learn more about, or which events merit more coverage, and adjust not only their online content but potentially the actual television broadcasts in response to public opinion.

Overall, NBC is providing a lot of content and making it easy to learn about these athletes if you happen to find your way to their site. They could be using social media more effectively to drive more traffic and spread the word, but it’s a decent start. I’ll be monitoring how all this continues to play out as the Games begin in a few weeks. It will be interesting to see how viewers respond and interact with the network once this unique sporting event gets underway.