Vancouver 2010 - The "Social Media" Olympics

Can social media be the unofficial sport of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics? Everyone from athletes, newscasters, bloggers and fans are furiously typing away. This makes the Olympics the hub of social media, with thousands of tweets being blasted out every hour.

The social media network, Twitter, has released a Verified Tweeting Olympians page where you can see what athletes are tweeting about on one page. They are following 104 athletes including American Johnny Weir to Canadian Joannie Rochette.

The Vancouver Organizing Committee, VANOC, has branched out to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, recognizing the increasing role of social media.

In Alexandra Samuel describes it as “a living social media experiment”:

Social media was around for the Summer Games in Beijing, but this is the first time it will be deployed in a free and democratic regime. There’s good reason to expect that the Olympic experience will be transformed by the social media presence: it’s already changed the Olympic planning process for both the Games organizers and the media that’s now descending on the city.

Even sponsors like Molson are using social media for their Olympic campaigns. Their personalized Team Canada jerseys are part of their “Gear Up For Gold” campaign. Fans can pick up their personalized jersey on the brewer’s Facebook Fan Page, customize the gear, and make it your personal profile on Facebook and Twitter. In the spirit of the Games, and the need to show my Canadian pride, my current Facebook profile picture is my own personalized jersey.

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UPDATE

Now that the games are over ... and we obviously had an impact on the games (I know many people who had the same profile pic as I did), Hockey Canada sent out a thank you to all their supporters.

I think I just liked that it was personalized ... well electronically but that's ok!

Many people have also reviewed the overall success of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics in terms of their social media usage. Take a look at this article for a review of what they did well and what went wrong!