It was heralded as being the first social Games, and it was just that. There were 150 million Olympics tweets during the 16 days. And Usain Bolt may not have broken the 200m record, but as he ran that race Twitter’s record was broken; some 80,000 tweets were sent per minute.
Aside from their brilliant blog, Twitter took interesting steps as it sought to help curate some of the phenomenal volume of coverage. Partnered with NBC in America, for the duration of the games they highlighted the very best stories and content as it emerged, at the hashtag #Olympics. That’s very exciting indeed – particularly when you consider the potential for other events and similar partnerships.
Elsewhere, we loved M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment’s use of the social buzz around Team GB to assess Athletes’ commercial potential by their ‘popularity’. They found that Tom Daley, by some distance, creates some serious online traction…
And we can expect the role of social media platforms to keep ramping-up in the future. Adidas have just shown off their latest stunt; a hacked running shoe complete with a mini screen, allowing people to tweet athletes live as they compete. Never say never!
