Posts Tagged ‘Olympics’

The results are in, the Cheermeter has spoken, and Nike has been awarded gold for the social media Olympic games – and they weren’t even a sponsor! 

The Cheermeter is a tool that was cooked up by the Socialbakers to analyse and track social media mentions on Twitter throughout the Olympics. It follows everything from which sports, athletes and languages are trending on Twitter, to how many “cheers” (tweets) the Olympics amassed per day.

Here’s a breakdown of twitter mentions between July 23rd and August 15th, with twitter mentions peaking at close to 2.5 million on July 28th.

The Cheermeter also pulled in a live feed from Twitter and Instagram, so fans could keep up to date their Olympic coverage from their favourite athletes.

According to a press release, Nike bagged the gold medal for social media interaction during the Olympics and stacked up some impressive stats. Their fanbase grew by 166,718 during the Olympics, which was more than double the growth of their sporting rival Adidas, who also happened to be an official sponsor.

Nike also dominated Twitter mentions, with over 16,020 tweets associating the Nike brand with the Olympics, which is 6,725 more than Adidas.

What was the key to their success?

CEO of Socialbakers, Jan Rezab, commented that social media has levelled the playing field for primetime advertising, and the stats speak for themselves. This graph shows the diference between sponsor and non-sponsor mentions associated with the Olympic games.

Acer, Adidas and Cadbury failed to keep up with their non-sponsor counterparts during the Olympics. (It has been speculated that many of the Mars tweets could have been related to the Curiosity landing, hence the incredibly high number.)

“There was a time when primetime slots around major sporting events were essential for maintaining position as a household name; but social media has levelled the playing field. Through its savvy social strategy, Nike demonstrated that you no longer need prime time to create brand buzz.” - Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers 

What you can learn from Nike

Their social media strategy is like their brand, everyone is encouraged to get involved. Interaction is key to this, so Nike asks questions, retweets, and keeps the fitness conversation flowing:

They also had a strong presence at the Olympics with the Nike Camp Victory Pavilion at the Olympic village.

NIKE “CAMP VICTORY” from HUSH on Vimeo.

They also weren’t afraid to stand-out. You may have noticed throughout the Olympics that the majority of the athletes were wearing bright green (Nike) shoes, which were incredibly eye catching. Although it wasn’t strictly a social media push, it was certainly a social media conversation starter.

The Olympics is coming to a close, and it’s been a magnificent run for Team GB. Pegged as the World’s first ‘social’ Olympics, it certainly didn’t disappoint, as fans and athletes were brought closer than ever before. It was also a interesting time for marketers, as they had a captive Worldwide audience. Check out this great infographic about the evolution of Olympic coverage.

The End of the ‘Fan’

In social media news this week, CEO of Wildfire has hailed the end of the Facebook ‘Fan’. She argues that marketers lack the information required to really understand their fans through social media, so we’re no better off than we were two years ago before the dawn of the social media ‘fan’.

While I agree with her to an extent, her argument lies on the basis that marketers have to adapt to their fans every whim. Some companies are able to ‘come into their own’ on social media and develop a brand and voice that attracts fans, who may not have been fans before. Marketers cannot speak to every single fan on a one-on-one basis using social media, so the best thing to do is to develop a brand and promote a lifestyle that attracts the right people. Check out her article here and let us know what you think below.

Commitment & Social Media

Wild Frog Studio have tackled a difficult subject in their blog; how does a company stay committed to their social media? They discuss ways you can stay on track with your social media strategy, and how to take advantage of the power of social search as more and more users are turning to social media to find information. This means businesses now have to come up with the goods and provide great content if they want to stay relevant.

Facebook Optimisation

Track social look at ways you can optimise your content for the best possible level of engagement. The key take away points? Keep it short, and use images where you can. Companies should also look to posting when their audience is listening, and not restrict their interaction to office hours. This doesn’t mean you have to stay up late posting pictures of cats, there are great scheduling services available to help.

Facebook 80% Bots Claim

Remember the start-up that claimed 80% of their advertising clicks on Facebook were coming from a bot? Well, Search Engine Watch has done the legwork and examined their claims in more detail. They assure us that we shouldn’t panic just yet, and attempt to clear up some of the claims made by Limited Run.

Mobile App Engagement

If you’re currently dabbling in mobile apps, which is fast become a huge market, then you might be wondering how best to engage your target audience. Search Engine Watch once again clears up the confusion with these top tips. As always, keeping things social is vital to success.

Testing Linkbuilding

And finally, SEOMoz shares these great tips for testing if your link building strategy is working. All you need is Google Analytics, pivot tables, and a spare 20 minutes. The result will be an awesome table, like this:

The Olympics is off to a great start, and already Team GB is seeing so much Gold and Silver! Keep it up guys, the whole country is rooting for you! Innocent Smoothies has been particularly active on Facebook during the Olympics and cheering on Team GB in a very “Innocent” style.

If you’ve ever wondered what twitter sounds like, it turns out it doesn’t sound like chirpy birds tweeting away! In a very interesting social media stunt, British Airways has turned Olympic tweets into a a digital symphony – click here to check it out!

In other news, folowing on from the Tom Daley twitter troll fiasco, British weightlifter Zoe Smith well and truly owned her trolls via her personal blog. She writes:  “The obvious choice of slander when talking about female weightlifting is ‘how unfeminine, girls shouldn’t be strong or have muscles, this is wrong’. And maybe they’re right… in the Victorian era,” Well said! You can read the full post here.

Moving on from Olympic news, a new Facebook privacy plugin could be the solution many people are looking for to keep their images private. McAfee has launched a social privacy app which allows users to safely share photos, which will be blurred to all but the intended recipients. The plugin will be available on IE, Firefox and Chrome for PC by the end of august, with Mac, iOS and Android support coming later this year.

Image from mashable.com

And a new study by has brought a new meaning to the word “viral” when it comes to social media. Researches have used Twitter to predict when New Yorkers will catch the flu. And the most impressive part is they could predict when someone would fall ill up to eight days in advance with a 90% accuracy rate.

TechCrunch has reported on the rumour that Google+ may be on the rocks. They released the information that Google has put all acquisitions relating to Google+ on hold, suggesting that they are putting an end to the Google+ team’s resources.

Following on from the story about the New-York based start-up who dropped Facebook after alleging that 80% of their advertising clicks come from bots, Facebook has announced that around 8.7% of accounts are fake. This accounts for around 83.09 million of the 955 million.

Facebook classes fake accounts as: duplicate accounts, for example, if you have a personal and a professional account; user-misclassified, for example, if you set up a personal account for a business; and finally non-human entity accounts, so when you sign Fido and Felix up for their own accounts. Limited Run will be interested to see that Facebook doesn’t make mention of any ad-clicking bots.

And finally, The Social Media Examiner released this great article about how to use Social Media to increase your search ranking. It’s all about the Penguin update, and how you can use it to your advantage. Check out the full article here.

The Olympics has barely even got going yet, and already the social media buzz surrounding it is causing quite a stir. Another day, and another story about an athlete/ journalist/ fan who has landed in hot water due to their tweet/ status update/ or general social media usage.

With London 2012 dubbed as the first social media Olympic Games, it leaves me wondering if social media etiquette should have been covered in athletes official training. Although lets be honest, they have enough on their minds. One Olympic swimmer has already cited Facebook and Twitter for affecting her performance and keeping her from the gold!

Here’s a round up of some of the headlining social media mishaps so far:

Greek athlete Voula Papachristou was sent home on 25th after she posted a ‘racist’ message on Twitter. The  triple jump champion retweeted a message from a far-right politician which criticised the Greek prime minister’s stance on immigration. She later apologised for offending anyone, but after receiving over 100 re-tweets, the damage to her reputation was already done.

In a similar situation, the Swiss Olympian Michel Morganella was sent home after posting remarks about South Korea following South Korea’s defeat of the Swiss soccer team. The soccer player apologised in an official statement saying he was “truly sorry for the people in South Korea, for footballers, but also for the Swiss delegation and the Swiss football in general.”

A teenager in the UK is now facing charges for sending malicious Tweets to British Olympian Tom Daly after he failed to secure the gold medal in the 10m synchronised platform diving event.

Fans watching the men’s cycling were blamed for hogging the GPRS network which had a knock on effect to the BBC coverage of the event. Organisers called for people to only send essential tweets and messages when in the area, as the network couldn’t cope with the increased demand, and the cyclists GPS information couldn’t get through to event commentators.

And finally, journalist Guy Adams had his account suspended after posting personal information about an NBC executive following the #NBCFail fiasco. NBC has been accused of fudging up coverage of the Olympics for audiences in the US by delaying some footage for their prime time reel. One mistake they made was showing an interview with a recent gold medal winner before showing footage of her winning the 100 meter backstroke race. Doh!

It has now come to light that NBC were alerted about the tweet from Guy Adams by Twitter, leading many to question the value of freedom of speech, and just how cosy Twitter is with NBC.

So there you have it, all of the Olympic drama without any of the sport!

What do you think of social media usage at the Olympics?

The Olympics Games is now well and truly under-way after a spectacular opening ceremony, which was very well received around the world. The London games are set to be the most social games yet, so you can keep up to date with all the action through Facebook and Twitter, and watch the games online, and on your mobile.

Here’s a round-up of the top social media and search engine marketing stories from the past week.

Social Mums

A new infographic published by nielson reveals the uber-social lives of American mums. They’re blogging, they’re pinning, and they play a huge role in promoting brands. The research is based on US mothers, so it would be interesting to see how mum’s in the UK stack up against the highly social Americans.

Facebook Mobile

Research into eye movement tracking has revealed deep flaws in the mobile advertising strategy on Facebook, which is an area which has been troubling Zuckerberg for quite some time. Research revealed that users spend less time looking at ads on the iPad, and even less time looking at them on the iPhone.

Finding the Influencers

This great blog post by Jure Klepic looks at practical ways to find influencers in your industry, and how to reach out to them. It also looks at how to leverage your expertise to become an influencer.

Social Strategy

Sometimes we find social media strategy in the most unlikely places. This article looks at the success of WWE and UFC as social media brand builders (who knew they were the third and fourth popular brands on Facebook?!)

Who Drives the Most Traffic?

Social Media Today delved into a tough subject which every marketer wants to know the answer to: which platform drives the most traffic. Find out here.

PPC Marketing

Here’s a great list of all the things you don’t want to hear from your PPC marketing manager.  PPC managers – take note!

Google Tab Search

And finally, an in-depth look at the new Google search tabbed options. More importantly, this post also looks at the importance of this to SEO, and how to make sure your website shows up looking great with the new changes.

It’s July, the month the UK has been waiting for since 2005!! The Olympic torch is busy zig-zagging its way across the country. Stonehenge has been lit up like a Christmas tree. And people all over the country are busy with preparations for the Olympic event.

Image from dailymail.co.uk

Since the last Olympic Games, hosted in Beijing in 2008, social media has well and truly taken over our lives. The number of Facebook users has grown from 100 million in 2008, to 900 million users today. And Twitter usage has grown from around 1.3 million in 2008 to 100 million active users today. So it makes sense for London 2012 to be the most social games to date, and to set the precedence for all future games.

One of the big differences in these Olympic games will be in how people access and view events. Audiences in the US will be able to access live-streaming of the events hosted by YouTube and American TV network NBC.

In the UK, the BBC has been trialling mobile live-streaming of the event, meaning that fans could access coverage any time, anywhere, providing they have a smartphone and mobile data plan.

If you want to keep up with the events on social media then you should head over to the Olympic Athletes’ Hub, which is the ultimate destination for keeping track of all your favourite athletes. You can search by the athletes name, team, sport, or discipline. This has been amazingly successful, with 2.9 million likes on Facebook, and nearly 200,000 Twitter followers. This will likely grow as the games kicks off.

It isn’t all about following your favourite events, social media will also be used to aid in organisation and to keep on top of customer service. BT also announced plans to monitor social media conversations to ensure they can quickly respond to technical complaints. As they plan to offer Olympic park-wide Wi-Fi access, this could be useful in identifying weaker areas and ensuring coverage is consistently fast.

The Olympics is also a big event for UK based marketers, as all eyes will be on London for those 16 days. This is the perfect opportunity to engage your audience as the world is united for this unique sporting event.

Check out these creative uses of Social Media to drive fan engagement on Facebook.

Panasonic have built an app that paints your face with your chosen country flag.

And the Coca Cola Move to the Beat Campaign has been bringing together some of the biggest names in music to celebrate the Olympics in style. Bring your beat to the Olympics here.

Now there’s only one thing left to say… GO TEAM GB!!