Experts: Social Media, Mobile Devices Key to Olympic Outreach

(ATR) Olympic organizations should increasingly take advantage of social media to build connections with the public, says a panel of experts featured during the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Assembly.

"You’ve got to draw people into a place where you can connect with them regularly, maybe Twitter or Facebook," said Robbie Bach, a member of the USOC Board of Directors and former President of Entertainment and Devices at Microsoft.

"It’s not complicated and it doesn’t have to be expensive. If you get people to connect to Facebook, it enables a tremendous number of other marketing things you can do."

Bach said social media allows organizations to take advantage of the assets they have: the stories of their athletes and the emotions they build.

The Facebook page for the U.S. Olympic Team surpassed one million "likes" in June. The Facebook page has live chats, athlete postings, a donation application as well as links to NGB and sponsor pages. The page also links to the Team USA website, which has feature stories, news and athlete blogs.

Bach added that the beauty of Facebook is that it's a central point for people who want to connect to sports and that the site "takes care of all the stuff under the covers" such as managing privacy controls, etc. "It’s a really good platform for the USOC and NGBs to build on," he said.

Ralph Santana, Chief Marketing Officer for Samsung Electronics, meanwhile cautioned that so many people are now going to Facebook, which has 800 million users, and the site is so crowded with material that "it’s hard to stand out. With the privacy controls, it’s easy to build up your own walled garden. As marketers, we’re trying to break through."

He added that marketers are seeing some diminished results.

Yet Peter Scott, Vice President of Emerging Media for Turner Sports, believes Facebook will continue to infiltrate daily life.

"It’s going to be on our television remote, part of how we eat, drink and live," he said. "It will change people’s behavior."

The Digital Media Forum, moderated by Alan Abrahamson, founder and writer of 3WireSports.com, was the featured event on the final day of the Assembly in Colorado Springs.

Samsung and the Olympics

Samsung, a company headquartered in South Korea, decided to build its brand through the Olympics because sports fans tend to be "a little more tech-savvy," Santana said. "Sports makes sense for us to do business, and if you drill down and say, ‘Why the Olympics?’ It’s because it is a global platform and we are a global organization."

In the United States, he added, the Olympics are "just culturally relevant. It’s a hyper-local activity. You can create really interesting ways to leverage the passion behind it."

Rise of Mobile Devices

In the past, a family would sit down together and watch the Olympics on television after eating dinner. Now the Games are on practically 24 hours a day and available on mobile devices.

Scott said that during the NCAA basketball tournament in March, 30 percent of the video streaming took place on mobile devices.

In addition, people are using devices while they’re watching TV.

"The couch potato is not the couch potato anymore," Scott said. "They’re using a tablet or using a mobile phone (while they’re watching). They want to share the experience. The tablet is here to stay, and the laptop will go away."

The purchase of Skype by Microsoft for $8.6 billion gave the software giant new opportunities. "It’s an experience that’s like being in the same room with people," Bach said of the ability for speakers to see each other while talking via Skype.

He said the quality has to get better, but "now when you map that to what Microsoft sees is going on with Facebook, I can use a Facebook infrastructure and my applications combined with Skype for a new way to interact and monetize."

Samsung Genome Project

Samsung is using social media to drive business through an initiative called the Genome project.

Santana said it's a Facebook application that will make a family tree for users and show how they are connected to Olympic athletes.

"It looks at your data on Facebook and identifies things about you that you have in common with athletes," he said. "What we’re drafting off of here is the power of discovery. People really want to know how am I connected to the Olympic Movement and how am I connected to different athletes?’"

By becoming connected to athletes – perhaps they went to the same high school or share the same interests – fans can become part of a community. They could "like" an athlete on Facebook or "follow" him or her on Twitter. "It mines fans for the athletes," Santana said.

He added that an NGB or the USOC could structure the program in such a way as to channel donations to the federation, the NOC or directly to the athletes, although Samsung hasn’t yet figured out how to do that.

By bringing utility to the consumer, Samsung can "plug into the Movement in a credible way" and make its brands stand out, Santana said, adding that the company is looking for past and present athletes who want to be part of the database.

Written and reported in Colorado Springs by Karen Rosen

20 Years at #1: Your best source of news about the Olympics is AroundTheRings.com, for subscribers only.