IOC Embraces Social Media for Olympic Day Celebrations

(ATR) Athletes, Olympic organizers and fans around the world are geared up to celebrate Olympic Day.

The annual event takes place June 23, the day the IOC was founded in 1894 at the Sorbonne in Paris.

The IOC says 160 countries around the world plan to participate this year through fun runs, concerts and other events designed to get people active and make them think about Olympism.

"It’s much more than just playing sport, running or exercising," IOC president Jacques Rogge said in the latest edition of Olympic Review.

"It is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the Olympic Games: i.e. that we must always try to give the best of ourselves, while the important thing is not winning or losing but knowing how to play the game well."

IOC Honors Women in Sport

As part of Olympic Day, the IOC will celebrate women’s contributions to sport with the 2011 Women and Sports Awards.

The trophies will be presented at IOC headquarters in Lausanne to five women representing each continent and one woman representing the entire world.

Rogge and Anita DeFrantz, chair of the IOC Women and Sport Commission, will attend the presentation.

Also in Lausanne, there will be a run from IOC headquarters to the Olympic Museum.

Social Media Strategies Explained

By participating in Olympic Day, fans around the world have the chance to win a trip to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Innsbruck 2012 Winter Youth Olympic Games or the Olympic Museum.

"We have different competitions running on different platforms, and what we wanted to do was kind of aggregate those competitions and those conversations that are happening around Olympic Day onto our website," IOC head of social media Alex Huot tells Around the Rings.

"The general idea is to get people active, to be sportive and to take advantage of this day to do some sporting and be healthy.

If fans follow the IOC’s official Twitter account, @Olympics, and tweet a picture or video of them participating in any athletic activity, they will be entered for a chance to win a trip to London. Click here to enter the contest.

Fans also can participate on Olympic Day by including the hashtags #Olympics and #OlympicDay in their tweets.

The contests aren’t limited to Twitter. The official IOC Facebook page has launched an Olympic Day event as well, inviting fans to submit photos and videos of themselves "doing sport on the road to Olympic Day" for a chance to win a trip to the Olympic Museum. So far, nearly 3,000 fans have done so.

On June 30, the IOC will watch videos from YouTube of fans participating in sports and select a winner to visit Innsbruck during the 2012 Winter YOG.

The IOC has also concentrated a portion of its efforts specifically on Asia. The organization launched a photo competition on weibo.com/Olympics and asked followers on video-sharing website Youku to submit videos of themselves practicing sports.

"So far, we’ve been seeing some pretty awesome photos and videos of people doing stuff and being active," Huot tells ATR.

"And it’s not just individuals, but it’s parents. Parents taking their kids out on a hike in the forest or on a bicycle ride, and they’re sharing those photos with us."

Huot says the social media campaign for Olympic Day is a big effort to engage fans and raise the awareness level of the Olympic and Youth Olympic Games.

"I think this is a really good sort of social media legacy from Vancouver and Singapore that helps us to leverage to create awareness about Olympic Day, so in the future, I think you’re going to see definitely more of this and our next big stop will be Innsbruck 2012 and then London."

NOCs Lead Olympic Day Festivities

"National Olympic Committees and other stakeholders are taking part and retweeting our messages, and they themselves are sharing photos of the events they have had on the road to Olympic Day," Huot tells ATR.

"So I think what they’re sharing with us is the real value and we’re seeing some pretty rich stuff."

Olympic Day festivities are traditionally linked most closely with NOCS. The usual activity is a fun run.

The United States Olympic Committee will host 350 celebrations across the country between June 17 and 26 as well as a week of events at USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

"With a full week of planned activity ending with our annual community celebration, Colorado Springs residents will surely be touched by the Olympic and Paralympic Movements this week," USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said in a statement.

In the Zambian capital of Lusaka, more than 1,000 students will take part in a five-mile run while hundreds of local residents take part in educational programs on HIV/AIDS, anti-doping, environmental preservation and female empowerment.

The workshops will be staged at the first Olympic Youth Development Center, a modern $10.3 million complex inaugurated last year as the prototype for the Sports for Hope program initiated by Rogge.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Olympic Committee will also host a series of Olympic Day events centered around spending time with family and living a healthier lifestyle. In the city of Chaguaramas, participants can take part in volleyball matches, a 5km run, wheel chair races, football games, face painting and more activities.

A number of NOCs have already hosted Olympic Day runs, including Portugal and Cambodia.

The Mexican Olympic Committee expects thousands to participate in its runs.

Organizing Committees Join Celebration

Sochi 2014 will host its Olympic day celebrations Saturday in two Russian cities: Moscow and, of course, Sochi itself.

In the Luzhniki Sports Park, site of the 1980 Olympic Games, 30 different types of athletic events from relay races to a football match will be contested.

Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov is scheduled to participate in the Moscow events.

Rio 2016 is celebrating Olympic Day through a "virtual run" in which people can have their Olympic Day activities broadcast on the organizing committee’s website.

Twitter users can fill in blanks in the line "On #olympicday I_____ #diaolimpico @rio2016_en," and the authors of the most re-tweeted messages will have their avatars displayed on Rio 2016’s website.

Written by Ann Cantrell and Isia Reaves Wilcox .