Tuesday Talk - IOC Social Media Guru Looks Ahead to London

(ATR)Alex Huot tells Around the Rings "there are new stories for us that are born every day".

Read on for more from the IOC's social media guru in this Tuesday Talk.

Around the Rings: Olympic media are viewing the 2012 Olympics as the first "Social Media Games". To what extent is the IOC also looking at London that way?

Alex Huot: It is clear as we see the growth. The conversation began with Vancouver, where we went from five to a million. If we look back at Vancouver and here we are with London, two years later we have seen a growth in our fanbase. Our collective fanbase is over 12 million, so we are seeing growth all around. I think what we are seeing is these are definitely the social Olympic Games.

These will be Olympics that people will watch on television and will share and have a conversation with their friends on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These will definitely be ones that are conversation Olympics per se, where people will be sharing the moment when an athlete takes gold, and they’re going to be talking about that.

ATR: What role will the IOC's pages on Facebook and Twitter serve in London? Will they drive traffic? Facilitate conversation? Function as a cheerleader of sorts?

AH: They will be a bit different and depending on what you can do on a certain platform, that is how we are going to be integrated.

Let’s say you login into Facebook, Facebook you can get great apps. We are going to provide a Facebook experience around some apps that could be a photo contest, that could be a lot of things we can build around. That is going to be an app layer to our Facebook integration, but within that, one of the things we do is we ask fans what they would like to see. What are the content of stories they want to hear about? A pretty big chunk of the editorial will be driven by the fans, and that’s the same thing on Twitter as well. So we will be asking the fans, and we will be getting some special views, some cool behind-the-scenes stuff, but again we want to integrate as much as we can our fans and what they want to see into the editorial line.

All this kind of stuff is the fan experience. Within the athlete experience, we’d like to bring our fans on Facebook and Twitter and bring them to one place in the athletes’ hub at Olympic.org/hub. That is an integrator of Facebook and Twitter updates from athletes, so all on one screen you can see, for example, what Usain Bolt said on Facebook and Twitter. That will be an essential part. It’s a searchable portal of athletes that have qualified for London and some Olympians from Atlanta. We’re going to integrate even deeper into that, because we’re going to have a person that was in the Athletes’ Village. Part of the staff here that is going to be connecting the athletes with the fans through the hub. For the first time you are going to be able to ask through the Athletes’ Hub a question to an Olympian within the Village, and we’re going to set up some Q&As in real time from London.

ATR: What kind of traffic do you normally get on social media, and what are you trying to achieve during the Games?

AH: Before social media, the digital traffic has been one that has been inspired by the event. Obviously, on the website the closer you get to the event, the more traffic you get and the bigger the conversation. Social media today, what it's enabling the IOC to do is to connect to fans outside of the Games. We’ve been connecting with fans since the closing ceremony in Vancouver. We have been connecting, posting content and engaging with them and we are continuing to do that, so in terms of how many metrics – it’s hard to tell. To kind of say are we going to get 1 million, 2 million, 3 million – it’s hard to tell. But what I can commenton, looking at how many thousands of people are subscribing to our various accounts every day, on Twitter we may be picking up, depending on the period twenty, thirty thousand it depends. The growth is exponential across all social media platforms. If I were to put a number, we may be picking up 200,000 new subscribers a week. That’s going to grow, maybe to 250 or 300 thousand, and the growth will be exponential and will continue to grow during the Olympics and even after the London Games. If we think about how many people love the Games, its massive. The numbers are growing and so are subscribers onto social media platforms.

Facebook is up to 930 million or something. Who knows what they are going to hit by the Opening Ceremony in London?All these platforms are going. I would think that the evolution is as people discover and get to know that we are on these platforms, we will grow with also very big numbers.

ATR: At the end of the day, what is the IOC hoping to accomplish with its embrace of social media in London?

AH: There’s a lot of things. One is to connect with young people. I think that’s actually super important for us. To connect with the athletes which we are doing with the Olympic Athletes' Hub. For us, the story of the Olympics – it kind of peaks during the Games, but what happens when the Games are over, there are new stories for us that are born every day.

After London people are going to be training for the Winter Olympics, or they’re training for Rio 2016 or they’re training for the Youth Olympic Games. So the London Games will inspire and from there, people will begin to train and we want to connect with all these athletes to be able to re-share their stories of their preparation for future Olympic Games. That’s in part what you are seeing with the Olympic Athletes' Hub. What we want to do is, we think that each athlete can create their own stories and connect, so I think that’s kind of the first big kind of thing. We are going to see – and even right now it’s kind of built up. There’s over 1,500 profiles of Olympians on the Hub, and we will be seeing the first community of the first social network of Olympic Athletes.

On Foursquare, what we are going to see on Foursquare is tips from athletes. Tips where they swam and tips where they ran and you’ll be able to – through the Olympic Athletes' Hub – be able to see what’s the latest thing this athlete said, and I just happen to be hanging out in this neighborhood where they used to run and wow I didn’t know that I just checked in and it suggested to me that this is where this athlete used to train.

You can follow what they said and you can physically go and relive where they trained and were inspired to compete for the Olympics, and its' really to bring this complete experience from the physical space into the virtual space. That’s really what I think is going to be a big legacy of this integration.

The other thing is going to be, there are new cities that are preparing and what we are doing is, we are amplifying. You have to look at the Olympics and the IOC as an amplifier and a connector and a builder of relationships. If you look at our fanbase you know we will break 3 million on the Olympics account on Facebook. We use that account and we used other accounts to engage our stakeholders to say the next Games are here. The Games take seven years to prepare, and we’re always here. What we want to do is to tell when a city gets elected to say ‘it’s here, it’s happening’ so engage, connect and give the fan love back to organizing committees, to National Olympic Committees and other stakeholders.

Interview conducted by Ed Hula III.

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