London 2012: The first Olympics social media

Being the first Olympics to contend with social media, sports fans and patriots anticipated the coming tally of medals per country in their Facebook and Twitter accounts. In parallel, advertisers and big companies anticipated the tally of clicks and leads for their products on their Facebook Insights and Radian6 accounts. And the big winner is… Nike? But it wasn’t even an official sponsor! How did that happen?
Yes, the times have changed for the Olympics, and the times have also changed for companies and brands who want to advertise in the Olympics. The lessons we learned this year will affect how advertising will be conducted for the Olympics in the future. Outside of that, however, all social media marketers can learn a little bit of something from the macro lessons this gigantic advertising push provides.
These are the biggest lessons we’ve learned from the first social media Olympics:

Social Olympics advertising beats official advertising

Being an official Olympics advertiser is no longer as important as promoting Olympics presence online. The Olympics committee and its sponsors might want to believe otherwise, but the evidence is out there, and its indisputable. Nike ended up the big winner over Adidas in the Olympics advertising game, and this even though it was Adidas that had the official sponsorship. Adidas may have had its logo spread around Olympics ephemera and interstitials, but Nike played a better advertising game online.
And now we recognize that there’s a lot of interest in the Olympics from people who are unable to or do not actually watch the event live. Many of them may have deliberately chosen to stay updated online instead of watching it on TV. Nike recognized the opportunity there and capitalized on it.
Of course, this would not have been possible if Nike did not make any appearances in the Olympics, and they did sponsor a few select athletes. Adidas was not a complete loser either, since they still managed to garner a lot of interest in their brand anyway. Advertising in the Olympics in an official capacity is still sound advertising strategy. However, it is no longer a safe bet.

Social media turned Olympic stars into superstars.

This was a vital learning for companies with brand ambassadors, and of course the athletes themselves. For many, the Olympics was going to give them their fifteen seconds of fame, but those athletes who were already famous before entering the Olympics had that rare opportunity to raise their social media stats significantly.
So, the likes of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt saw their star rise a little bit in this time, and this translated not just to greater prominence in traditional media, but a notable increase in Facebook likes and Twitter followers.  Recent figures reveal Bolt, not Phelps, was the overall most talked about athlete online, but that race wasn’t really that important. Translating all this prominence to leads and opportunities is the most important thing for all the people managing these brands.

Women drove Olympic social media traffic.

I wanted to make sure to bring this up. Pinterest only recently came in prominence as a predominantly woman-powered site. Subsequently, we see now that women powered social activity for the Olympics, as women outnumbered men in chatter in Twitter, and women athletes like Gabrielle Douglas and Jordyn Wieber were also prominent topics.
On this end, Procter & Gamble (yes, the same P & G I wrote about not too long ago) won big. P&G invested big on traditional and online advertising for the Olympics. They funded 28 of the athletes entering this year, particularly heavily (although again, not exclusively) on the US Olympics Team. And then they based their online campaign around that. Their “Thank You, Mom” campaign revolved about athletes being grateful to their moms. This was not a case of serendipity or luck; P&G claims they did the research and verified that not only were women going to be a big part of the Olympics online and offline, their campaign was poised to have universal appeal.
Just to bring it full circle, P&G is one of the biggest longtime sponsors of the Olympics, and they recently renewed that sponsorship for the next decade.