Since I first shared my disappointment about the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games’ (LOCOG) lacklustre approach to social media on AccountingCPD’s blog, I’ve tracked down the official International Olympic Committe social media guidelines. While encouraging social media and blogging activity by ‘athletes and other accredited persons’, they also place a number of restrictions on what can and can’t be shared. The guidance includes orders to:
Combined with the restrictions based on ‘Games Maker’ volunteers use of social media, which discourage most activites aside from retweeting official London 2012 postings, this reinforces my concern that London 2012 will, like Vancouver 2010, be ‘pushing’ agreed messages out, rather than engaging with audiences in any real sense.
On the other hand, at a recent NESTA Hot Topics event about the challenges of digital media for London 2012, Tom Uglow, Creative Director for Google and YouTube Europe talked about putting people first – not the Games, the athletes or the brands, but the users – to create shared experiences. The BBC’s Digital Olympics Editor & Social Media Editor for BBC Sport Lewis Wiltshire also has a more ‘connected’ vision for the Games. At the Social Media, the Olympics and the BBC event at the Design Council, Wiltshire claimed “like no Olympics before, [social media] has connected fans with athletes, athletes with journalists, journalists with fans. There’s a global conversation, which has connected everybody involved in the Olympics to everybody else and that can only be a good thing.”
As Wiltshire’s colleague, the BBC’s Head of 2012 Roger Mosey, pointed out in the same discussion, “you can’t control this” shared experience, “in the end social media breaks down all the traditional barriers”. That’s exactly why LOCOG should be careful about over-restricting athletes and volunteers. Let’s hope they don’t – and that we end up having the most socially connected games ever. After all, if you’re going to host the world’s biggest sporting event, you want to share the experience, right?
Want to know more?
Read my original blog post for AccountingCPD: London2012 is missing a social media trick.
Download a PDF of the IOC Social Media, Blogging and Internet Guidelines for Participants and Other Accredited Persons at the London 2012 Olympic Games or NESTA’s Social Media at Scale report on The Challenge of Digital Media for the 2012 Games.
Watch the Social Media, the Olympics and the BBC event:
2 Comments
pocket_venus
For a company, am I correct in assuming that Retweeting London2012 – so our customers can get involved in activities, not promotionally – is not allowed?
annafaherty
Hi Pocket_Venus, LOCOG have taken a number of legal steps to prevent non-sponsors from using London 2012 as a marketing tool. The legal situation is relatively clear for physical marketing pieces and the use of logos or branding (which is basically prohibited), but a bit more blurred in terms of social media. As I’m not a lawyer, I recommend the word from law firm Taylor Wessing. In this report they point out how easy it could be to fall foul of the law: http://www.taylorwessing.com/download/article_games.html . So proceed with caution!