Less than 2 years have passed since I was able to participate in one of the greatest and most important events a Marketer can ever be involved in: The Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
Looking back I have mixed feelings. On one hand it was a great and exiting experience, it forced me and the people I worked with to pull quite a number of work hours. On the other hand the amount of bureaucracy and problems the IOC and BOCOG presented us was so immense that I'm glad that I don't have to do that again.
I'm fortunate enough to have first hand insights into how things work, and, trust me, Olympic Marketing is no easy task. In order to associate your brand with the 5 rings and the games you need to comply with a lot of rules that, more often than not, seem a little bit arbitrary.
I can now speak more openly of this issues since my former employer is no longer an Olympic sponsor and I'm no longer employed by Lenovo.
The idea of writing yet another post on the Olympics came after seeing the site AP built for the ocasion. The site bears some resemblance of the gadget aggregator we built in partnership with Google. That page no longer exists, and for those of you who were not fortunate enough to see it I'll make a description: Picture iGoogle filled with Olympic-related gadgets, from maps and photos of the venues to a schedule of activities and the always present medal tally.
I think a web-based gadget platform can be a very powerful means to engage the public, that could lead to a customized experience for every user. If a company could combine that level of customization with the power (and inherent virality) of a social network of the size of facebook that would be a winning combination.
I have to admit, tho that after reading pieces such as this on Mobile Local Social I feel a bit surprised with people finding that Olympians + Social Media can be a killer combo. That has already happened at Beijing. Of course neither was the world what it is now nor was Beijing (or China) as open and as eager to socialize as Vancouver is, but the Athletes have very compelling stories to tell. [shameless plug] And that was what we tried to enable with the "voices of the summer games" blogging aggregator program. Think of it as "long tail meets world-class sporting event". (The site is still up and locked, left as a time vault of what it was).
Yet there is one major issue with Social Media, telling the athlete's story and the Olympic games: the IOC.
The Olympic committee has to be one of the most conservative entities I ever had to work with. Sure, when working for the 2008 games we were concerned about the great firewall and people not being able to:
- Post their stories from within China
- Read posts or watch videos from within the firewall
We had partnered with Google, we were using Flickr and YouTube and Facebook, we had reasons to worry. But we were looking in the wrong direction. The real censor was the Olympic committee. And it still is.
Proof of that is this piece by newsy:
And the tweet (now deleted) by Gold Medalist Lindsey Vonn, which stated:
Hey everyone, because of the olympic rules (blackout period) I will not be able to post any updates...
The rules for Athletes are vague. And Athletes are afraid of the Comitee, and for a good reason, they could be banned for life or stripped of all their medals.
There are two main reasons why the rules imposed by the IOC are very misleading:
- They do not understand Social Media and cannot (or will not) adapt quickly enough and
- they want to keep the upper hand and call some interpretation of the rules and hold them against someone in case of need.
The committee does not like receding any amount of power, and that is exactly what social media would do: it would shift a little bit of power from the IOC to the athletes.
It would seem like the IOC forgets it exists thanks to the very same individuals it puts under an iron fist: the Athletes. The fear is that once the Athletes can start telling their stories by themselves a good chunk of broadcasting rights money could shift from the centralized control to the athletes.
And no one would like that, now, would they?
There was a time when I was not a sarcastic, cold heart (curse words). At the time I was 4 years old. By the time I turned 5 I already was this SoaB.
I look at the twittverse and it reminds me of what I know of the 60s. Too much flower power, high hopes and interest in changing the world, but little real action and tangible proposals.
Take into account the recent events that had to do with Iran's election. I'll grant you that technology played a pretty decent job allowing the world to find out about what was going on at Iran (to some extent).
Yet the problem is when poeple that don't live in Iran start acting like they could actually have an impact. Like that idea of changing your twitter location to Tehran to confuse Censors.
(dramatic pause)
For intelligence sake! Do people actually think the Iranian government is moronic enough to completely ignore IP location or trace routing technologies. I can picture the Secret Service guy in some government bunker thinking: "Oh, Gee, I'm so confused this guy with a Manhattan IP says he is located in Tehran, what will we do? Lets re-count votes".
Don't get me wrong, I know this is all well-intentioned, but it lacks thinking.And it lacks real action.
The impression I get is that most of the twitters actually go to bed at night with the notion that by changing their Twitter Avatars to green and using the #IranElection hashtag the world has become a better place.
That is our 2009 perception of activism: type something in 140 characters, that ought to have an impact, Right? Wrong!
Then of course we get hit by news telling that the US state department asked for a maintenence reschedule so that the Twitts about IRan would keep coming.
"If the US state deparment asks for that then Twitter must be really important! I'll sleep soundly tonight!"
Sorry, but: Holy Fucking Shit.
We have been amused to idocy. We are so bombarded by information, we have been positively reinforced so much that we actually think we are that important.
Saddest thing about it is that people could actually make a difference in a lot of aspects. But not by twitting, or using hashtags or changing avatars to green, but by actually doing stuff.
Now we also find out that despite what media and new media tries to make the crowd believe Twitter did not play an important role in Iran.
The whole "changes happen one step at a time" thing has rooted so deeply that people actually believe a 140 character message has an impact. Change happens when people take real steps. Not twitted steps or verbal steps. Things happen when people act, not when they hashtag.
I think we need to grow up and grow out of this self-inflicted deceit. We need to go back at thinking at lenght. And by length I mean longer than 140 characters.
There has been a lot of buzz around the real time web lately. And the main responsible for that buzz has been, without a doubt, twitter. Some have gone to the extent of saying that Google is afraid of twitter.
Well, hum, I don’t think so, clearly the mountain-view gang is worried about other stuff, not twitter. Twitter does not overlap with what google does. Yet it does open the door to something somewhat novel.
One of the main differences of twitter with “chat” as we knew it is that the content is stored, indexed, and publicly available in the form of webpages. IRC, for instance (or Messenger, or Yahoo! IM) uses its own protocol to transfer, store and access information which, in most cases is not publicly available either.
The so-called “real time web” then is actually “almost real time web”. This makes a small difference to the human interactions (things happen as fast as we can assimilate them) but has huge implications from a technological and indexing point of view.
This is where google comes into play, why they shouldn’t worry and why this rumor about big G’s plans to launch microblogging search makes perfect sense.
Let me explain.
Twitter is endogamy. It is a self-contained universe. Fair enough, its API allows all sorts of interactions with the outside world and extensibility through other services and programs, but it all orbits around the same. Google, on the other hand has always been an outside-looking company and set of services.
Google’s basic premise is to crawl what others generate in order to allow people to find that content. That premise does not have to change with the so-called real-time web. That is what makes companies such as google so interesting, the fundamentals are so simple that they can adapt to changes without having to change them. As a matter of fact what google needs is other real time content-generation sites and services to proliferate.
How so? since most people use Twitter it makes perfect sense to use Twitter’s native search when looking for the latest. But what would happen if there were another big player in the scene? You’d end up using a search engine that indexes them both. That is if such two things existed. It does not make sense for google to buy Twitter, but it makes perfect sense for google to foster and help new players to enter that market.
A lot has been said about how important(sic) Twitter is in news-spreading. I remain skeptic.
I plan to blog about the Iran-Twitter affair soon (and I know most people won’t like that post), but a quick lesson learnt from the entire thing is that Twitter is neither a good nor reliable news source. It is a good alert system, granted, but if you need in-depth information, background or analysis you better seek some place else.
In what seems to be the trend with every new wave of web technologies (scrape the term technologies, this is not technology, call it “usage”) the signal to noise radio decreases. If you watch the entire river of tweets you’ll only spot a very tiny percentage that are meaningful in any way. Yet, I think enough has been said about the amount of rubbish going on in twitter all of the time.
Bottom line is: Would I buy Twitter stock? Probably not for the long run. Do I think Real time web is here to stay? yes it is, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
I thought I'd start honoring the "rambles and riff raff about all this and that" tagline on this blog starting a weekly unordered list of loosely connected thoughts. This fits everything that is on my mind but not long enough for a post on itself.
- Argentina is screwed as a country. Sad to say, but true nonetheless. Too much stuff going on and I don't want to blog about it no more.
- Less than a month to go for the opening of Beijing 2008. I should be freaking out, but I'm not. I do expect this weekend to be the last one I take off until August 8, 2008.
- Fairly happy with the recent buzz around the "Voices of the Olympic Games" program. Also some mentions around the "Podium". Great feedback, took some of that this week as you probably witnessed.
- Personal life is in turmoil, but for good.
- I've ditched twitter. Maybe for good, might go back to it for the games. I simply lost interest.
- My Spanish blog is almost ready. It is live, but still not "launched".
- I still hate translations. And it is only bound to get worst.
- I will never work for a TOP Olympic sponsor again in my life
. I feel like I've pushed everything in my life (personal and professional) until "after the games". I'm starting to fear the emptiness inside I'll feel after the games are over. After all I have devoted the past 9 months to "Olympic Stuff".
- I miss blogging somewhat smartly.
I've ben using twitter for about a week now. This makes me nowhere near an expert, but gives me the insight that only brand new toys can provide, after all: first impressions count.
Here's the list of random observations:
- I wouldn't lasted a week if it wasn't for twhirl. The little tool is a must-have if you want to use twitter at all.
- There certainly is a very high noise ratio. That being said you can never know when a meaningless discussion can turn into an inspiring exchange of opinions. That is probably the one thing that might hook me permanently into twitter: the sheer randomness and expectation of the moment when a great thread might start.
- I don't know how some people can keep up with following 1000+ fellow twitters. Man, I don't know how Guy Kawasaki keeps up with 10k+!!! My own limit of people to follow will probably never go beyond 200. I'm at 68 at the time of writing this (and 43 followers).
- You get first-hand insights into breaking new technologies. More on that in a post soon to come.
- Once can easily get distracted and absorbed into twitter.
- I don't know how to measure anybody's success in twitter. Followers mean little (although people will follow other twitters who tend to say smart or previously unsaid things). The only way to know if someone is worth following is by reading a good bunch of their previous tweets. (note to self: my very own message history in twitter is worth nothing)
- I still don't know how twitter makes a living (suspect it has something to do with SMS text messages, but can't be sure).
- The platform needs stability and reliability Seriously.
- I know I'll regret posting this because spam follows me everywhere like a voodoo curse, but I haven't got a single piece of spam so far.
Bottom line: Is twitter worth something? yes. Will I keep using it? for the time being. More posts on this in the near future for sure.
Ok, I know I'm going to have to eat up my words. I'm tweeting.
I decided that as an external observer I had no-clue on what the appeal Twitter has, thus I'd decided to give it a try, use it more or less intensively and then make up my mind and, hopefully, draw some conclusions.
What surprises me is that I'm usually an early adopter of geeky stuff and although I have had the account for well over a year I have not used it at all so far. Something kept me on the skeptical side of things.
It is too early to say anything really useful other than "I'm stevie_glas, feel free to follow me". Sidebar widget coming soon to this blog as well.
Oh, and I'll blame David if I get too hooked up, idiotized or end up hating the thing.