With the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics now only days away, social media feeds a predictably buzzing with anticipation for the games. It would also be fair to say that there is a fair amount of nervousness and negative speculation creeping its way into the sentiment of those posts, given the public’s concerns that it may not be alright on the night… We shall have to wait and see.
Anyway, following on from last week’s story about the social media powered Olympic light show due to take place on the London Eye, here’s another games related story from the world of social media.
US broadcaster NBC has teamed up with Twitter to create an ‘Olympics hub‘, aiming to highlight the noteworthy tweets from across the games. A team in Boulder, Colorado, will spend a staggering 20 hours a day curating the tweets into a single Olympics hub page. Their source material will come from the athletes themselves, their support staff and entourages, NBC staff, as well as from the fans.
NBC say there is no money involved in this partnership, however it will be pointing its viewers to Twitter, and Twitter will be pointing its users to NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Olympics.
The micro-blogging site is hoping that the exercise will see an influx of new sign-ups. Chloe Sladden, VP of Media at Twitter explained that it is “a new way for users to sample Twitter”.
NBC hasn’t limited itself to 140 characters either – the network has already entered into a similar mutually beneficial arrangement with Facebook.
How will you be keeping up with the games? Will you simply be watching it on television, or will you be keeping an eye on the social media streams for extra contextual updates? Let us know by leaving a comment.
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