360DigitalInfluence

Apologies that Facebook Friday is coming at you a day late this week but here in Washington DC we got TWO blizzards so I hope you’ll forgive us. The 2010 Winter Olympics started yesterday and of course every major athlete, organization, and sponsor has a Facebook campaign going on. Here are some recommendations for getting the most out of the games using Facebook.

The Officials - Inside Facebook has a good run-down of the main Facebook pages from the IOC, Visa, Vancouver, and NBC. None of these stand outs but some are a great way to keep track of scores and upcoming events if you’re a hard core fan. The majority of them simply repurpose content or sweepstakes from their website or YouTube and the applications are action oriented, inviting fans to learn about the sports or get into the action with virtual skiing, speed skating, or hockey.

The Athletes- There are lots of Athletes who manage their own fan pages and if you have a sport or an athlete you love these are really fun and the best way to feel like you’re there. Brand pages make it easy for athletes to share their stories and experiences with fans through status updates, blogs, and multimedia; today USA’s Lindsey Vonn posted a status update that she was in her condo baking banana bread and is her injury is healing nicely. Vonn and other athletes and also using Twitter but in Vonn’s case you can tell it’s linked off of her Facebook so the posts don’t make much since when their cut off at 140 characters.

Your Friends- Last week, Facebook quietly rolled out their next jab at Twitter: a search feature that letsyou look at friends’ posts and everyone else’s. Search for “Olympics” and you can see status updates, photos, videos, or links your friends are sharing related to the games. The search functions aren’t nearly as flexible as Twitter search and the use of hastags hasn’t appeared yet but if privacy advocates don’tcomplain about this new feature I think we’ll see a new version of the now-dead Lexicon in 2010.

Overall, I’m underwhelmed with branded Facebook campaigns this year because they didn’t take advantage of human element of platform.

In 2008, our team worked with Lenovo to build the Voices of the Summer Games. We found 100 relatively-unknown Olympic athletes from around the world, armed them with Lenovo products, and asked them to blog about their experiences. The reason the program was a success was because it reminded people about who these athletes are: not everyone is going to win gold; most of these athletes have jobs andfriends and families outside of their competition and are living the dream of their moment to compete against the best in the world. Had this program been done today with the flexibility of brand pages, Facebook would be the perfect platform to bring these great stories to life and cheer on the unsung heroes of the games.

Briefly noted- USA Today had an article about broader social media use at the Olympics: here.