By Steve Retka:Between Shaun White’s high-flying acrobatics and the U.S. finally beating our neighbors to the north after 50 years, it’s been difficult to peel our attention away from our television sets. However, there have been some pretty impressive steps taken by NBC and the Olympians themselves to take Winter Olympic coverage to the Internet and social networking sites. And with the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver coming to a close in less than a week, it may be a good time to look at these online developments.
The reason why these social media developments are so interesting is that these are the first Winter Olympics since Twitter was launched in 2006. And because social media (especially Twitter) has become so popular in our culture over the past couple of years, it was obvious the social network would have an impact on how we view the Olympics this year.
As expected, The massive hype surrounding these games have caused a huge spike in interest in following the competitors’ Twitter accounts, and one trend that has plagued athletes in the past has been false accounts being created in their name. Both NBC and Twitter have solved this by tracking and sorting all of the official Olympic Twitter accounts on a verified page.
Additionally, NBC created a visual Twitter tracker so fans can see which Olympic topics have been the most popular. Based on Twitter’s existing visual tracker, this version categorizes the topics by the specific sport (speed skating, snowboarding, etc.) with more specific topics and trends listed under them. Also, users can view how the different topics change and fluctuate over time.
All of these developments just go to show that there has been a greater focus on the individual athlete as opposed to nations as a whole with the 2010 Olympics than in the past. Whether it’s Apolo Ohno becoming the most decorated Winter Olympian in U.S. history or what fellow American speed-skater Chad Hedrick has planned for his day, the personal lives of these Olympic athlete’s seem to be taking the gold medal in the minds of social media users.