PaidContent.org’s always useful site has a fascinating piece today about the size of the 2012 London Olympics and the way social media is already being used to steer consumers. They provide statistics from the online sites of the Vancouver Olympics in February this year and the Beijing Olympics of 2008
- 291 million visits (Beijing 2008: 105 million)
- 83 million uniques (Beijing 2008: 70 million – compared with Yahoo’s 32 million, NBC.com’s 20 million)
- Over 50 percent of all Canadians visited the site
- 8.7 million visits to mobile site, 1.25 app downloads
- 1.2 million Facebook fans (Beijing 2008: 320,000)
- “Every post they put on Facebook attracted about 100,000 comments.”
But then note that London2012.com “is already tracking x2 Vancouver traffic at same stage and planning for 10 billion visits.” They are aiming “to sign up 5m+ to our databases.”
At the moment, it’s using Twitter to encourage deep-link click-throughs to London2012.com pages, Facebook for more static, “call-and-response” excitement building and MyLondon2012.com to collect user-generated messages that could be re-published during the games – some, perhaps, beamed on to athletic venues …
“Our major learning from the Vancouver games is that social media has to be FUN. People use it in their procrastination time, downtime, fun time. We produce endless photos of construction progress … some of them quite inspirational and exciting … however, when we put updates on our Facebook page, we get complaints. ‘show us something cool’.”
They also plan to play to their market by figuring out with major telcos how to make cell phone operation flawless at venues, which is certainly not the case today.
Posted by jakking 
