5 Social Media Events: Olympics, Superbowl, State of the Union, Grammys and Oscars

As technology and life intertwine, we are beginning to see more instances of large scale events integrating the live experience with the digital audience. Understanding the cross-over points between the real world and digital world all of us now live in helps connect us as individuals and as groups. We encourage you to look at the five case examples below, each using a variety of methods to collect audience generated information and leverage it as a digital asset.

We wanted to highlight the following events:

• 2010 Winter Olympics
• 2010 Superbowl
• 2010 State of the Union
• 2010 Grammys
• 2010 Oscars

All five of these events are block-buster events, giving us a wonderful idea of methods and tactics that can be utilized for live events at a variety of different levels. They also begin to address some of the connected benefits presented by audience groups, ranging from user demographics and market information (*SIDE NOTE: if you strip out the huge marketing / buzz budgets related to these five events, social media can also provide a tremendous amount of collaboration and participatory exposure.)

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2010 Winter Olympics

One of the most anticipated global events, the 2010 Winter Olympics embraced a mixture of technological and cultural elements in the opening ceremony, including the use of digital projectors to create virtual scenes and immerse the audience. The presentation had as much (if not more) focus on audience members watching the event unfold through television and web based services.

Social Media has been embraced across the board: including using Twitter and Facebook accounts for specific event interaction and being deployed by both local and federal sites in anticipation of the event. The CODE Canade site includes some interesting digital assets and visualizations of the event and prompt users to get access to exclusive digital memorabilia.

Read more at The Harvard Review: Welcome to the Olympics, the world’s largest social media experiment

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Superbowl 2010

Perhaps the largest annual sporting event, this years digital Superbowl had tweets, friends and URLs zipping away. Before the Superbowl even started, advertisers were leveraging social media outlets to promote campaign messages and even apply pressure to get ad approval (see “ManCrunch” on Mashable for an example.)You can also see a digital image and content collection on the NFL site creating a mashup of Tweets and comments.

Pepsi decided to skip this Superbowl and break a 23 year advertising record, instead spending $20 million on the digital “Pepsi Refresh Project”

Social media monitoring company Alterian also provided a ten page analysis of ad spends, mentions and Superbowl impacts.

Read more at SmartBlog: The Digital Superbowl

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2010 Presidential Address

Nothing insights conversation more than politics. CNN Politics and several other news sites created service collections around the digital debate, with such example as the “State of the Union: Tweets by type and volume”

The main presidential support site of BarackObama.com also led efforts into the digital fray, reminding us that social media played a significant role in the election of Barack Obama (the Barack Obama site proudly boasts over 6.5 million hours pledged for health care reform.)

http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=141978

Read more at CNN: Barack Obama’s Presidential Address and Social Media

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The Grammys

Realizing the creative nature of the music audience, the Grammys used WeAreAllFans.com to aggregate vidoes, tweets, comments and images from Youtube, Twitter, Flickr and in-house teams. The real-time visualization allowed viewers to interact with information being created by the other audience members and act as a barometer of engagement.

Read more @ Mashable – How Social Media is Changing the 2010 Grammys

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The Oscars

Of all the entities that decided to “get involved in social media”, the Oscars seems like the the most obvious group (almost unlimited audience participation, deep studio marketing budgets, digital assets waiting to be used…)

The net effect for the Oscars was a half-level of participation, which leaves other organizations to note that commitment to a participatory channel requires commitment. You can’t realize success if you are afraid of putting both feet into the water. Keeping in mind that Oscar viewers come from embedded fan groups and enthusiast communities, the end results of only 170k viewers details the Oscars should have been able to drive results at a level far more in-line with the Superbowl’s online coverage.

Read more @ Advertising Age – The Oscars get a Social Media Makeover

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Do you have any other good examples of large events being transformed by social media? If so, please list them in your comments and tweets using hashtag #socmedevent