A few weeks ago I wrote about the troubles that Nike and certain athletes had gotten themselves into over certain 'sponsored' tweets that went out without clarifying that they were in fact advertisements. This week Mashable reproduced a 4 page letter from the International Olympic Committee ("IOC") to olympic participants with respect to 'Social Media, Blogging and Internet Guidelines' for the upcoming olympics. The rules include prohibiting athletes from posting footage from the Olympic village, require that consent be sought before uploading photographs and limit tweets to those in a "first-person diary format".
The guidelines, which will undoubtedly cause frustration for olympians, demonstrate the difficulties that are brought about by the wide adoption of social media. On the one hand the IOC wants to promote the Olympics and on the other hand they have lucrative contracts in place with the media to whom they owe a duty of care as a client. It will be interesting to see how strictly the olympians themselves will stick to these guidelines and how any breaches may be dealt with, as it could either serve as a precedent for other professional bodies or change the way that these bodies need to think about their own activities.
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This post has me recalling a programme I watched recently that talked about the Bavaria beer incident at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. You might remember this episode of ambush marketing for its use of 36 orange mini-skirt clad models as a tactic to compete with Budweiser for the prize of official beer sponsor of the day. Social media in 2012 ups the ante a whole lot more because back in Athens 2004, Twitter didn't exist and in Beijing four years later...well it's Beijing. All of this to say that London could be the first summer social media Olympics. And so I'd say the challenges brought by clever ambush marketers will be as interesting to watch as the Games themselves.
Clearly in a world where a single tweet can take down a big name campaign and where opening bids to advertise start at US$50M, censorship issues are no longer reserved for heavy-handed political regimes. Let the games...login!
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