The Associate Press (AP) nails the point home in the video above.
Social Media Proves The Olympic Games Is The Most Identifiable Movement On Planet Earth
A few highlights from their video:
The London Olympics Transformed Sport…
For audiences…and digital devices…
The London Games were watched by 300 million more people than the Beijing (Olympic) Games…
That’s a total of 4.8 billion people…nearly three-quarters of the world population…
And the numbers could go higher…in 2016 in Rio Brazil…
There were more tweets about the 2012 Olympics than any other sporting event…ever!
When Budweiser and VISA ran ads during the Games…
Discussion on soical media around those brands…increased 1500%…
In 2012, four of the top ten most searched athletes in the world were Olympians…
“Olympic 2012” was the No. 3 search trending term among “all events” worldwide on google in 2012…
4 out 10 U.S. viewers are checking a social media networking during a TV show or commercial break…
And…the trend is growing globally.
We launched SwimSwam a little over a year ago. Our company birthday was March 8th. Our goals were very simple:
1. Only partner with swimmers who “actually” swim or swam to report the news and feature profiles. If someone doesn’t know the swim language, doesn’t understand the conversation from the pool deck, they don’t qualify. We wanted the swimswam audience to be able to smell the chlorine on the contributors.
2. Listen to the swimming audience very, very closely.
3. Share the narrative of swimming. We don’t want to give you just the “who, what, and where.” Our readers all know how to look at results. We want to give you the “why you care and how they got there,” and open up conversations for you to share your “why” and “how”.
4. Water connects our world. We want to connect the water of the world through SwimSwam. We want to connect the story of Michael Phelps to the story of Brazilian age group swimmers to the story of Bulgarian open water swimmers back around to Chinese distance superstars who are trained in Australia.
5. Most importantly, we wanted to bring swimmers back to the sport, and give them a reason to be fans again. There is an unnbelievably huge network of former swimmers who haven’t followed swimming since their high school or college careers ended. We wanted to show them that it’s ok to still score out psych sheets for the British Collegiate Championshp meet; that it’s ok to care what Ricky Berens went in his 200 free at the American Short Course Championships; and that it’s perfectly reasonable to debate which is currently the top professional training program in France.
Nothing makes us more excited than when we see swimmers and swim fans get excited about the sport. When Louisville All-American Gisselle Kohoyda, from the western coast of Michigan, favorites a tweet about an Ian Thorpe comeback, halfway around the world, we smile. When swimmers who are the future of the sport like Isabella Rongione are watching and talking about Ricky Berens’ American Records, we get motivated. Or, when age group parents ask questions about the nuances of NCAA Championship qualifying, or when swimmers-turned-television stars like Anders Holm remember their roots and write lines about the legend of the Vanderkaay brothers (not just for the swimmers, but for the masses), we feel more connected. These are the things that get us excited. This is when swimming goes global.
We knew we were going to work hard, that we would probably make some mistakes along the way, but that if we followed the points above, we would build an audience that was passionate, loyal and fun-loving. It’s worked. SwimSwam’s reached nearly 25k likes on Facebook and 12 Twitter followers; nearly 15,000,000 hits and four and half-a-million readers. Not bad for year one.
Thank you to everyone who drops by each day. We promise we’ll continue to work hard and follow our points listed above.
Thanks to my good friend and fellow Olympian, Chris Coleman, for sharing this video.