It wouldn’t be much of an understatement to say social media touches almost every aspect of our lives. It’s no surprise then that this year’s Olympics were tweeted, posted, blogged, and commented on in a truly remarkable volume. The “Social Olympics”, as the Games were dubbed, created buzz beyond the actual medal count and athletes’ personal stories. As marketers, we were interested to see how the brands that pay millions of dollars for sponsorships at the Olympics fared alongside the athletes and the competitions. We decided to create a little competition of our own and see if brands were capitalizing on the social buzz of the Olympics. To do this we chose to look at the TOP global sponsors for the event: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, GE, Dow, Panasonic, Acer, Atos, Omega, Visa, P&G and Samsung.
To make this a representative view of global buzz around a global event we included both Twitter and Sina Weibo, two of the largest micro-blogging platforms in the world. While there were other stories and interactions happening during the Games – both online and offline – these platforms allowed us a snapshot of the general buzz, mainly due to the high velocity of conversation and the tendency to link to articles and rich media.
While consumer behavior and velocity remain somewhat consistent between platforms, other metrics like sentiment, hashtags, replies and retweets, and other indicators we would normally use for influence or buzz evaluation, do not necessarily remain consistent. Therefore we looked at relative scales of volume and the drivers of those spikes in posts.
Cross-platform findings
Across both platforms, we noticed that consumer brands generally performed better than B2B brands, in terms of audience reach and engagement—which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone! While Sina Weibo posts were mostly neutral to favorable, Twitter reactions tend to be more critical and swing in different directions quite quickly.
The most volume of any one brand on Twitter was over 21,000 re-tweets of a negative post for McDonald’s, compared with a 6,100 peak for Sina Weibo.
Twitter findings
Three sponsors generated over 80% of the mentions – McDonalds (62%), Samsung (12%) and Visa (10%). McDonald’s dominated the overall share of voice with 62% across the three week period, seeing a lot of publicity; unfortunately for the fast-food company it was mainly negative. From an early point in the run-up to the Olympic Games, McDonald’s was being criticized as a sponsor, with questions being asked regarding the brand connection to an unhealthy lifestyle and elite athletes. Linked with other sponsors, Coca-Cola and Cadbury’s (a UK only sponsor) comments on Twitter negatively described this year’s Olympics as the unhealthiest in its history.
Samsung had a steady stream of conversation with multiple topics including bloggers and officials using the new phones, their Olympic Games mobile application, and new celebrity advertisements. Unlike McDonald’s, most of these were positive.
Discussion of Visa was more mixed. There were multiple giveaways and contests with the hashtags #visagoworld and #giveaway. There was also criticism for the phrase “We are proud to accept only Visa”, which resulted in many consumers not being able to make purchases with other means like cash within the Olympic Village.
Weibo findings
On Weibo, Samsung took the lead in creating the largest amount of chatter, 6,117 posts on 2 August, while other consumer brands such as Coca Cola, P&G, and McDonald’s, appeared to connect with the audience through engaging content. Other significant volume spikes were due to incentivized online contests or campaigns, as well as buzz around celebrities’ status updates. The high volume of Samsung posts was fuelled by a lottery contest to celebrate the victory of China’s gymnastics team at the Games, and offered mobile phones as prizes.
To sum things up, much can be learnt through these insights from the most socially active Olympics to date:
- People use social media as a supplementary source of information on the Olympics. Both as news source for scores and results, but also to add their own two cents on the athletes, teams and sponsors. This, of course, is in line with social media’s ability to democratize commenting.
- While social media has added a new layer of interaction between brands and consumers for global events like the Olympics; brands should be aware that the most significant spikes in volume have been around negative posts. As such, like with any social media campaign, brands must be prepared to address, engage and participate in the conversation to mitigate negative sentiment and build upon the positive. For instance, did McDonalds think through the social media ramifications of the brand disconnect between fast food and athletic excellence?
- Contests undoubtedly work, but brands should ask themselves can this engagement with customers translate into a sustainable relationship or “do users just want access to my prizes?!”
- Understanding where your brand sits within the larger social conversation ahead of time can help you plan out your messaging and social activity as strategies turn into actions. Was there dialogue about Visa’s credit/debit card exclusivity and its potential problems that the company could have gotten on top of, before it brewed into a potential PR issue?
Do you agree with our observations? Feel free to drop us a note by using the comments box below.
See you in Sochi in 2014!