Facebook has officially launched its official Olympic Page for its fans, so that they can communicate with their favorite players and support the teams that they love. The new Facebook page “Discover London 2012” contains the profiles of about 200 athletes who will be participating in the coming event. It, therefore, serves as a platform for the fans of the renowned games to socialize with their idols. Mark Adams, the communication director for the Olympics goes on to say, “I’m sure that through Facebook and all of our other social media channels we will manage to bring a new dimension to the games for a new audience.” Moreover, featuring a number of Facebook pages devoted exclusively to particular sports, Discover London 2012 has captivated the interest of a number of passionate sports lovers.
However, due to the strict Olympic marketing restrictions, Facebook revealed at the press event on Monday June 18th that it would have no advertisements for any of the game pages they have created. The international business development head for Facebook, Christian Hernandez stated, “we will not be running adverts against these [Olympic] pages. Just like the stadium itself, the game pages will be a ‘clean venue’ with no adverts visible. The stadium as well as the Facebook pages will feature both the official Olympic Games and London 2012 logos and will carry no adverts”. While this curtails the number of ads in this medium, an ad agency can surely make an impact elsewhere.
It has been revealed that the page shall be solely dedicated to the Olympic sports and will provide links to the official pages for 60 national teams participating, as well as, links to the profiles of 200 out of 10, 500 athletes taking part in the games. It would not exactly be possible to have all the countries and players featured on this page, but the most popular ones will definitely be there, including one of the most popular players LeBron James, David Beckham, Michael Phelps and many more.
The London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games was highly focused on protecting their logo, keeping a check on any website using it due to the immensely high costs that they bore. Last month, Twitter was forced to take action and bring down a particular group that was making use of an altered version of London 2012 logo. The reason behind this action by Twitter was that the use of the logo might have ended up creating confusion among the audience. The companies that have been granted permission to use the logo are allowed to do as they have paid the concerned authorities for using it. However, Facebook has not paid anything which is why they cannot make the games commercial in any way.
None of the Olympic athletes is allowed to put up any video from the venue on any of the social networking sites because of the strict rules that have been passed. During the last Olympic Games that took place in Beijing, the total number of Facebook users was around a 100 million. Whereas this time, the number of Facebook users has gone up to 900 million. The European manager of Facebook, Joanna Shields, therefore, acknowledged the possibility of the first kind of social Olympic Games. There is now anticipation for the launch of dedicated pages for the Olympic Games by Twitter, Google+.
