3foldComm

The Winter Olympics are a bit odd. Skiing combined with shooting? Sliding rocks around with brooms? Hockey? These are not sports that usually captivate Americans. Well, maybe the ski-gun thing if it was a developing story on CNN, but not really in a healthy competition kind of way.

What the Winter Olympics lack in warm-weathered sports I understand, they more than make up for in frosty tech, making the 2010 Vancouver games a wonderful example of the plethora of multimedia options available to us marketing nerds. Yes, NBC’s TV coverage borders on the pathetic. Who cares? Traditional broadcasting is so 20th century. Keeping real-time tabs on the international festival of ice sports has gone uber-social, and NBC is attempting a gold medal performance for its audiences (see what I did there?).

Of course there’s live streaming on www.nbcolympics.com (although, more often of the less popular events, NBC saves the “good” stuff for their TV broadcasts. Lame.). The site also includes athlete interviews, previews, recaps, and photos of every sport.

Beyond that, however, the popularity of social media has made way for a delightful cornucopia for feeding Olympic obsession. Looking for more personal information, or more information in general? There’s  live blogging, sports history, and terms and jargon definitions. They’ve even hooked up athletes who are tweeting and blogging their experiences as they happen.

Socially, NBC offers RSS feed updates, updates from Twitter and Facebook, mobile and email alerts, and even embeddable widgets for streaming video on your own sites.

Want to stalk the Olympians on the go? There’s an app for that. For the iPhone, there’s an official NBC Olympics app and a CTVOlympics.ca app. There’s also apps for Android and WebOS, but rumor has it, they’re unofficial and a bit lackluster.

While far from perfect in both technical and program components (a little figure skating scoring reference there), so far the 2010 Winter Olympics are a large-scale example of the numerous possibilities available for combining media and events. Sure, one could argue NBC’s efforts border on the overwhelming (i.e. desperate), offering far too many elements to be truly effective, but there’s still valuable lessons to be learned.

Creative event planning, even without an Olympic-sized budget, can utilize a variety of integrated media strategies to create a memorable experience for your own organization’s events.