IP/Internet/New Media Blog

By Galen Gentry

Aided By Exciting Competition, Higher Than Expected TV Ratings, And A Hockey Game For The Ages NBC’s Experiment In Social Media Will Pay A Dividend

NBC did a great job on www.nbcolympics.com. There was lots of video; it downloaded easily, and it was not exclusively of and about U.S. athletes.  NBC had tweets and blogs as a page on its site, allowing good access to the personal if not always interesting blogs and tweets of those involved in the games.

NBC also did a good job using its local news affiliates.  In addition to making NBC’s content available the affiliates focused on connections to local athletes.  NBC Los Angeles had articles and video of on the numerous athletes in the games with California connections  including skater Mirai Nagasu and ubersnowboarder Shawn White.  NBC Los Angeles had the tweets of some local athletes as well.

In my February 16th post I noted that NBC was making a concerted and expensive effort to measure the use of different media platforms at the Vancouver games so that ultimately it and advertisers could make meaningful decisions on how to spend money in emerging media. NBC hopes to determine what media the public used—mobile devices, computers and how they used it.  Monetizing new media content is the Holy Grail.  The 2010 Winter Olympic games will give NBC and its advertising clients lots of data to crunch.

 There was plenty of buzz, the television ratings were higher than expected,  and the both premier and secondary events were filled with excitement. Did NBC’s push into social media work?  Probably.

By Galen Gentry

NBC believes that the Olympic Games are a giant petri dish for new media consumption and the company is making every effort to effectively measure and evaluate new media trends and use.  Monetizing new media is the mantra of the world’s biggest corporations.  All of whom have serious money to spend in advertising and are involved to greater and lesser degrees in different media platforms.  The problem is that there are no standards by which to measure the audience of the most of the outlets.

Advertisers want  numbers, but collecting and quantifying the data on emerging media use is in its infancy.  NBC has hired a host of market research companies and  will release  among other things a daily total audience measurement which will count  how many people watched the Olympics on the various media platforms.  Sample size, the means of measurement and other issues will affect how much faith advertisers put in the numbers, but professionals involved in the legal and marketing aspects of  emerging media are very interested in NBC’s “daily total audience measurement.”