The countdown to the 2014 Winter Olympics is on (79 days, just so you know). As digital manager of the Canadian Olympic Committee, Georgia Sapounas is responsible for engaging fans on all of COC’s digital and social media properties. Ahead of her talks on “The Digital Road to Sochi” in Ottawa and Toronto next week, Marketing spoke with Sapounas about creating a great online fan experience and why Sochi will be the world’s biggest social media event ever.
The COC’s digital team has only been in place for about a year. How far have you come in terms of online fan engagement?
We’ve compared ourselves across the board to the other national Olympic committees as well as other large brands in the industry. Especially when compared to our Southern counterparts, we actually rank higher on engagement per capita. With the digital team being so new, we’ve made great strides both in terms of our engagement as well as our fan acquisition. [@CDNOlympicTeam has 61,000 followers and the Facebook page has 231 likes.]
How are you keeping Canadian fans so engaged?
It’s about looking at it from their perspective, analyzing everything that we do and looking at what else we can implement that’s going to excite the fan. The Olympics only come every two years, and people largely don’t pay attention [in between]. You have big spikes and then a massive valley, but we’re trying [to create] rolling hills.
We invented a lot of content in the summer. The COC is involved in so many sports on the Olympic roster, so any time there is a topic of conversation that we naturally belong in – for example, tennis – we’ve be able to do that successfully. [More recently], there was an article on Buzz Feed called “16 Reasons to Root Against the Evil Canadians at the Winter Olympics.” It was a really funny article. We were able to craft a response in a unique Canadian way, “16 More Reasons to Root Against Us.” Our fans really enjoyed it, so it’s those kinds of things—stoking a bit of rivalry—that we know our fans want to see from us.
What are the key elements to Olympic fan engagement?
We know that fans want to be in the know first and they want to get unique content from us, so we’ve been able to provide that. In addition, contesting is huge. You want to engage everybody, so you don’t just have the typical contest-goer. For example, HBC’s Olympic giveaway on Twitter, “Retweet to Win,” garnered over six and a half million impressions on Twitter, which was incredible. With something that naturally already has a lift—like HBC’s red mittens—you are able to garner a national conversation around it. Asking fans questions and “fill in the blanks” is another great way to start the conversation instead of speaking one way to the audience.
The London 2012 Olympics were called one of the biggest social media events the world has ever seen. Will Sochi 2014 be the most social games ever?
I think so. As we’re seeing the space evolve, you look at two years later and how many more people have joined various social channels. Instagram wasn’t nearly as large with as many adopters as it has now, even though it was there for the London 2012 Games. That was the first Games where you saw huge adoption and engagement in the social space. But our fans really rally around the winter Olympics, especially with Canada being a contender for the number-one spot. For us as a country, we are going to completely obliterate what London looked like from a fan engagement standpoint.
