SOCIAL MEDIA:DAYS AFTER gymnast Gabrielle Douglas made the US Olympic team, the 16-year-old posted to Twitter a picture of flowers, cake and a giant plastic tub filled with paper towels, soap, deodorant and mouthwash.
The package was a gift from her new sponsor, consumer packaged goods company Procter Gamble. “I love all of my goodies thank you so much for everything!” she tweeted to her 27,000 followers.
The message represents a new wave of athletic endorsements, where a star’s presence on Twitter, Facebook and the like factors in to which athletes marketers choose to sponsor. Those endorsement contracts often require that athletes share messages, photos and videos about the brand with their social media fans.
Several of those relationships are taking centre stage during the 2012 London Olympics. Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt recently posted a photo of a refrigerator filled with Gatorade sports drink to his 615,000 Twitter followers.
American swimmer Michael Phelps mentions Visa, Head Shoulders shampoo and Hilton Hotels amid the training updates he shares with his 5.4 million Facebook fans.
“It is an absolute phenomenon,” said Lowell Taub, the global head of sports endorsements at Creative Artists Agency who is representing several athletes competing in this year’s games.
“With almost every single deal that my group puts together, sponsors ask: ‘Can you tell me about the athlete’s social media footprint? How many Twitter followers do they have? How many Facebook fans? Will they do some tweets for the campaign?’”
The online-sponsorship battle is just one reason some people are dubbing the London Olympics the social media games.
“We are at a dawn of a new age of sharing and connecting, and London 2012 will ignite the first conversational Olympic Games thanks to social media platforms and technology,” said Alex Huot, head of social media for the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The four years since the last summer Olympics have ushered in a new era of digital media. Facebook has 900 million users, up from 100 million in 2008. Twitter has 140 million users, up from six million in 2008. Other popular social media platforms, such as Pinterest, Instagram and Foursquare, did not exist at the time of the Beijing Olympics.
As the Olympic torch makes its way across London, social media are lighting up with posts about the games. There were more tweets about the Olympics on a single day during a recent week than the total number during the entire Beijing summer Olympics, according to Twitter.
Athletes are taking to the medium by storm.
Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova on Monday shared a picture with her 7.7 million Facebook fans of her first trip to the Olympic Park to pick up her credentials. After basketball star Kobe Bryant gave her a pair of Nike shoes, Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice posted a photo of them to Instagram.
The trend has yielded unsavoury moments. A Greek triple jumper was expelled from her team after she tweeted comments that were deemed racist about African athletes and forwarded tweets by a far-right politician.
Strict guidelines from the IOC encourage Olympic athletes to use social media but bar them from mentioning commercial sponsors without a special waiver. This could mute the impact of endorsements from marketers that are not official Olympic sponsors.
A flurry of social media activity about the games could also make it difficult for a sponsor’s message to stand out – particularly if the athlete is endorsed by multiple brands.
Many Olympic athletes view the games as their shot to land sponsorship deals and are careful to use social networks to interact with fans but not to annoy followers with too many commercial messages.
Hoping that an Olympian’s halo would extend to the brand, marketers for years have struck sponsorship deals with athletes based on the star’s performance on the field, looks and personality, among other factors.
Until recently, marketers had to spend sponsorship budgets on both endorsement contracts and advertisements promoting relationships with athletes. That dynamic has changed now that athletes can promote themselves via social media followings that rival the audiences of traditional media.
“Brands are smart enough to say: ‘You are having a direct dialogue with your fans. Please try to include our message in that communication’,” said Kevin Adler of Engage Marketing.