Bragging Or Complaining: Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium Worries About Social Media

In 2009 I was at the Canadian Telecom Summit, and was able to hear of Canada’s broadcast plans for the 2010 Olympics. I’m not a fan of the Olympics, but the broadcast plans were creative, inclusive and multi-pronged. It sounded VERY neat. The Media Consortium was excited to leverage social media and user generated content to augment their coverage. It was planned to be a very interactive project with spectator sharing, commenting, photos and videos.

This morning, I’m unfortunately not terribly surprised to read that “Social Media Set to Spoil Olympic Opening Ceremonies”

You can’t commit to leveraging social media for corporate gain in one breath, and then slam it in the next breath…. Certainly that was the plan of the Consortium —- hitching its wagon to the millions of spectators who will bet facebooking, twittering and YouTubeing during the Olympics……All that content, all that conversation, all that buzz, all for free.

The Media Consortium had planned to juice up it’s coverage of the Olympics on the backs of content provided by spectators. Now it’s complaining that user coverage is going to spoil the surprise of the Opening Ceremony.

Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it too.