Monday, February 22, 2010

Olympics don't like twitter


This tweet of mine apparently caused a stir with Olympic marketing folks. They felt that when Red Bull retweeted my post, they were in some way "ambushing" the Olympics because they were not 'official' sponsors. Seriously?

Wall Street Journal blogger, Emily Steel, did a story on it that can be found here. The Olympics need to understand that tweets such as this actually bring more attention to the games and, in the long term, provide more value for their actual sponsors. There's also this dated notion the Olympics seem to subscribe to, which is only traditional media outlets can cover events such as the Olympics.

Red Bull took down the retweet, but luckily I grabbed a screenshot so it is on the Internet for all of eternity (or at least until the Cylons take over):


I guess the Olympics were under a rock the last four years?