For the Olympics, Twitter and NBC Form Partnership
As athletes parade into London's Olympic Stadium this Friday, Twitter Inc.'s Olympic hopes will play out in a spartan office in Boulder, Colo. — There, a handful of people will spend 20 hours a day to help corral millions of Twitter messages …
Context & Ripple Effects
NBC had already been reworking its Olympic playbook around Twitter, while a separate Facebook arrangement and the IOC’s multi-network social hub positioned the Games as a contest for attention across several platforms. The Twitter-NBC deal gives the broadcaster a defined social counterpart as the London coverage begins.
Twitter enters the event after adding more relevant Promoted Tweet targeting, making a concentrated stream of Olympic conversation commercially meaningful as well as editorially useful.
First-order effects
- NBC and Twitter can coordinate Olympic conversation around NBC’s coverage, with Twitter staffing a Boulder team to organize the expected volume of messages.
- Twitter gains a marquee, time-bounded setting for its Promoted Tweet targeting alongside a major broadcast event.
Second-order effects
- Facebook’s NBC partnership and the IOC’s hub must compete with a Twitter-NBC pairing for the athlete, fan, and advertiser attention concentrated around Olympic moments.
- NBC’s Olympic coverage becomes more dependent on directing viewers between broadcast programming and selected social conversation, rather than treating social networks solely as outside commentary.
Third-order effects
- The arrangement points toward sports-rights holders and broadcasters treating social platforms as distribution and engagement partners whose audience activity can be packaged alongside live programming.
- If major events keep dividing social roles among platforms, event organizers gain leverage to structure access around official partnerships rather than leaving real-time discussion entirely open.
The trend: Major live events are becoming coordinated broadcast-and-social products, with platforms competing to own the audience conversation around the feed.