After a great lunch, WOMM-U returned to the action with a general session led by David Churbuck, Vice-President of Global Web Marketing, Lenovo and John Bell.
The 2008 Bejing Olympics offered Lenovo a unique opportunity to partner with athletes to use social media to tell their stories and their experiences at the games. As a primary sponsor of the Olympics Lenovo had the right to provide gear to athletes.
Lenovo is the home team in China, so everything had to go perfectly. They were very concerned about the perception of the brand.
There were some internal objections to doing anything social at all. Once again it was the fear of losing control.
Another issue was the IOC. In the eyes of the IOC, once the torch was lit, the athletes were there to compete, not to blog. If they were blogging then they were a member of the media. Eventually these internal barriers were overcome. Lenovo then looked to work with athletes to blog from the Olympics.
Lenovo soon realized that they needed help recruiting and training athletes. Ogilvy was brought in to help with this task. They tapped their existing networks to recruit and train the athletes all over the world.
They looked to find athletes that had blogs, they were free to say what they want to. They also looked to find athletes that would not normally be in the spotlight.
Lenovo did ask athletes to include a badge identifying them as a member of the network. This allowed them to track traffic to the individual blogs.
The next step was to build an aggregation tool that pooled together content from all the athlete's blogs. This landing page was the focus of all of Lenovo's advertising efforts.
The project was in constant beta. They had the ability to quickly change technical aspects of the project without a lengthy approval process.
There were a number of roadblocks. The IOC was very strict in making sure that athletes did not post photos or video footage from the venues. There seemed to be some daily issue related this.
The blogging provided an alternative content channel for the games. Readers could follow the behind-the-scenes story from before the games to after it. As is often said with blogs and other social media tools, the humanization of the content is what makes it compelling.
One of the main lessons learned is to reach out to writers with existing blogs and aggregate the content, don't look to re-create the wheel.
Next on the agenda is YouTube & Google.
