For the second year, GamesBids.com is releasing our list of Top Ten Olympic Bid Stories for 2009. These stories, from the mainstream to the obscure, impacted the course of Olympic bids and formed an interesting plotline for 2009.
#7 Social Media Becomes Critical Tool In Olympic Bidding
In the run-up to the 2016 bid election in Copenhagen on October 2nd – the Olympic bidders used Social Media to bring along hundreds of thousands of additional voices to support them.
Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janiero and Tokyo used their Websites along with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to engage their fans throughout the campaign. But in the final days before the election bid marketers marched their virtual fans to niche Olympic Websites – including GamesBids.com – that were running polls allowing people to choose their favourite cities.
Powered by the viral impact of the Internet and and news articles in Rio and Tokyo, millions of votes flooded GamesBids.com servers bringing them down a couple of times. At the end Rio edged Tokyo by a couple of percent on the GamesBids.com poll – and Rio won the bid in more dominating fashion.
This trend has already continued with the bid for the 2018 Olympic Winter Games and the 2014 Youth Olympic Games. Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and rushes to vote on GamesBids.com polls seem to be an accepted new marketing method in Olympic bidding.
Watch for story #6 tomorrow.
#8 – Too Many Cheesy Bidders In Italy
#9 – Hiroshima and Nagasaki Propose Joint Bid for 2020 Olympic Games
#10 – The Maldives to bid for the 2024 Olympics
