[MUSIC]. Hello. In this video I'll introduce you to the recent history of collaboration between the Olympic Games and social media. We will also define the concepts of social media and social networking websites. The Olympic Games and Olympic movement are, by their very nature, open to public participation. It is this inclination to involve the public in general, and young people in particular, that is at the essence of the Olympic movement, rendering new social media, and particularly new social networks, devices that have a large strategic ability to connect audiences and allow them to share the Olympic values and ideas. One of the key issues associated with social media is that they're able to turn every fan into an advocate of the cause, the users have a main role in the desseminating messages. The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games witnessed the emergence of social media. The International Olympic Committee reached an agreement with YouTube to re-broadcast the Games via this Internet platform and create an official channel of the 2008 Beijing Games. The International Olympic Committee and the organizing committee of the Games started on the social network, Facebook and Twitter as independent initiatives during the Vancouver Games. The London 2012 Games, classified by the media as the first social Olympics, saw the spread of Olympic presence to other new social platforms, blogs photo-sharing applications and added filters to them, like for example, Instagram. As well as the new local members seeking global expansion to those markets with specific language requirements and political characteristics such as China. To discuss the social media is to discuss a genetic concept within what are known as new media, that is, those media that are based on the Internet and that allow any user to produce and disseminate images on the net. In social media, therefore, what is known as user generated content has a notable role. Following this concept are the following media platforms, such as blogs or You Tube. The social networks Facebook and Twitter are also social media, although these have specific features: they directly connect people with each other and organizations by means of public or semi public profiles. Therefore, social media is a general concept that includes the social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. According to Musial and Kazienko, two key elements define a social network that fit into set of nodes, and etches ties that links they nodes. Another specific characteristic of social networking websites is their ability to incorporate elements from other social media, videos, photos, maps, to allow opinions on contents to be expressed by means of comments or votes and their ability to combine previous Internet communication devices, such as chat, instant messaging and electronic mail. The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games were the web. 2.0 Olympic Games, according to some authors, marked by the abundance of information from Internet media, blogs of digital journalists and athletes. They were also the beginning of the alliance between the IOC and social media. Before the Beijing Olympic Games the International Olympic Committee created the YouTube Olympic channel for 77 countries, in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where, the Olympic Games' Internet rights had not been sold. The Google service was only accessible from those parts of the world and, consequently, only YouTube users in those geographic areas could access images of the Olympic Games. As this channel was being created, the alliance between both organizations aimed to ensure the exclusivity of the television rights acquired by the right-holding broadcasters, eliminated from any video published by a YouTube user that could prove detrimental to the exclusivity of the broadcasters. For the London Olympic Games, the experience initiated in Beijing was fully consolidated through the Olympic Games channel on YouTube. This channel provided live as well as summarized coverage of the Olympic ceremonies and competitions in 64 countries in Asia and Africa, where no television channel had acquired the right to broadcast the event. Olympic Games You Tube provide 11 simultaneous signals in high definition to follow the competition live. In total, the International Olympic Committee provided approximately 2,200 hours of television of the Olympic Games via YouTube. However, the big leap to social networking websites took place weeks before the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games with the International Olympic committee and the 2010 Vancouver Organizing committee of the Olympic Games launching its presence on Facebook and Twitter. Up to that point, social networks were a territory unexplored by organizations governing large global sports events. The International Olympic Committee was a pioneer in the use and management of these social networks, inaugarating models that have since been followed by other similar organizations. The main presences of the Olympic movement on Facebook, and Olympic Games, The International Olympic committee, and the VANOC, the organizing committee of the games, obtained more than one million Facebook users in less than one month during the weeks prior to the Games and the days on which they were held. This fact shows that social networks are fed by the capacity to build the current situation and to focus the audience's attention on a specific topic. Nevertheless, for the organizing committee of the Vancouver Olympic Games, social networks did not play a notable role, an important role in the online communication of the event, the main element being that organizing committee's web page. According to Graeme Menzies, director of online communications, publications and editorial services in the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, everything we do is in our approach to social media is in the context and with the knowledge that the website is the mother lode and the mother ship. This explains why, during these Games, Facebook and Twitter were used to rebroadcast information that had already been published on the webpage, without social networks being used to have live interaction with the public, encourage conversation and respond directly to questions from the public, all of which are key and differential elements for communication on social networks. [BLANK_AUDIO]
