Legacy of Olympic Social Media

Never before has North America seen such a digital intimacy with the Olympics. From the first Canadian gold won by Alex Bilodeau to play-by-play updates by thousands in the final Canada vs. USA game, the number of tweets to hit the airwaves and the Olympic Facebook fan pages were in record numbers.

ACG captured a few of the thousands of tweets sent out when Team Canada won Men’s Hockey Gold as depicted above. Never has emotion and micro-blogging been at an all-time high because of a hockey game. The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics have absolutely changed the way social media will be used by the world to watch and cheer for their athletes and countries and, of course, connect with everyone else via social media.

Many Vancouver locals and visitors also were able to partake in the games themselves thanks to the hundreds (if not thousands) of Facebook groups, events pages, and fan pages that described local concerts, cultural houses, and parties in the city. The social media pages created in light of the Olympics have energized the entire city to flock to the city center in record numbers. This mass gathering will be interpreted as a renewed sense of patriotism for the Maple Leaf flag and renewed strength in Canadian athletics.

The Olympic movement of 2010 isn’t over yet. Closing ceremonies and another night of excitement await the city.

New Developments

We’re excited to start rolling in the holiday season with new developments at ACG. We’re still hard at work internally, but here’s a few developing points going on with us:

1) New website to be released for the Mountain Shadow Pub. ACG is preparing to launch a new website for the favorite North Burnaby pub. The website will be a mix of flash and AJAX navigation, and will also feature a simple mobile site for cell phone users.

2) Announcing our social media flagship project dubbed “Justin”. Justin (shortened from “Just-In”) will be a social media management tool, allowing users to monitor social media and have a central social communication platform. Justin has been quietly discussed with a few candidate Alpha testers in the last two months, and we are hoping to soon have a test version ready for our testers. We currently do not have a set schedule, but we are 80% to Alpha. Justin will be replacing our test app, Dustin.

3) Working with Crush Marketing! ACG is happy to be working with Frank Leffelaar from Crush. Frank has ten years of internet marketing experience with large European corporations, and we are happy to be working with his expertise.

Playing With Social Technology

It’s been almost a year since we’ve started playing with social technology. Last winter, we created a prototype website that integrated Facebook functionality into news items and games, and today we’ve been proudly integrating the tech for our clients.

Our clients will be excited to learn that integration of social media into their web sites is now becoming standard practice for ACG. We have found that social media is a necessity for modern websites – SM is recognized as a vehicle to promote word-of-mouth, and must be considered in any marketing plan.

With the exception of industrial companies (and a few other niche markets), ACG encourages companies and organizations to use social media daily. Most importantly, social media is a cost-effective tool for analyzing public trends and opinion and forming closer relationships with customers. We encourage our clients to not underestimate its potential, and become intimate with its practices.

The Shifts at ACG

If you haven’t realized it yet, things are different on the ACG website. We’ve updated it with a new user interface, auto-AJAX’d Twitter updates, integrated blogs, and more! But this post isn’t about boring you with the geeky terminology.

The biggest change happening internally at ACG is our new focus for social interaction. What we haven’t told anyone until now is that we’ve been quietly conducting research and have been collaborating with some knowledgeable scholars in psychology to develop our own expertise in social interaction.

We won’t discuss all of the new developments at ACG, but keep an open ear this coming month for some exciting stuff!