Social media was around during the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008, but as Alex Huot, head of social media for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) predicted, the Winter Games of 2010 in Vancouver would be “the first social media Olympics.” It turns out — he was right.

Today, media corporations are competing with citizen journalists, bloggers and Twitter/Facebook users for the most up-to-date content and volume of online traffic. The Olympics has always been a very tightly controlled media event, in part, to protect those media companies that paid millions of dollars for content and video rights to the Games. But with the use of new media outlets and social media, the IOC implemented new limitations on the athletes‘ use of social networking for the Vancouver Games so that they didn’t become journalists themselves. (more…)