For an event being hyped by organizers as the world’s “first social media Olympics,” the summer 2012 games in London have some pretty antisocial policies.
Athletes will not be allowed to tweet photos of themselves with products that aren’t official Olympics sponsors or share photos or videos from inside the athletes’ village.
Fans, too, could be barred from sharing on Facebook and YouTube photos and videos of themselves enjoying the action.
Business owners will have restrictions as well. They won’t be able to lure customers by advertising with official Olympics nomenclature such as “2012 Games.” Regulators will scour Olympic venues to potentially obfuscate non-sponsor logos on objects as trivial as toilets.
The imminent crackdown is largely the result of a pair of stringent brand-protecting acts passed in the United Kingdom in preparation for the games, as detailed in this recent Guardian report. The pieces of legislation are 2006′s London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act and 1995′s Olympic Symbol (Protection) Act.
Breaking the big-brother rules will be a criminal offense.
Paul Jordan is a partner and marketing specialist at a law firm that is helping official Olympics sponsors and non-sponsoring businesses comply with the laws.
“On a very literal reading of the terms and conditions, there’s certainly an argument that the IOC could run that you wouldn’t be able to post pictures to Facebook,” he tells The Guardian.
“I think what they are trying to avoid is any formal commercial exploitation of those images, but that’s not what it says. And for that reason, it would appear that if you or I attended an event, we could only share our photos with our aunties around the kitchen table. Which seems a bizarre consequence.”
UPDATE: We heard back from Alex Huot, the IOC’s head of social media, for more details on how these rules fit into the upcoming Olympics.
He says the guidelines for athletes are not specifically linked to social media, but that social media has changed the nature of marketing and sponsorship to more of a two-way conversation.
“The basic guidelines for athletes come from the IOC, but we work together with all of our stakeholders,” Huot wrote in an email. “We encourage athletes to share their Games experience. The Olympic Athletes’ Hub has been in part built for this. We have created a place for them to join and connect with our millions of fans around the world and to share not just during the Olympics but long after the Olympics are gone.”
He also says, “athletes are allowed to tweet what they eat — what is not allowed is any form of commercial promotion.” The question that will be hard for athletes and the IOC to answer, it seems, is when eating or drinking something from a branded package becomes a promotion.
-Sam Laird
Source: www.mashable.com