Social Media Gets The Gold!

All of the medals are out and the winners have taken their places on stage during closing ceremonies. Now it’s time to announce the real winner of Sochi 2014: Social Media.
These Olympic games generated so much content from users all across the world that they officially became known as “the digital games.”

To give you an idea of exactly how much content we are talking about, here are a few stats from this year’s winter events:

• Taking home the gold was Ice Hockey, which generated the most tweets and mentions on Twitter and Facebook . Curling came in a distant, but admirable second, claiming silver.
• The U.S shootout victory over Russia in Men’s Hockey generated 72,000 tweets per MINUTE. Talk about a loud sport!
• The only sport to land in Twitter’s “Top 5 moments” was Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyo who took the gold medal in Men’s Figure Skating.
• U.S Snowboarder Shaun White was the most mentioned athlete on Facebook. (No surprise there.)
• Finally, all of this combined, there were 40 million Olympic-related tweets and over 100 million Facebook related statuses, comments, and/or wall posts. Talk about an Olympic-sized win for social media!

Yes, these numbers may appear large but consider this: networking experts like Avaya spent 18 months prior to Sochi 2014 building a network infrastructure that could support the amount of media being generated during the Olympics. Avaya’s VP of Marketing stated, “We had to build it in the summer, so we could test it in the winter under similar conditions to the Olympic Games. In the winter, then, we would fine tune it and fix it in the summer so it was ready for the Olympic Games.” Just to put this into perspective, the support required by the influx of social media messaging during the games was equivalent to there being THREE SuperBowls taking place everyday for 17 days in a row!

Thanks to all the Twitter and Facebook attention, Sochi 2014 became the most social Winter Olympics in history! The Sochi 2014 website alone saw more traffic in one single night than Vancouver 2010 did in its entirety.
Sochi 2014 wasn’t all fun and games though (no pun intended). What ended triumphantly as the “digital games” began as a virtual unloading for all those disappointed by hotel accommodations, facilities, the treatment of animals around the Olympic site, etc. #TrashSochi was the hashtag heard ‘round the world and negative images from the Sochi Olympic site went viral (most of which was later debunked). There was even a point in time when the hashtag, “SochiProblems” was gaining more momentum than “Sochi2014”.

No worries though, guys, everyone likes a good come back story and the social buzz around the Sochi Olympic games was just that.
And in case you needed a little reassurance that good always trumps bad, I included my favorite moment from Sochi2014: US Olympian Gus Kenworthy (@guskenworthy) who tweeted about all of his newly adopted Russian puppies!

Everywhere has a robust internship program and we invite our interns to participate by writing on our blog. Hollyann Roemer is an intern from Georgia State University. She authored this blog post.