14 SOCIALMEDIAINTHE OLYMPICGAMES Actors,managementandparticipation Emilio Fernández Peña, Natividad Ramajo, and María Arauz CENTRE D’ESTUDIS OLÍMPICS (CEO-UAB), UNIVERSITAT AUTÒNOMA DE BARCELONA The Olympic Games and the 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 social networks, devices that have a large strategic ability to connect audiences and allow them to share the Olympic values and ideals,as acknowledged by the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge (Koop, 2011). One of the key issues associated with social media is that they are able to turn every fan into an advocate of the cause (Fernández Peña and Arauz, 2011) – the users have a main role in disseminating messages. The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games witnessed the emergence of social media. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) reached an agreement withYouTube to re-broadcast the Games via this Internet platform and create an official channel of the 2008 Beijing Games (Fernández Peña, 2009a).The IOC and the organising committee of the Games started on the social networks Facebook andTwitter, as independent initiatives during theVancouver Games (Basich, 2010).The London 2012 Games, classified by the media as the first “social Olympics” (Rooney, 2012), saw the spread of the Olympic presence to other new social platforms, blogs, photo-sharing applications and ad filters (e.g. Instagram), as well as to new local members seek- ing global expansion to those markets with specific language requirements and political characteristics such as China. Towards a definition of the term social media To discuss social media is to discuss a generic 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 messages on the net. In social media, therefore, what is known as user generated content has a notable role (Jenkins, 2006). Following this concept are the social media platforms such as blogs orYouTube.The social networks Facebook and Twitter are also social media, although these have specific features: they directly connect people with each other and with organisations by means of public or semi-public profiles (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). For Musial 153 5092 Routledge HBook of Sport and New Media:Style.qxd 30/9/13 13:20 Page 153